Wayne E. Oates was born June 24, 1917, in the poverty stricken rural county of Greenville, South Carolina. Left by his father at birth, and with a mother who spent her long hard days at the cotton mill, he was raised by his grandmother and sister. As a young boy it seemed that destiny was repeating itself as he too faced work in the cotton mill. However, providence intervened when he was selected at age 14 on the basis of his intellect and poverty to become a page in the United States Senate.
Struggle To Be Free, Wayne wrote:
Wayne understood education to be his way out of poverty and away from feelings of inferiority. At a young age he began his "struggle to be free," as expressed in his autobiography. InAny effort to be free of poverty calls for a stubborn, gutsy struggle. It is uphill all the way ... Education became my God-given path to freedom. God does not intend that human intelligence be snuffed out by hunger, grinding poverty, and a squalid lack of care and discipline. I know this: that once we have won the struggle to be free of poverty, God intends that we have a burning sense of social justice that is dedicated to the enabling of others in that same struggle.
The passion born of his own childhood pain began to weave in Wayne a powerful combination of knowledge and compassion. As one wounded by deprivation, the abandonment of his father, the resentment of his brothers, and later by chronic back pain, Wayne developed a tremendous capacity to empathize with others.
Continuing the struggle, Oates graduated from Mars Hill Junior College, and Wake Forest University. He served as a pastor of churches in North Carolina and Kentucky, and after combining the best of the behavioral sciences with Biblical and theological perspective, Wayne received his Ph.D. in the field of Psychology of Religion from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In 1947, he began his full time career on the faculty of Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
In those days, the field of Psychology of Religion was new and seminary faculty wanted to put it under Religious Education. However, Wayne Oates fought hard to get it in the theology department as part of the Master of Divinity program.
Noted for pioneering an academic body of literature in the fields of pastoral care and pastoral counseling, his books have been translated into more than three languages. The first of the 57 books Wayne Oates would author, would not bear the name of his dissertation,The Significance of the Work of Sigmund Freud for the Christian Faith. It would be called,The Christian Pastor, a title chosen intentionally after being advised, "a person's first book tends to tell people who the author thinks he or she is."
Born out of the freedom to create, and with his capacity to empathize, Wayne Oates coined the term "workaholic," while counseling a man who was trying to accept his own alcoholism. The term workaholic spread like wildfire and found its way to the dictionary soon after Wayne published his book,Confessions of a Workaholic.