Addiction (Pt. 1): Fear Not
It was on 22 April 2014 that journalist, presenter and public speaker, Lauren Windle got clean and sober from a cocaine and alcohol addiction, before becoming a Christian five days later.
We're delighted to have Lauren writing a four-part mini-series on addiction for Jubilee+ (first post below).
-----
Churches are afraid of addicts. There’s a feeling that if we start being proactive about welcoming them in, running support programmes and advertising ourselves as ‘recovery friendly’, we risk opening our doors to swathes of zombie-like heroin users rocking up on a Sunday with needles hanging out of their arms.
This isn’t the case. Addicts are already filling the pews, the Church just doesn’t know it.
When I set up a Bible-based recovery course in West London, I reached out to all the church leaders in the area. I wanted to tell them about the programme and encourage them to advertise it to their parishioners. Several times the message I got was: “Lovely idea, but we don’t have that problem here.”
Here’s the news I am forced to break regularly: your church is full of addicts. There are various different stats, facts and figures on this – but I would say it’s likely that ten per cent of the congregation you’re a part of, struggle with an active addiction.
For some that will be alcohol or other substances, some may be consumed by gambling or gaming. There’ll be people with eating disorders and food addictions and you can pretty much guarantee you have an alarming number of pornography addicts.
Addiction is the great leveller. An addict wears grubby clothes that haven’t been washed in days and they wear suits from the finest tailors. They live in council estates and in country estates. They sit in Burnley Ladbrokes all day or in Monaco’s casinos all night. They look like the world’s most beautiful supermodels, and they look like anyone you pass on the street. They could be you, and they are definitely me.
But we are the same. We are all broken. Some people show signs of their brokenness and others hide it well. The great injustice is that, if someone is well presented, if they can communicate effectively about their addictive behaviours, we are far more open to supporting them. We need to challenge this feeling that some addicts are too messy to deal with. The people who are rough sleepers, the people who have co-morbid mental health battles, the people who don’t think, speak and relate like we do. Jesus wasn’t just there for those who made it easy.
Step one to welcoming in addicts is not to see it as outreach to a new community, but as extending the arms of your existing one. You’re not inviting in ‘the needy’ so that you can ‘do your bit’, but instead celebrating the diversity of God’s kingdom. You’re challenging the world’s attempt to build higher walls to keep individuals safe, by instead extending your tables to keep everyone included. There’s something refreshing about people who wear their hardship rather than doing their best to conceal it, we can learn so much from that honesty.
There’s a risk to opening up your doors every day and welcoming people in. The church is a place for the vulnerable to seek shelter and those in the addiction and recovery community are no different. Yes, we need to have the right safeguarding in place to protect ourselves, our congregation and anyone new joining, but Jesus didn’t avoid the lowly – and neither should we.
-----
Lauren Windle is a journalist, presenter and public speaker, published by Vogue, Marie Claire, Huffington Post, Red Magazine, Mail Online, The Sun Online, Fabulous Digital, The Star, Church Times and others. She also heads up the digital opinion page for Premier’s Woman Alive and presents a weekly show on dating app Salt’s YouTube channel. On 22 April 2014 she got clean and sober from a cocaine and alcohol addiction and became a Christian five days later. She has a master’s in Addiction Studies, runs a charity recovery course for people struggling with addiction and, in 2018, gave a TEDx Talk about her personal story of addiction and recovery. You can connect with Lauren @_lauren_celeste on Instagram and Twitter.
