Video Transcript: Rescue, Recovery, Restoration

Speaker 1  

It's it's great to have you on campus with us.

Speaker 2  

Thanks. Really nice to be here. And I guess for the purpose of our viewers, I probably ought to tell everybodymy name. I'm Steve Stratton, and I'm professor of pastoral care and counseling here, but that's not as important as who you are. 

Speaker 2  

A little bit about me. My name is Dale Ryan. I'm an associate professor of recovery ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary, where I've taught for over a decade now and focused on trying to develop resources and help the Christian community figure out ways to do meaningful recovery ministry in the local church context. 

Speaker 2  

You sound like you've said that before. Yeah, very good. Well, maybe the best place to start is to give us a little bit of an idea of what's going on in the Christian recovery movement now. 

Speaker 2  

Well, the Christian recovery movement is still pretty new. The modern recovering movement as a whole begins the 1930s with the beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous, which was birthed out of an evangelical Christian movement in the early part of the 20th century. It started with a very explicit and clear Christian fountain foundation. there was a long process by which they tried to figure out how much of that they wanted to make explicit and how much would be better to leave implicit, in order to keep the front door of the program as wide open as possible. And that instinct really won the day, over time. And as a consequence, although the modern recovery movement was birthed out of the Christian context, the connections became thinner and thinner over time. And for whatever reason, most people in the Christian community who have trouble with addictions still, to this day, wind up going outside the Christian community to get help. They're going to go to AA to get sober. Most of the leadership of the Christian recovery movement are people who got help in AA, and after a while, felt, you know, I need something. This is good. This stuff saved my life, but I really would be nice to have some place where I could be both a Christian and a person in recovery, because sometimes in recovery culture, it's hard to be too explicit about your faith. Everybody gets your recovery, but they don't really understand your faith, and it feels like a distraction. Don't want to talk about it, whereas in Christian culture, everybody understands your faith, and they don't get your recovery stuff at all. So you feel like you living in two cultures. And any bicultural person is really helped by having some place where you can bring it all together and you don't have to explain either one of those things. Everybody gets it. And a lot of what's going on in the Christian recovery movement emerges out of that.

Now there's a lot of diversity in the Christian recovery movement. There's what I call churches, whose basic recovery strategy is what I call AA in the basement. It's just a church that lets AA or NA or SA or other groups meet on their property. There's also churches that have recovery ministries. So there's a church and they have, you know, kind of an indigenous 12 step group of some kind, or a series of groups that meet at the church. And if you ask people in the congregation, some of them know this is us doing this, and some of them don't know whether this is us or in for us, or whether this is for outsiders who are meeting at our facilities. So it's usually marginalized within the congregation. Then there's churches that have recovery departments, which is the way larger churches tend to organize things. If you're going to do Christian education, you have Christian Education Department. You want to do worship music, you have a worship music music department. You want to do recovery? You have a recovery department. And the expectation is you have a variety of programming, not just groups of kinds, but you might have retreats and intensives and Bible studies and different kinds of social, sober social events that would be helpful to people struggling with addictions of various kinds. And finally, there is now quite a number of what I call recovery churches. These are churches that are really the central premise of the kind of central organizing principle of the churches. This is for people in recovery. That's what we do. And many of those actually have been started in Wesleyan context and Mercy Street comes to mind as an example of a really strong and very, very accessible and powerful recovery ministry that really is the central feature of the life of that church. But there's many other examples of that in other contexts. It's a much more ambitious way to do recovery ministry. It means that if you're going to have a fourth grade Sunday school class, you're going to assume that these kids come from homes where there's addiction, abuse or trauma. You're not going to assume that they just need to know Bible stories. They need basic life skills, how to feel, my feelings, how to you know that you always have choices and stuff like that, things I wish I'd gotten when I was eight, but had to learn much later under much more difficult circumstances. So it's really a very dramatic and fluid environment right now. We're still in the process, I think, of making the kinds of mistakes we need to make to know what this is going to look like in the future. One of the worst things that could happen to the Christian recovery movement, in my view, is to decide we already know how to do this, because we need a lot of creativity for quite a long period of time here. And I should emphasize about the Christian recovery movement that it's also not just an American reality. There's indigenous Christian recovery movements all over the world. Now, I spent a better part of a decade trying to identify people who are headed this direction, and there are some wonderful examples of recovery ministries in Egypt, in Germany and Russia in Finland, and emerging ones in different places in Asia that are  very exciting. They are going to prepare the church, I think, for some pretty dramatic changes in the days ahead.

Speaker 1  

That's outstanding. It sounds like with that international and global sort of focus, there probably are some things that you think about when somebody asks a question like:  how do we move or evolve to a place as a congregation, to be ready for this kind of ministry?

Speaker 2  

It's really good question. It's not difficult to be discouraged by the places you have to start from, because it always feels like if God's given you a vision to do recovered ministry, you have this deep gut sense of what this ought to be like, and you think it ought to be easier than it looks like it's going to be. And the truth is that starting any kind of ministry in any church has its problems. There's always resistance. If you wanted to start a new hand bell choir in a church, you're going to have somebody who thinks it's a bad idea. So a lot of the resistance that you experience to developing Christian recovery ministries in local churches is just a normal kind of resistance that happens in any kind of church ministry. That being said, there's also some very distinctive kinds of resistance that comes up. Do we want to get a reputation of being a church where broken, damaged, hurting people? Come now, Jesus would not have missed a heartbeat in answering that. It's a no brainer. It does not take long to figure out what Jesus is. The community of Jesus's followers thought was the appropriate answer that question. Who else do you want to come? Jesus did not know what to do with well people, right? If you're well, you don't need a physician. I don't know what to do for you. I got nothing. So his assumption about the Christian community was we're going to be pretty damaged, broken, hurting, missing- the-mark type people. That appears to be who we actually really are, but we sometimes spend a good deal of energy pretending that that's not the case. I have a good friend not long ago who told me he's been sober for probably 15 years in AA, and he told me he went to his home group on Thursday night in AA, and after the meeting, a friend of his came up and said, How you doing? And he said he told him I was doing kind of have a hard he had kind of a hard week, and so said a little bit about that, and, you know, they kind of talked, talked about a little bit, and he went home, and then he came to church on Sunday morning, and a friend of his at church came up to him after the service and said, Hey, how you doing? And he said, Fine. How are you now? That dissonance between telling the truth about one's story and being a "how are you? Fine. Thank you." Person points to one of the core issues. I think it's just really hard to tell the truth in the Christian context. And you know, all of us can find the biblical texts if we look hard enough, which recommend telling the truth. This is not a minor theme in the biblical text, but we have conspired--I suppose that's a too strong a word--but we've managed somehow to become the kinds of communities where it's just really hard to do. It's easier to say, "how are you? Fine? Thank you." And initially it feels like we're protecting ourselves, perhaps being less vulnerable. But you pay a huge price for that, both personally and institutionally. So you wind up in places where the kind of truth telling that is absolutely essential for any kind of recovery process really feels like climbing uphill and feels like it might be hard to sustain, and you know it's fine to tell the truth if you're all better.

Speaker 2  

Now one of the examples I often use is, let's say that you're in an automobile accident, and your spouse is killed in the automobile accident, so you're going to go through all the stages of grief, and you know right away, what are you feeling? You're feeling numb. You just you can't access anything. You're just numb. And no one's going to come from church and say, Would you like to come give your testimony? Just would seem intrusive. And you know, we better wait. And later on, you go through all stages of grief. You're gonna go through anger and bargaining and all sort of the classic stages of the grief process, and down at the end, two years later, three years later, when you look back on the whole thing, and you say, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, but I can look back now, and I can see how God was working here, protecting me from lots of outcomes that would have been really tragic, and I'm really grateful for that. And then someone comes and say, well, we'd like you to give your testimony at church, so as long as it's down at the end and it's all tidied up and complete, then we do testimonies. And one of the things the Christian recovery movement, I think, is trying to recover is the benefit of disciplines like spiritual testimony and making that available to all of God's people, so that if you are angry and you say you're angry, that's a good testimony, and that is hard to get to, I think for lots of folks. I remember in college being invited to a weekend retreat that was to teach me how to give a good testimony. And most people watching this will know what a good testimony sounds like. Used to be bad, and then Jesus, and then it was fine. And, you know, I can give a good testimony, all I have to do is leave out all the complexity, all the dead ends, all the one step forward, two step backs, all the stuff that makes my life story a real human story, you know, a real story, an honest one. If I leave all that out, then you get what passes as a good testimony in most of the church in modern America. And that's a real tragedy, because there is a spiritual practice that we desperately need to recover, confession, testimony, making amends. These are the core practices of 12 step process and somehow or another, I think we have to find the spiritual humility to notice that when we stopped doing that in the American church, God preserved those spiritual practices, and he, you know, my own instinct is mid 1930s God says, this is going downhill. People are arguing about stuff that don't matter very much. This is going to go on for a long time. I better take the really important stuff and put it someplace safe. So he gave stuff like confession and testimony to who two hopeless drunks in Akron, Ohio. This is so like God, I think he picks really damaged, broken people to do the work of the Kingdom, and they preserved those spiritual practices in AA and other organizations of fellowships that followed that. So there is a place now we can go to learn how to do confession ways that help people. I've been in the Christian community all my life, and I had never seen the spiritual practice of confession done in a way that helped people. It was not until I went to my first AA meeting that I observed this practice. I said, Oh my gosh, I know what this is. I get this in my head these people are doing confession, but I'd never seen it in done a way that helped people. I'd seen it in done away that shamed people, that reinforced people's obsessive compulsive desire to be perfect and all that kind of stuff. I never done it and seen it done in a way that really helped people. So there's a lot for us to learn here, if we can acquire the spiritual humility to to learn actually do that.

Speaker 1  

You know, it sounds like as you're describing it, there  may be some particular things that need to happen within church environments in order to promote this. But part of what you're saying is we need to really promote what it is to be healthy person. Confidence as the first step into the kind of community that that allows us to engage this this issue as well.

Speaker 2  

It's very difficult to predict what kinds of things are going to be, the things that make the next step possible, doing recovery ministry in the local church. But one of my most fundamental convictions is that it's possible to start from almost anywhere. I'll give you my best story about this. This is a story years ago I did a series of workshops on how to do recovery ministries in a  local church, one day workshops, very basic and simple, that we did in four or five parts of the country. And the last exercise of the day was always next steps. And this was all for pastors. And I'd say, what's one thing that you could go home and do actually do that you could imagine? And the only thing I really remember about these workshops is this one pastor who just couldn't think of anything, and he said things like:  I'm in a church where if you move the communion table three feet to the left, you can get fired. So it was a pretty locked down kind of place. Yeah, you've been to that church. Sot, it was not a church. He was excited about unique innovation, and so I talked with him and I said, Well, is there something that you do on Sunday morning that no one notices? What's the smallest part of your worship service? Say, wow, there's the greeting. No one pays the slightest attention to the greeting that I do at the beginning of the service. Everybody's out in the foyer. They don't come in until the organ starts, and the organ doesn't start until they get to the end of the greeting and say, let's sing him number 263. I said, Okay, let's just do an experiment. Just one time. Don't change your music. Don't change your sermon, just one time, go home and change your greeting based on what you learned at this workshop. So what would you do to change your workshop, your introduction? You're welcome to reflect what you learned here today. He said, Well, I'd probably try to tell the truth. I said I felt very good about that. He got the main point of the day. So he goes home, and next Sunday he stands up and says, I was at a workshop this weekend. I learned that people who had experienced abuse of different kinds as kids often find it hard to trust people at church when they grow older. If that's part of your story, I really want to thank you for coming. Let's sing hymn 253.

Speaker 2  

So he called me the next Tuesday after this, and he said, You've ruined my ministry. He was desperate and anxious  because he was getting phone call after phone call from people who he knew were not paying any attention. And so he calls me up and I say, and he says, I don't know what to do. He wasn't a counseling pastor kind of guy. He's an administrative pastor. Really wanted a job at the denominational level, kind of guy, you know, so it's not so. I said, Are you sure you don't know what to do? He said, Yeah, I haven't  the slightest idea what to do. I said, that's perfect. You don't know what to do. So the the next time someone calls you, what do you think I'm going to advise you to say? He says  You tell me to tell the truth. I said, That's exactly right. Next time someone calls you, tell the truth. And the truth is, I don't know what to say. I feel really bad about not knowing about this, but I don't really know anything about this. I don't know what to do. And I said  just add one thing after you say that, ask the person who's calling you whether you can share their phone number with the next person that calls you. And that's what he did, which it was a very courageous sort of thing. I think telling the truth for this guy was not easy. It's not easy for any of us, but for him, it was a real leap, and it changed the culture of the church in the end, because it didn't happen right away, but all of a sudden, there were a lot of women in the congregation talking to each other. Nothing happened very quickly. But the following spring, at the Women's retreat, all of a sudden, there's a table of women who have been talking to each other for six months, and they're saying, you know, I felt all alone with this. I thought I was the only one; that isolation was really painful. And everybody said the same thing, and they started to say, you know, it's not okay to feel like you're the only one. What can we do? A year later, he has a support group for survivors of childhood sexual abuse in the congregation. He's got therapists who volunteered to coach the leadership team for that group. He started recovery ministry from changing the one thing he thought no one was paying any attention to. My conviction is, if that guy can start a recovery Ministry of church, just about anybody can. So it's it's possible. Often you meet a lot of resistance in any kind of institutions and you're going to meet resistance to starting a recovery ministry, because that's not business as usual. So there's going to be a lot of political work that has, has to be done. There's going to be a lot of paying attention to different stakeholders who are concerned about different things. 

Speaker 1  

And can you talk a little bit more about that aspect of it? Because what you're describing is not something that's a one week and out sort of process. It's not, there's not a quick fix, managing this sort of process, is what you're saying.

Speaker 2  

It depends on what kind of setting you want to start a recovery ministry in, or what kind of institution you're working in. You know, if you're doing a church plant or starting a new institution, you have an opportunity there to kind of set a different sort of foundation from the very beginning. And there's special problems with that and advantages of that in established churches: this is about really fighting for the hearts and minds of the congregation with fighting for the identity of the congregation. Are we going to be the kind of people where it's it's okay to be in process, where it's okay to be broken and where you can say that out loud? Or are we going to be a "How are you? Fine. Thank you," church. You can't expect that to happen overnight. You need to think  this as part of your five year, 10 year strategic plan, this kind of stuff, because you have to figure out realistically how much change is possible, how fast you may not be able to bring everybody along on this process. So you may experience losses in the process, but you do your homework. Local churches and other Christian institutions are some of the most political institutions that exist. So  my custom, when I was working in local church, was to spend a good deal of time making sure that every stakeholder in a particular decision had been given the opportunity to express their reservations, but also given an opportunity to talk to somebody in the congregation who was struggling with the kinds of issues we wanted to deal with. So that this meant pairing board members with individuals in the congregation who were struggling with whatever issue we're going to start a group about but it meant that when it came time to vote on approval for that group, everybody knew that this was for us. This wasn't for those poor souls out there who needed this. We need this because we need this. It's one of the things that I think is a bedrock, important piece about Christian recovery ministry is make sure you're doing this, because we need this.

Speaker 1  

I think that point is really interesting. As I've watched this evolve in different churches, the movement from it usually moves from we are in service to these people to where it becomes really healthy, it seems like, is when we need these people. These are not someone other than we are, who we serve. These are people like us in reality, and their voice is needed for us, in those times.

Speaker 2  

At the root of things, if there's this premise that we're helping the other, then it's about them. It's not about me, too. It's not about us. It's not, we're all in this together. And that, I think, can poison recovery ministries in a very fundamental way, because it leaves a root of spiritual pride. And one of the keys to recovery of any kind, in my view, is finding somehow the capacity for spiritual humility and that's not an easy thing to come come by. It's not encouraged necessarily in existing Christian traditions, where it feels like it's really important to have all the right answers to all the right questions, and as long as you do everything's fine. Of course, your life may be out of control. Your kids' lives may be out of control, but at least you have all the right answers to all the right questions. But I think it is a bitter pill. We want American culture. We like success. We like a fast break. We like stealing second base. We like anything fast and to hear that this process might take time, might be complicated, might have relapses as part of it, is not really what we want to hear. But you know, the Christian faith is not just about fast. You know, I've never heard anybody, no one, in the Christian community complain about discipleship being for a lifetime. Everybody knows that discipleship is a lifetime word. It could take a long time. Nobody says, Are you still working on discipleship? You know, I just kind of assume that discipleship is a lifetime thing. And recovery is like that. Recovery is a long term word; it's a process that really requires some faith in God's faithfulness over long periods of time, that God's not given up on us. Sometimes that faith is hard to come by, and you need a community of people around you that can help you see that with clarity. But if you have that sort of safe community around you, it makes all the difference in the world.

Speaker 1  

A lot of times. I don't know if you would say this is true, but I think a lot of that quick fix and happening fast sort of process really is part of the foundation for addiction, even in some cases, might be one of those things that has to be dismantled. It may in some in some churches and some churches and some Christian institutions.

Speaker 2  

That strikes me as very thoughtful observation. I do think that one of the reasons people, not for everybody, but there's a lot of people for whom the payoff for addiction is it takes care of the pain quickly, at least it does at the beginning, right? I mean, manages it in some way; it feels like I'm okay. Now, the longer the addictive process has worked, the less  you start off feeling good, and then eventually you're struggling to feel normal, and then there's no way to get back to normal. You just feel bad. So  initially theyfirst used, for some addictive substances, is because there's that kind of initial payoff. It's not true of all addictive substances. After all, first use of nicotine, the initial response is coughing and nausea for most people, you know, but it's still pretty addictive stuff. 

I think of Eugene Peterson's book, A Long Obedience, in the same direction. And I can't imagine the development of these kind of ministries in a healthy way without that mentality. It sounds that sounds like what you're saying.

Speaker 2  

Yeah. Well, there's, there's a couple things to emphasize about about that. One is, you know, at the level of planning and thinking about what's possible to achieve in any kind of institution, there's a real importance of being able to see  God at work in slow things,  if you're in in recovery; particularly early recovery, you need to focus on 24 hours, right? You're not focused on long term. You're asking, How can I stay sober for 24 hours? And if you start thinking in bigger frames, you just get yourself in trouble. You start thinking about the past too much, you're going to feel guilty and ashamed, and you've only got one strategy for dealing with guilt and shame, and that's to use. So don't get into the past too much. Early on, your likelihood of relapse goes up. If you think about the future, the fear goes through the roof, and you've only got one strategy for dealing with fear. So again, your likelihood of relapse goes up. So in AA, there is this relentless present tense focus about staying sober today. If you've never been addicted, one day doesn't seem like a big deal. If you've been addicted and you haven't been able to stay sober for 20 years, one day is a miracle from God. It's God breaking into history and doing the unthinkable. And you know, as no end of people could testify who have worked 12 step programs, you can make a life out of one day at a time. You know, it's too much to ask, can you stop drinking forever? You just want to ask, can you today? Can you stop drinking? And what kind of support would you need to do that?

You know,those little practices fit very well for for those of us who are Wesleyans--means of grace, those means by which we give God space to administer grace into our lives. And we think about prayer, Bible study, those classic disciplines, they are certainly there. But these are some of the things that Wesley said. These are means of grace as well. 

Speaker 2  

If you look at what people actually do, when they work the 12 steps,  not 12 ideas or 12 principles, there are 12 suggested behaviors. So if you look what people actually do, you'll find that it's really very much like some of the things that Wesley did, unlike in other ways, but certainly his penitential bands, the sort of questions you might hear from a sponsor are very like the kind of questions a potential band leader might ask everybody who came to a group. And the sort of practices that are the spiritual practices that are embedded in the 12 step program are all practices with long history in the Christian tradition. This is not stuff that was invented in a hot tub in California in the 1960s. This is searching, a fearless moral inventory. This is about  taking a look at oneself, then confessing what you come up with, and making amends to other people, and prayer and meditation. This is all stuff that's been around in the Christian tradition for a very long time. So here you have a very large movement of people doing all this distinctively Christian stuff. And they'll be criticized by two groups of people. In the secular context, the primary criticism of 12 step movement is, that it's way too Christian. It's just a thinly disguised Christian discipleship program. Look at all this stuff. It's all Christian stuff. Confession. You know what you do in a group is testimonies, talks about God all the time. Whereas the principal criticism in the Christian context will be this isn't Christian enough. I mean, there's no Christology in there, there's no eschatology in there. There's no traditional Christian stuff, is there? Now, my own instinct is that the the secular criticism of the 12 steps is more thoughtful than the Christian criticism of the 12 steps. I don't think you make it any less Christian by focusing on suggested behaviors. The 12 Steps are not intended to be a statement of faith. They're intended to be sort of baby steps in the right direction. Bill Wilson, one of the founders of AA, called it a spiritual kindergarten. It's just the first baby steps in the right direction with a lot to be revealed later as you learn more about God who's actually helping you. But I think that if you're doing recovery stuff in a Christian context, you have to be sort of attentive to both those kinds of criticisms, and sometimes that's a difficult balancing act, but that's part of the skills we need to learn in doing Christian stuff.