By Anna Badkhen,
Globe Staff

HADLEY – When a young veteran arrived at the Wesley United Methodist Church two years ago, the Rev. Lyle Seger barely noticed his presence. The church was moving to a new building, and Seger was preoccupied. The veteran attended a couple of Sunday services and then stopped coming.

Last February, the man returned to Seger’s church to speak at a seminar about emotional needs of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and seeing his life shattered by his tour of duty in Afghanistan, the veteran had turned to alcohol, left his wife and two children, and considered killing himself.

“It was like getting a gut punch; it was eye-opening,” said Seger, a pastor of 22 years who sees his calling in helping people. “What would have happened if we were more attentive to him?”

While private charities and government agencies have focused on ways to help returning vets dealing with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, or major depression, clergy have had little training. And with vets looking to churches for healing, ministers like Seger have not always known how to respond.

“They are not reaching out to them in a meaningful way that would help them heal from the war,” said the Rev. Philip Salois, a Vietnam War veteran and chief of the chaplain service at the VA in Boston.

In Massachusetts, some members of the clergy are trying to find out.

Shaken by the realization that he had failed to help the veteran who had come to his church, Seger last week co-hosted, together with the Massachusetts nonprofit Veterans Education Project, a workshop for about 20 pastors who wanted to learn how to help veterans and their families.

“We felt very ill-equipped to know how to reach out to them,” said Seger. “And I meet with other clergy, and they say, ‘We don’t know, either.’ ”

About 20 pastors sat on folding chairs in a hushed room and took notes as Mel Tapper, from the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, described signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, the two signature injuries of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Do they feel depressed? How is their family situation? Are they able to keep a job?” Tapper ticked off questions that could help clergy recognize whether the veteran is suffering from trauma. On a screen, a slide projection read: “During the past month, have you often been bothered by feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?”

“I’m not a vet, never been in the military, and I don’t know much about their emotional experience,” said the Rev. Bob Livingston, an interim pastor at the United Church of Christ in Enfield, Conn. “I want to be able to relate to them and kind of understand what they’re going through.”

A young combat veteran in Livingston’s congregation survived a roadside bomb in Iraq, sustaining a fractured elbow.

“But after listening this morning I’m wondering if there might be something else that’s going on,” said Livingston, who suspects the veteran also might have suffered from a traumatic brain injury. “He was shaken up pretty bad.”

Many young veterans shun church services, but their family members often come looking for spiritual guidance, said the Rev. James Munroe, the dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Springfield and a Vietnam veteran who still wrestles with his own post- traumatic stress disorder.

“Veterans are not pouring into churches asking for help. Still, the realities of the war seep into the pews,” Munroe said.

“The families are out there, and a lot of clergy have no idea what to do.”

The Rev. Linda Stetter, for example, ended up ministering to the parents of a young veteran who returned from Iraq suffering, because the minister of the church they had attended until their son’s injury “did not give them the pastoral care” they needed, she said.

The family came to her “in tears, they came absolutely in need to talk,” said Stetter, a pastor at the North Grafton United Methodist Church and the First United Methodist Church of Marlboro.

She said the veteran “has a lot of anxiety. He gets very angry with his family and just disappears for periods of time. He defaults on treatment. He abuses alcohol. He also has seizures now. His mother had to quit her job to help him.”

Stetter came to the Hadley seminar to learn more about traumatic brain injury so that she could better understand the family’s needs.

Five other of her congregants are currently serving in Iraq, and one is about to be deployed to Kuwait. She expects that those veterans might have to confront their own trauma when they return, and wants to be able to recognize it when she sees it.

“If you walk into an average church . . . these nice people sitting in the pews have no idea of what it’s like, and this sweet pastor up there will never be able to connect with” the veteran, Munroe said. “But if you make the clergy sensitive to and aware of the dynamics that apply to soldiers . . . you can have clergy who understand.”

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