COMMENTARY: Substance Abuse and the Conspiracy of Silence

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.) (UNDATED) “I believe a spiritual awakening will take […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) “I believe a spiritual awakening will take place in the recovery community that sweeps the world and influences the traditional church,” says the Rev. Gerald Dunaway in a recent issue of Christianity Today.


Dunaway, a recovering alcoholic who last year founded New Freedom Fellowship, a church for recovering substance abusers, argues that the traditional church has little understanding of the dynamics of addiction.

Most churches, he says, preach that all the alcoholic or drug addict needs for complete recovery is to be saved. Yet, for Dunaway, whose need for alcohol once caused him to drink a fifth of Scotch a day, “that was not true. I had Jesus.”

To the contrary, say Dunaway and other recovery-church pastors, recovery, like sanctification, is a process by which the addict is “conformed” into the image of Jesus.

That most churches are ill-equipped to minister to the needs of substance abusers is unconscionable, according to pollster George Gallup Jr. Gallup, the founder and chairman of the Princeton-based George H. Gallup International Institute, says that 60 percent of the public can be found in church or another faith community in a given month, with 80 percent attending at least once a year. Thus, according to Gallup, the clergy are in the best position to both educate the public about addiction and serve the needs of the addicted.

To this end, the Gallup Institute, in collaboration with the Recovery Institute of San Francisco and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, recently convened a three-day conference, “Healing a Soul Sickness,” on alcoholism, addiction and the church at Princeton Theological Seminary. The conference was developed, according to Gallup, based on a three-fold premise.

First, alcohol and other addictive substances are “devastating our country and its families.” Second, the clergy are in the best position to address this issue because of their ongoing relationship with the public. Third, clergy in general have very little training in this area although they desire to help.

The conference featured 10 workshops addressing a broad range of subjects, including an overview of the disease of addiction and how it affects women, children, families and different ethnic groups. Other workshops discussed the need for congregational assistance programs and partnerships between the church and the workplace. The keynote speaker was Gerald May, a noted psychiatrist and author of “Addiction and Grace.”


Among the more than 100 people in attendance were many who were in recovery themselves. Some told horrific stories of domestic violence and child sexual abuse in combination with, or as a result of, substance abuse. One couple I spoke with shared quite candidly about their years of mutual co-dependency, substance abuse and self-loathing. Now, several years into their respective recoveries, they are happily married and, with the support of their pastor, are developing a ministry in their church to people with similar backgrounds.

For Gallup, who, with his wife, Kingsley, spearheaded the conference, the positive response to the conference was heartening if not completely satisfying. While pleased with the enthusiasm of the conferees, the Gallups were discouraged that many of the churches and seminaries they invited to the conference failed to respond. Thus, they cannot shake the feeling that at the conference they were preaching to the choir.

Nor, for that matter, can I. As I have previously suggested, there remains within much of the church a conspiracy of silence regarding the dysfunctions that affect our communities. To the degree that churches fail to function as part of the solution, they, in a de facto sense, become part of the problem.

Thankfully, there are people like Gerald Dunaway and the Gallup conferees, many of whom have experienced God’s grace in their own addiction and are now agents of that grace to others. The kingdom of God is made up of persons such as these.

Pastors, are you listening?

DEA END ATCHISON

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