This post is also appearing at Steve Brown, Etc’s “Guest Room Blog” this month. If you don’t subscribe to the SBE podcast, what’s wrong with you?
I’m finishing Susan Cheever’s biography of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, My Name Is Bill. For those who enjoy distinctively American biography and the intersection between spirituality and cultural history, Cheever’s book is outstanding and interesting.
It’s also a great prompt for those who are living through a “church crisis” and feeling spiritually homeless.
That would be me in the middle of that crisis, and best I can tell from my email, thousands and thousands of others are on the same bus.
It’s not that I don’t have a home church where people love me, or that I’m a church consumer who can’t be satisfied with the coffee bar and kickin’ worship band at the local megachurch, or that I am so theologically sophisticated that I can’t stand to listen to any preacher who isn’t more interesting than N.T. Wright.
No, my spiritual “aloneness” crisis is something inside of me. It just isn’t syncing with the churches around me. I feel like I’m sitting in a huge commercial for a product I don’t want to buy anymore. (Not Jesus, but the current version of the Christian life as its sold by evangelicals in general.) I haven’t abandoned the church. I just feel like I’m an alien visitor listening to a lot of that sound the adults make in the Charlie Brown cartoons.
Which brings me to Alcoholics Anonymous. When I was a pastor, our church started an outreach to alcoholics with a ministry called Alcoholics for Christ. A recovering alcoholic and committed Christian in my church had long experience in AA and was excited about what we could do with AC. So through him, I was introduced to AA and AC meetings in the Louisville area. I attended meetings of all kinds in various places on a regular basis.
And I kept saying, “I like this better than church.”
Well, not always. I’m not talking about the smoking or the crudeness or the generic spirituality. No, I’m talking about two things.
The stories. The stories are human stories. Remarkably similar. Sometimes boring. Sometimes compelling. All recognizable. All full of brokenness, human tragedy and humor. Stories about the breakthrough of grace in the midst of the worst messes we can make of life. But they are “our” stories; even for non-alcoholic, but otherwise addicted persons like myself.
The other thing was the experience of community. In those rooms, community was pursued and community happened. It was clumsy and awkward, and sometimes it wasn’t at all pretty. It could make you wince. But it was the real deal. People opened the door of their real lives, let some of the ugliness out, and everyone respected and loved one another through it all.
Not what we Christians call community, which is an orchestrated ritual of convincing ourselves we’ve done a lot of things we actually haven’t come near doing. No, this was community that moved in and toward the center of those Twelve Steps and Traditions: sobriety as a gift of spirituality found in common.
Now I would love to add a lot of Jesus and the Gospel to this experience. Celebrate Recovery and similar ministries do exactly that. But as it was, it was something that drew me in and made me wonder if I was looking at a movement much more similar to Jesus than what I experience on Sundays?
AA started with Bill W and Dr. Bob meeting for what was supposed to be a 15 minute talk where a former drinker encouraged a struggling alcoholic. It turned into hours, into a friendship and eventually into a movement with a life of its own.
The “secret” those founders discovered between themselves is something that Christians should know by heart. Sin, Grace, Gospel, Community, the Work of the Spirit.
We have a story in Jesus and that story allows us to open up our closets and tell the truth. What would happen if Christians told the truth? To one another? To ourselves? To the Christian community?
Our stories are important. The Gospels are full of the awareness that God knows the whole story of the woman at the well and the tax collectors by the roadside. He knows it all, and loves us in Jesus with a fierce, unstoppable love.
Community can happen. Maybe not at the scheduled times and places, but at the times and places the Holy Spirit creates. How much does the Spirit long for more of those Bill and Dr. Bob movements to be born out of such small beginnings of genuine community.
So I may feel “homeless,” but the Holy Spirit is creating the church in all kinds of two and three person settings. He’s opening the closets, giving us community, showing us what it’s like to be loved safely and loved anyway.
My prayer isn’t that I will find the church. I’ve had plenty of that. I want the Holy Spirit to make me the beginning of the Jesus-story believing community that tells its stories to the world. I want what Jesus wanted when he poured out his spirit on those disciples to happen in and through me, to whoever is thirsty, lost and alone.
Does someone have 15 minutes? Let’s get something started and see where Jesus takes it.
[Note: If you plan to badmouth AA, CR etc. in the comments, save your time. I’m not going to publish you.]
I wonder what the connection is between what maybe could be called “classic sinning” – subtance abuse, carousing, maybe fights/sexual promiscuity – and conversion to Christianity. Also whether other religions and cultures show that pattern.
It might be a really old one. Ever read John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners? (I may be mucking up the title and/or author, but have one of them right I think, read it a long time ago.)
The author was living in I think the 16 or 1700s but it was just the kind of thing you often find today – first he’s carousing, drinking… then suddenly conversion to Christianity.
I had a “born again” experience too but not that type. I wonder if with alcohol, drugs and other maybe other impulse control/addictive-type problems, the structure of a church community is the key? What do you think?
And of course it’s not a perfect correspondence, either – plenty of people get out of addiction non-religiously and plenty of people turn to Christianity for reasons that have nothing to do with overcoming addiction…
[…] You might want to read the post in its entirety at https://jesusshaped.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/finding-jesus-at-aa/. […]
I count myself very lucky. For the past 17 years, (until only recently, when he moved away into semi retirement) I was priviledged to be welcome in the home of a man who opened his house up a few nights a week to a group of friends and showed us by example what grace was. In the midst of marriage or divorce, drunk or high, during thick and thin, good times or bad, we were welcome and accepted for who we were. We were able to be who we were, and not lie about what was happening in our life. The BBQ was always hot, and the drinks flowing, and the conversation always came around to Christ and his love and grace for sinners. What a powerful mix. It changes you. I have had a foretaste of the feast to come and can say beyond a doubt that what awaits us in Christ’s Kingdom is so much better than we dare imagine. The men I shared this with are closer to me than brothers. We grieve that those days are temporarily behind us, and are working diligently to continue this fellowship as opportunity grants it.
I wish that everyone could taste this kind of fellowship this side of Glory. It does exist.
Your two-paragraph description of the church bus that many of us feel trapped on was depressingly accurate. It’s like a long cross-country trip on an old bus through the night with no stops. At fifty-something (very), I’m ready to get off, but don’t want to find myself standing alone on a desert highway in the middle of Arizona.
Your thoughts about finding Jesus, gospel, Holy Spirit, and community in two-three person intersections sounds a lot like what Barna describes in his book, Revolution–his belief (and cheerleading) for what he sees as the coming redefinition of the church based on individual experience rather than on corporate (body) identity. It is a provocative view of the future church, but it’s not a bus stop that says “get off here” to me. As I enter the final stretch of the ride through this life, my spirit longs for a real, biblical body of Christ simply committed to Word (expository preaching and teaching, Worship (Christ-centered, acoustic, corporate), and Work (ministering to people, not just managing programs). Why is that so hard to find?
Because “You’ve got to lose your life to find it” isn’t the vision statement of any denomination I know.
One of the saddest discoveries I’ve made is that churches are interested in being bigger and successful churches. The true teaching and example of Jesus is filtered out of most churches at the ground level. They can tell you all about a Jesus who would be fired if he worked there a week.
The Gospel is actually preached pretty clearly in a lot of churches that would actually oppose the idea of living it out institutionally. If it’s not going to draw thousands, most churches won’t consider it.
For one thing, AA and its associated 12-step programs are committed to having no leadership (or very little, and none permanent), no dues, and no “problems of money, property, or prestige.” I’m sure those basic traditions help us avoid issues that churches face.
I’m both a regular attendee at several 12-step meetings, and a member of the vestry of the church in which many of them meet. In the church basement at the Saturday morning AA breakfast, we have to come up with only enough cash to buy the next week’s breakfast ingredients. At the vestry meeting upstairs once a month, we have to replace the broken boiler and repair the leak in the roof.
But material possessions aren’t the only differences between the two “institutions.” As you say, Michael, in the 12-step groups, people are open about how life and sin have broken them and how God has put them back together. The “capacity to be honest with themselves” is the rock-bottom requirement for recovery in the 12-steps programs. “You’re as sick as your secrets” is a common saying there.
For some reason, being totally honest is much harder within a church group. Even with my beloved weekly prayer group partners, I am not as open as I am with my 12-step friends. I’m not sure why. I just feel that if I were completely open and frank with my prayer group, they would — not reject me, certainly, but they would feel uncomfortable and unsure of what to say.
So I may tell my prayer group that I’ve had a rough week, and ask for their prayers, but I won’t go on to say that I feel overwhelmed with the financial details of my life and I’m scared that I won’t be able to make it. The latter statements I reserve for my 12-step friends, who will point out kindly but firmly that we aren’t promised that “financial insecurity will leave us,” but rather that “*fear of* financial insecurity will leave us.” They may add that I can look for a part-time job, and meanwhile, I have enough to eat today, so I don’t need to”catastophize” about the future. I find that bracing.
Well, enough about me. I love my church, for its fellowship, its liturgy, and its beauty. I find God there in a special way, and in another and equally special way, I find God in the 12-step programs. I hope that you, Michael, can find the spiritual home you are looking for.
I read “My Name Is Bill” and enjoyed it somewhat, but I didn’t really feel it enlightened much about Bill W. I knew, of course, that AA had come from the Episcopal Church (of which I’m a member), and I did enjoy reading about his “spiritual experience” — the real thing!
You and others might enjoy a book by another religious writer, not evangelical but Episcopalian again: Frederick Buechner. He wrote “Telling Secrets,” about his daughter’s struggle with anorexia, how this reflected on his own view of himself as her father, and how he was able to find people to “tell secrets” with in Adult Children of Alcoholics, an Al-Anon group which was my primary portal into the 12-Step programs.
Micheal
I am a member of a 12 step fellowship. It opened me up to be able to rejoin a body of believers at church. It also reinforced for me the reason small churches are important. For me to be honest in my spiritual journey, I need to be accountable. You dont get that in megachurches or large 12 step groups. I need to know you and you need to know me for that to happen.
I believe that is why Jesus had 12 disciples not 24 or 48 or a 1000. That way they all became dependent on each other, they became aware and accepting of each others flaws, and each others greatness. And they all got a chance to know Jesus personally. And lets be honest, the 12 disciples were not exactly pillars of the community when he found them.
Like the writer above, I am more free to share the failures of my life, the fears in my life, and the plain I am just “overwhelmed” days in meetings. In church, we are encouraged to share our “blessings” only. We are also encouraged to share them in our 12 step meetings. But you know you are free to share both sides of the fence. It is to be made to feel like a “failure” as a Christian, if you have doubts, in the church setting. And this is done subtly, not to your face.
Like the above writer, I hope you can find the sanctuary, you are looking for. It is truly a blessed thing.
Huggles
“I want what Jesus wanted when he poured out his spirit on those disciples to happen in and through me, to whoever is thirsty, lost and alone.”
Me too, Michael. I pray that we will be the disciples Jesus wants us to be.
Joanie D.
My parents have both been participants in 12 Step recovery groups, both ones based on the more secularized AA model and those Christianized (like Celebrate Recovery). One of the comments that they have made over and over is that they’re amazed by the amount of grace they find (and give) in those groups. Ironically enough, the name of their church (and many others) includes the word “grace” but often the substance of grace is not found within those congregations.
Perhaps the grace that those who are willing to admit their need for it is just a bit more real than the grace that “pretty good” people perceive.
I’m finding that living with grace is much more difficult that I ever imagined, but I know that grace is what I need to live this life to which I feel called. Imitating Christ requires grace–both given and received.
iMonk, thanks so much for this post. In the church I planted and then closed, we had several recovering(ish) addicts and one in particular who I highly respect for her tenacity in pursuing Christ through the down times. She continued to compare her experience in AA with what we were up to, and told me I should read the blue book. I need to go back and do that, and attend some meetings.
It really is tragic that we cannot be as honest in our churches as in AA. After baring my soul in AA for about a year, I became more involved in my church and I decided to apply a similar level of honesty to try and shake things up a bit. The results were mixed. I know some people liked my honesty. Others definitely backed away.
You know… I thought I was going to write that my experience of being honest with other Christians has been negative. But after thinking about it some more, I don’t think it has. Sure, some people reacted poorly. Then again, I’ve made some good friends by opening up more. I guess I’ve been fortunate, though, since I do know many people who have been really hurt by being too honest. I suppose that’s a risk we have to take.
Yeah, AA is beautiful. Your accepted for you there. You don’t have to hold to any beliefs or agendas, and no one on average judges you cause we’ve all been there. How can you judge someone else when you know full well that you used to be just like them. I was able to really find God there and it is something I never thought was possibe. I was raised religious all my childhood until I got into drugs and alcohol, and all I ever had was beliefs. Now that I have had the experience, its all different. All I know is that it is more present in AA then most churches I have ever been to. Its kind of sad. I do attend church again, and a small bible study, but it is so much different. People are as sincere or real.