The Recovery Minded Church

You want to have vibrant and healthy relationships with those who struggle with addiction in your church and community. But you find yourself wondering how to meet their needs in a wise, helpful and God-honoring way. The Recovery-Minded Church addresses the pressing questions you are facing in ministering to those with addictions. Here you will discover a clinically informed, biblical and theological framework to love the addicts in your midst and also practical tools to help you succeed in doing so, including discussion questions after each chapter for use in small group settings. God desires to welcome his prodigal children with open arms and a spirit of celebration. We need to reflect this same kind of grace and mercy in our ministry to those with addictions, to move our churches from being recovery-resistant to recovery-minded.

You want to have vibrant relationships with those who struggle with addiction in your church and community. This practical resource for church leaders and congregations answers your pressing questions about addiction and recovery, through real-life stories, the latest insights from medical science and a biblical framework for how to love the addicts in your midst.

The Holy Spirit wrote the vision of Recovery Church on the hearts of strangers from across the country and then formed this rag-tag group into a family. The story of Recovery Church is His Story. The story of how a Holy God went through extravagant measures to reach junkies, drunks, crackheads, outcasts, sinners, wayward children, the lepers of today, us. From physicians, ministers, teachers, veterans, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, homeless, rich, poor, and every race, our growing fellowship is united in our shared solution through Jesus. We have grown from just an idea to an increasing network of Recovery Churches, and now to the groanings of a movement. We now hold to a God-sized vision. We are witnessing God raising up disciple-makers within the recovery community and starting, planting, and reproducing Recovery Churches. People who were lost in their addictions, who everyone thought the last chapter had been written, have seen God change the narrative. Stories of destruction have become His Stories of redemption. We now have the vision to see a Recovery Church in every city in this nation and beyond. We believe nothing will bring God more honor than for all the world to hear how a Holy God profoundly loved and pursued this group of addicts and alcoholics. We believe each story in this book is so miraculous that it is undeniably God at work. This is His Story of Recovery Church.

This book provides a theologically rich commentary on the challenge of addiction and the long road to recovery. Written by a minister with extensive experience working with people who struggle with addictions, this book helps pastors understand the roots and realities of our universal human struggle with addictions and attachments while showing that together we have great hope for freedom, wholeness, and recovery. Readers will learn how to create and foster a Beatitude Community, the kind of environment Jesus prescribed for his people, to help addicts and those who love them heal from brokenness. Foreword by Bob Ekblad. About the Series Pastors are called to help people navigate the profound mysteries of being human, from birth to death and everything in between. This series, edited by leading pastoral theologian Jason Byassee, provides pastors and pastors-in-training with rich theological reflection on the various seasons that make up a human life, helping them minister with greater wisdom and joy.

The United States is the most medicated country in the world. More than 1.7 million Americans are struggling with addiction to prescription painkillers, fueling the opioid crisis that claims more than 140 lives every day. The trouble isn't just the drugs--it's that we don't know what to do with the people addicted to them. Not as a country, not as the church. Is tough love called for? Or would Christ have us take a different approach to addiction recovery? Drawn from the personal experience of the authors and current research, The Heart of Recovery calls us to set aside judgment and mend recovering addicts and their families with the stuff God uses to heal: compassion and community. It's a call to serve the ones who cannot repay, to forgive 70 times 7, to fling the door wide-open to the prodigal, and to remember the purpose of grace. A supportive community--family, friends, the church, and more--encourages and sustains long-term recovery. Through compassion, we bring hope for healing.

Discover the power of recovery ministry for your church. Churchgoers who experience painful family issues, addictions, abuse, loss, mental illnesses, and other secret sorrows begin to believe they live beyond the grip of God’s redemptive hand. Pastors often feel ill equipped to help with such problems and refer people to resources outside the church. People badly need Christ-centered counsel and encouragement, but few church leaders even know where to start. Bridges to Grace is an inspiring introduction highlighting the stories of churches across the country that are thinking systematically and organizationally about the ministry of recovery. The authors share how this ministry is bringing God’s grace to hurting individuals. They relate both success and failure, and best of all, they demonstrate how God uses recovery ministry powerfully for his kingdom purposes.

Do Christians need recovery? Or is recovery something needed by the church itself? Addiction—whether to a substance or to a behavior—is a problem within faith communities, just like it is everywhere else. But because churches are rarely experienced as safe places for dealing with addiction, co-addiction, or the legacy of family dysfunction, Christians tend to seek recovery from these conditions in Twelve-Step fellowships. Once they become accustomed to the ethos of vulnerability, acceptance, and healing that these fellowships provide, however, they are often left feeling that the church has failed them, with many asking: why can’t church be more like an AA meeting? Inspired by his own quest to find in church the sort of mutual support and healing he discovered in Twelve-Step fellowships, Stephen Haynes explores the history of Alcoholics Anonymous and its relationship to American Christianity. He shows that, while AA eventually separated from the Christian parachurch movement out of which it emerged, it retained aspects of Christian experience that the church itself has largely lost: comfort with brokenness and vulnerability, an emphasis on honesty and transparency, and suspicion toward claims to piety and respectability. Haynes encourages Christians to reclaim these distinctive elements of the Twelve-Step movement in the process of “recovering church.” He argues that this process must begin with he calls “Step 0,” which, as he knows from personal experience, can be the hardest step: the admission that, despite appearances, we are not fine.

It is assumed by many that addiction is not a major issue for those involved in a faith community. But that is a myth. There are many people in virtually every congregation that struggle with addictive behavior and most are too afraid to admit it. Yet, the church is the ideal place to get help. This book equips pastors, church leaders, lay counselors and volunteers to build an effective and life-changing recovery ministry in their local church.