Personal Reactions

In the previous post, I pointed out that I have visited many meetings, where members claim that they would not know what to do if they did not have Alcoholics Anonymous.


Even a famous entrepreneur/engineer-turned-evangelist named Harold Hill (How to Live Like a King's Kid) first got sober through an AA meeting. He even credits the program with helping him to break free of his addiction to alcohol.


Yet even in the first few chapters of his motivational memoir How to Live Like a King's Kid Hill acknowledges that the sense of defilement which he felt within himself following his abstention from alcohol did not go away. In fact, he was even more miserable because as a sober man he had nothing to deal with the emptiness and guilt that plagued his life.


I found this account to describe many people in AA meetings, no matter what they share in their hour and a half sessions. I ran into one lady who still complained that she was sad about her life. She was still working at the same unfulfilling job, she was still very unfulfilled in her life. Some how, she took stock of what she did have in her life -- whatever that was, she did not tell me -- and went back to living her life "one day at a time."


A relative of mine went to one specific meeting for sixteen years. In the course of the past few years that she was going to these meetings, she noticed the same group of people who were not getting better. People came back, all right, but they were still sick, still empty, some were actually sicker!

The individuals who went to these meetings demonstrated no capacity to change beyond not "drinking". The palpable and apparent lack of victory, lack of growth, and even the escapes into other addictions, was too much for her-- and one day she just stormed out of the meetings and never went back!

I have endured similar experiences, having sat in on "Celebrate Recovery" programs in local churches, where men and women in the Body of Christ do not define themselves explicitly as "alcoholics", or "sexaholics," but instead moderate their identity with "I am a believer who struggles with. . " and they fill in  the blank with whatever hurt, habit, or hang-up they are struggling with.

Unfortunately, these individuals still define themselves by their problems or the problems of other people in the program. It was simply staggering and sad to listen to some visitors who would claim "I struggle with procrastination or unforgiveness. In Christ, every struggle ends, for in Him we are  more than conquerors (Romans 8: 37)
Another lady friend told me that she could not stand attending meetings where members bragged about killing people, raping and stealing, showing no remorse whatsoever for any wrongdoing which they had done in their lives and that they continued to do. Yet the finished every share with, "And I did not drink today!" as if that was the calling card that made them "Arrived" human beings, a startling and offensive phenomenon in the wake of core principles like "Humility."

This same arrogant, Pharisaical dysfunction was on full display in Celebrate Recovery meetings, where men would brag about or grouse about the illicit materials that they watched online. In many cases, men would share about their problems as if they were something to be proud of. If the goal of the program is "Recovery", then why are people glorying in their shame?


From the first few months of Celebrate Recovery, I felt that something was completely wrong with the whole program. Another friend of mine even started a program of his own in another local church, one which never attracted more than twelve visitors. He ultimately shut down the program, in part because no one was coming, in part because the head of the area chapter overseeing the Celebrate Recovery programs in the region refused to endorse his program on the regional website. The lack of integrity from "leadership", coupled with the regional leaders hollow admissions that he would be "in recovery" for the rest of his life, all hinted to my friend that this "Celebrate Recovery" program had nothing to celebrate and did not  tend toward recovery -- not one bit.

These and other personal reactions I will share at length in posts to come. But the sheer sinister and disturbing ironies of "no recovery" and "no peace" which characterize AA and other 12-step programs have enraged me enought to expose the truth of God's Word contrary to these empty, humanistic, and ultimately nefarious programs.