I read this piece from the Christianity Today website on Mercy Street Church and immediately thought of a lot of conversations I’ve had where people have asked me “why can’t the church be more like AA?”

In my congregation a good friend of mine is a recovering alcoholic with over 35 years of sobriety. He took to AA like a fish takes to water and worked his program within AA for a lot of years, getting his medallions, going to meetings, etc. He often asks me the question, “Why can’t the church be more like AA?”

He no longer attends AA meetings.  He’s got his sobriety to a level where meeting attendance hasn’t been necessary to maintain sobriety. Whereas he believes in “the program” to the depths of his soul and loves to meet other “friends of Bill” and talk the recovery code talk, he knows why he no longer goes to meetings. He’s “been there, done that” all before. He’s heard all the “drunk-a-logues” all before, done the whole thing. He stopped going because he didn’t need it any longer to “restore sanity to his life”.

If you look at my friend’s life you’d notice that he has a rather addictive personality. He tends towards excess in other ways in his life. Fortunately none of those ways gave him the same trouble as alcohol did, but to his own admission they were excessive nevertheless and cost him in various ways over the long term. In the last couple of years he has been rather obsessed with studying the Bible at home. He’s loved it and found it to be fruitful and enjoyable. He always feared the Old Testament previous to this but now via commentaries and other authors has a better understanding of how the Hebrew Scriptures speak and what they are trying to say. When he’s through with working through the canon he’ll move on to reading the Apocrypha and after that perhaps the Pseudepigrapha.  He and I are good friends and since he loves books and ideas we enjoy talking about what he discovers and how it all relates to everything.

His persistent question of “why can’t the church be more like AA?” continues to linger in our conversations and we revisit it often. We want the church to be a place where sinners don’t need to hide. We want the church to be a therapeutic community where people can be set free from their bondages to sin and addiction and find lives of sobriety and freedom. We want churches to be places where there are no barriers, places where PhDs can break bread with the illiterate, where millionaires call those on SSI and live in group homes “brother” and “sister”. By God’s grace Living Stones CRC is a place where these things are true at some level, but it’s never enough.

A Single Issue Program

When my friend asks “why can’t the church be more like AA?” he wants a place that doesn’t need all the overhead the church has. AA runs by borrowing space and needing just someone to organize and govern the meeting and a pot of coffee. The rules and rituals of the Big Book and other traditions govern and the thing moves forward. And it works if you work the program as he keeps telling me.

My responses to my friend usually begins with one observation. AA has the benefit of being a single focused organization. At least initially, you can be a thief, a wife beater, an ax murder, but as long as you can keep away from drinking, you have a level of acceptance in the group. Now I know that if you work your steps you have to address the other ways that you are wronging others, but there is a way in which isolating the focus of dysfunction down to one specific problem helps the group stay tolerant in a way that no church ever could.

This piece in CT was interesting to me because of how it moved the discussion forward in my mind. In the end of the CT piece the pastor himself has his “come to Jesus” moment where he too gets a sponsor and a group and he declares himself to be an “addict”. Now it might be that he is simply staying “anonymous” by not specifying the exact nature of his addiction. We don’t know if alcohol or drugs or gambling or sexual practices need to be addressed to restore sanity to his life or not.

Co-Dependence

I just finished a conversation with a man with whom I’ve had a friendship and pastoral relationship for a number of years and we were just talking about co-dependence. If you go to Wikipedia and search “codependence” you get a disputed but fairly narrow definition which deals with the sober partner in a relationship with an addict and the ways the codependent person tries to save the other. I am realizing that my definition of codependence is broader still to embrace a relational dynamic where responsibility for one’s actions are implicitly shifted to the other. (I’ll have to write a separate post on my developing theology of co-dependence and the mission of God.) A codependent dance involves trying to control your own emotional world by attempting to control the behavior of the other with whom you’re dancing. Because we cannot control the behavior of others, and ought not as well, this sets us up for a pattern of relating that becomes deeply frustrating and is a violation of how God created us to be. I’ve been exploring this dynamic personally and discovering approaches and resonances within the gospel and the biblical narrative, but I am digressing from the point of this piece.

Again in the CT piece two key ways in which Matt attempts to connect the church to the 12 step movement is by defining the “higher power” in terms of Jesus Christ (which is common for other churchified recovery programs) AND embracing the label of addict as his own, identifying with the addict and binding himself to the program. Now I don’t know the form and nature of Matt’s addiction (and I don’t need to know) but it led me to ask the question “Is addict really a suitable synonym for sinner?” I have my doubts.

Sin and Addiction

In Neal Plantinga’s fine book Not the Way it’s Supposed to be: A Breviary of Sin Neal does illustrate sin using addiction. Addiction is a great illustrator of sin in our lives because sin is not simply “making bad choices”, sin in the Bible are pits and traps we fall into and can’t get ourselves out of. Even though addiction is a subset of sin, and emblematic of an aspect of sin, addiction is a subset of the broader reality of sin and brokenness and for that reason identifying sin so precisely with addiction makes me uncomfortable.

Addiction has been used in a clinical way to describe a particular pattern of behavior or disease. The reality is, however, that there are many more sins than addictions, many more sinners than true addicts, and many more maladies than addiction. Gaining a greater understanding of sin by coming to an understanding of addiction is very helpful. If the reality of sin is not exhausted by the dynamic of addiction then the reality of our deliverance is also not fully expressed by what we call recovery. In all fairness “recovery” as noted in the 12 steps is designed to be broad and inclusive. The person in recovery has to make an inventory and make direct amends for past shortcomings and promises to continue this practice throughout the rest of life. The 12 steps include the intention to become a very good person and to treat others as best they can. Nothing wrong with any of that obviously, but does that in fact exhaust our sanctification or the nature of our deliverance? I think not.

The Question of Better Outcomes

I have no argument with those who note that in many respects many 12 step programs outperform the church on many levels and in many ways. What I don’t think is true is that we can equate the task of the church with the task of 12 step programs. 12 step programs are wonderful and wonderfully Christian tools to address specific manifestations of our brokenness and they can be highly effective in what they set out to do. As the article noted they are often MORE effective than general spiritual disciplines (attending worship, small groups, personal bible study, prayer, sacraments, etc.) at rooting out stubborn and devastating patterns of behavior. We should praise God that we have more tools rather than fewer. At the same time the difference in performance between these two things may illuminate the difference in task.

As I have been working through Luke for our worship services I have seen how critical “proclamation” is to Jesus especially in chapter 4-10. Jesus announces, proclaims the kingdom of God and that proclamation is embodied by his miraculous therapeutic powers.

His therapy is proclamational as his proclamation is therapeutic but it’s pretty obvious that proclamation doesn’t equal therapy and therapy doesn’t equal proclamation.

The therapy is an embodiment, a sign of the reality breaking out in Jesus’ presence and ministry which he is proclaiming and commanding his disciples to proclaim as well. Not all who are healed become disciples, and not all disciples are healed. I think this is exactly the difference between the church and 12 step programs and perhaps is a reason why it is OK for them to remain distinct.

A 12 step program moves forward and derives its effectiveness from the power of God, even if only named as “a higher power” whether or not the end of the age of decay is announced in Jesus’ name. A 12 step program can be the finger of God for the deliverance of those bound by addiction and for many who benefit from the program that deliverance may draw them to the broader and more foundational deliverance that Jesus announced and the church continues to announce today.

Are All Sinners Addicts?

What this may mean is that not all sinners are addicts while all addicts remain sinners even when they are in recovery. The vocabulary of the 12 step movement as many have recognized is enormously Christian and bears within it enormous wisdom. The 12 step movement shines a light on the nature of sin in a way that all sinners, whether or not they would clinically be diagnosed as “addicts” can benefit from. However, if all the world’s addicts were 100% in recover from all the world’s addictions sin and brokenness would remain needing the intervention of the King of kings.

An addicts recovery is a subset, a sign, and a manifestation of the deliverance announced in Nazareth in Luke 4 thousands of years ago whether or not that addict has ever known or expresses any allegiance to Jesus. In the church such deliverances should be celebrated and recognized as such. If the Bible are as John Calvin called it prescription glasses which allow us to see ourselves more clearly and see God more clearly they should also help us see individual expressions of deliverance more clearly still. Those expressions of deliverance don’t exhaust the breadth and fullness of the deliverance proclaimed, they exist just like any of the innumerable healings of innumerable individuals never individually detailed in the New Testament done by Jesus and his disciples.

There are enough needs and contexts to justify many different kinds of churches with different kinds of emphases. I don’t want anyone to misunderstand this piece as in any way trying to take anything away from Pastor Matt and the Mercy Street church. I also want to us see, however, that as always the breadth and scope of the deliverance announced by Jesus and commissioned by him to be announced by his disciples is always beyond that which we imagine and realize. We are blessed to have the 12 step movement and 12 step emphasis churches just like we are blessed to have other movements and other churches that express those emphases but no single movement or emphasis exhausts or fully embodies the deliverance announced and proclaimed by the one who claimed all authority in heaven and on earth.