Modeled After AA
by Jennifer Way
I have, for some time, wished the church could be more like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings.
I used to attend a Friday night service at the Boston Rescue Mission where the congregation was made up of those in recovery. My favorite part of these services was listening to people share. A man or woman would get up and make their way to the front. The names and faces changed; but the opening line was often the same: “Hi, I’m [name] and I’m a grateful, recovering [alcoholic, addict, drug abuser etc.].
The real, raw nature of these confessions; the willingness to ask for help; the exposure of struggle that smashed illusions of “having it all together”—these characteristics grabbed me and left me painfully aware of what typical church experiences so frequently lack: open acknowledgement of failures and weaknesses.
Contemporary Christian artist Derek Webb challenges this subtle paradigm within the church on his live album “The House Show”:
I think that we often believe, if we’re really honest with ourselves, that the Christian life is about how well we can learn to hide our sin... The Christian life is not about hiding! I’m so tired of hiding my sin from people, of deceiving people about who I really am…I wish there were huge screens that would just show you the truth about me all the way to my core in order that you would know me for who I really was; in order that I would have nothing but Jesus to grasp on to, ‘cause, that’s all I’ve got anyway.
He goes on to implore his audience to preach the gospel in a brutally honest and believing way:
Am I the only one sick of living in American subculture Christianity where we encourage each other to put on these faces? It’s no wonder, statistically, our church is losing relevance by the day...It’s no wonder we are so stagnant. [The Gospel] has not failed us; we have just failed to believe it.
The Twelve Steps of AA provide an amazing model for experiencing the truth of the Gospel. To illustrate, as Christians, we should have:
- Step 1 - Admitted we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable
- Step 2 - Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
- Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
- Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
- Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
- Step 6 – Become entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
- Step 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
- Step 9 - Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
- Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and, when we were wrong, promptly admitted it
- Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out
- Step 12 - As a result of the spiritual awakening of these steps, tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs
In AA groups I find an approach from which we, as a church, have much to learn. I am not alone in this discovery. In his book 12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee, John Fischer writes, “I am [more] interested in borrowing the recovery model as a way of unmasking, and potentially freeing us from, the intoxication of spiritual pride and prejudice that continually lures believers away from the grace, gratitude, and life of astonishment that the Spirit of God desires for us.”
In Church: Why Bother? author Philip Yancey recounts how a friend’s involvement in AA brought literal salvation. He writes, “From my friend’s midnight church (AA) I learned the need for humility, total honesty, and radical dependence—on God and on a community of compassionate friends. As I thought about it, these qualities seemed exactly what Jesus had in mind when he founded his church.”
There is great freedom to be found in acknowledging our failures and the areas in which we are frail, weak and powerless. Let us never forget that we are the “sick” and the “sinners” to whom Christ calls when he says, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.”
Jennifer Way is a grateful, recovering evangelical. She is currently preparing for six months of teaching in Tanzania with Village Schools International.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register