What the Church Can Learn from Drug Addicts

Fresh Air host Terry Gross recently interviewed Tracey Helton Mitchell about her book The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin. In the 1990s Mitchell was strung out on black tar heroin, living on the streets as she sought various ways to get high. She was even featured in the HBO documentary The Dark End of the Street, which you can watch at the link at bottom of this post.

Today Mitchell is sober and, besides being an author, works as a treatment counselor, helping others get clean. A couple of things struck me from her Fresh Air interview:

• In the midst of her addiction, Mitchell didn't have one major epiphany and decide to get clean all of a sudden. She had many moments of clarity, realizing that she was on a path that would eventually lead to her own death. (About 65 minutes into the HBO documentary is one of the those moments.) After a while it wasn't so much that she wanted to be a junkie, but at some point in her life it was all she knew. After spending years in that lifestyle, and in a community of other users, she had grown accustomed to living that way. She said that she didn't get out because she could not imagine how to live clean. Using drugs was more than a means to getting high -- it was a way of life that had shaped and socialized her, one day at a time, over many years.

• At first Mitchell was scared of needles. This woman, who eventually injected herself with intravenous drugs every day of her life, needed other people to do that for her at the beginning. That's right: other, more experienced users held her down, calmed her, and distracted her from the needles until she could learn how to handle them on her own. It takes a community -- of sellers and other users -- to make and sustain an addict.

The church could learn a few lessons from this community described in Mitchell's book. People are addicted to all kinds of things, and it's not just drugs -- think of those who are trapped by dysfunctional families, caught up in a desire to earn more and more money, or who strive above all else for personal fulfillment and achievement. Folks in those situations often realize how they are being harmed -- they aren't always blind to the damage being done to their bodies and souls. But addictions often come with their own communities, and people stay trapped because they cannot imagine another way of living -- they don't know where to go or who they would associate with if they got out. Churches need to provide an alternative, teaching people another way of living, offering more than tips for having a good life. Congregations must learn how to surround addicts of all kinds with loving relationships and new livelihoods so they can break old habits.

In reality, churches make disciples using the same techniques that turn drug users into addicts. Worship and prayer are foreign practices to new Christians -- getting saved or baptized doesn't automatically teach someone how to navigate a church service or understand the Bible. That takes socialization -- someone sitting with a new believer to explain why we sing, stand, pray, and read what and when we do. As I've written before, worship is an acquired taste. One doesn't figure out how to do church or live in a covenant community by accident.

This Sunday I'm preaching on Saul's Damascus road experience as told in Acts 9. Even after this most dramatic of encounters with the risen Christ, Saul still needed help from other Christians. Ananias had to heal him and teach him about Jesus. The church then brought Saul into fellowship through baptism and communion. Then he spent several years in prayer and study before God sent him out to fulfill his calling to preach to the Gentiles. All of this shows that Saul had to be socialized into a new way of living, and that took the work of many other Christians.

Allow me to make a prediction. Churches that are around 100 years from now will be those kinds of congregations that have figured out how to re-socialize people into new communities -- that is, into congregations based on the love that is lived out at the communion table and that is based on the covenant relationship with God that we celebrate at baptisms. Now is the time to figure out how to demonstrate a new way of life for people who are trapped in addictions of all kinds.

1990s HBO documentary on heroin users