MISSION STATEMENT

Educating Clergy, Faith Communities and Caregivers About Addiction

Offering the hope of recovery to the addicted, and to those who love them.

Our Mission

The Center of Addiction & Faith works to awaken faith communities to be more fully places of welcome and healing for persons with addiction and those who love them.

The Center of Addiction & Faith is a cross-cultural, inter-faith network sought out and supported by faith communities, mental health and addiction experts, religiously-inclined people who seek recovery from addiction, and change agents, including legislators and philanthropists.

Our vision is a world of human and institutional flourishing that inches closer toward grace and community, away from the brokenness and isolation imposed by addiction and exacerbated by uninformed theology and scapegoat politics. The building blocks of that household are: Faith, Science, Justice and Compassion.

Our Vision

Our vision is a world of human and institutional flourishing that inches closer toward grace and community, away from the brokenness and isolation imposed by addiction and exacerbated by uninformed theology and scapegoat politics. The building blocks of that household are: Faith, Science, Justice and Compassion.

Our Goals and Objectives

We aim to do our work with the support of a few principles. We do not live out these principles perfectly. We simply strive to do the best we can in all that we undertake.

• Theological Humility
• Addiction as Science, Not Morality
• Authenticity, Vulnerability and Transformation
• Treatment Not Punishment
• Destigmatizing Our Language

• Theological Humility

Theological humility begins with acknowledgement of our brokenness and limitations and is open to new ideas and new ways to think about God.  Ultimately, humility is understanding that our sole purpose and calling in life is to use ourselves and all that God has given us. As the language of the 12 steps puts it: being of maximum service to God and to our fellows. This is achieved by elevating others, by encouraging them, lifting them up. We accept that nobody fully understands God, and our theologies can only scratch the surface of comprehension.

• Addiction as Science, Not Morality

Despite all we have learned, society and faith communities continue to treat the issue of addiction with unfair stigma – addiction is bad – and judgement – you brought this on yourself; and thus shame – you are bad. We do not do this in our culture if someone has cancer or a brain tumor or requires insulin for diabetes. When in fact, addiction is also disease with a physiological pathology, the nature of which is to demand more of what actually causes trouble for or in the body.

The beginning of the healing process begins with this understanding. Until we accept the science of addiction, we will continue to treat the various symptoms instead of the underlying problem, which is often an unresolved traumatic wound to the psyche. The Center of Addiction and Faith is committed to promoting the facts about addiction through the best and most current research in addiction studies. To this end, we believe that many modalities contribute to healing and that there is no one “right” way to recover.

We also believe that every single living soul is a child of God, regardless of race, color, creed, belief and illness. A loving creator known by many names and understandings has made us beings to “be” the best we can be in this lifetime and throughout eternity. God mourns when that which God has created mourns; God rejoices when creation rejoices.

• Authenticity, Vulnerability and Transformation

“I am not being flippant when I say that all of us suffer from addiction. Nor am I reducing the meaning of addiction. I mean in all truth that the psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged addiction are actively at work within every human being.” 

 — the late Dr. Gerald May, psychiatrist and theologian

We are all weak. We all struggle. It is human nature to be flawed and to break. It is also human nature to hide our brokenness! It is God’s nature to shine light on brokenness and enact healing. There is no need to hide from something normal. We are free to emerge, transformed by grace. Only with God’s help (however we understand God), is our strength made perfect in weakness. We see it throughout scripture, and we see it today in our modern stories. And we carry hope with us to God’s other children when we describe what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now.

We realize that by being open and authentic—and inviting others to be the same—that there is no more pretending or hypocrisy, which are forms of dishonesty and manipulation.

• Treatment Not Punishment

Compassion is the natural response and state of those living in the grace of God’s unconditional love. When we are authentic and vulnerable, we are more able to show compassion and understanding. From this love comes great levels of compassion and understanding, which is a true gift to those who live in shame and fear, for whatever reason.

We would never punish our loved ones for getting cancer or diabetes. Yet our nation’s War on Drugs pursues punishment rather than treatment as a response to addiction and drug use. It is the responsibility of advocates, especially people of faith, to promote a different approach.

The single most prominent national response to drug use and addiction has been a failed War on Drugs, implemented in 1971, to combat illegal drug use by greatly increasing penalties, enforcement, and incarceration for drug offenders. This tragic effort has been based on premises that have no discernible relation to addiction and its causes. It has destroyed countless lives for no recognizable purpose, at a cost of over $1 trillion since 2001. 

Simultaneously, the War on Drugs has led to the mass incarceration of African-American and Latino individuals, and has militarized police departments in cities and towns across the country. It has also failed to reduce drug use. 

Meanwhile, treatment for addiction remains a luxury for the rich. State hospitals are egregiously underfunded and beds are limited for people with mental-health emergencies. Those with ongoing mental-health difficulty requiring psychiatric treatment often also have problems with addiction, and they have few places to turn.

• Destigmatizing Our Language

Little progress has been made in removing the stigma around substance use disorders. People with addiction continue to be blamed for their disease. Even though medicine long ago reached a consensus that addiction is a complex brain disorder with behavioral components, the public, including the Church, and even many in healthcare and the justice system often continue to view it as a result of moral weakness and flawed character.

Stigma on the part of healthcare providers who tacitly see a patient’s drug or alcohol problem as their own fault leads to substandard care or even to rejecting individuals seeking treatment. People showing signs of acute intoxication or withdrawal symptoms are sometimes expelled from emergency rooms by staff fearful of their behavior or assuming they are only seeking drugs. People with addiction internalize this stigma, feeling shame, and refuse to seek treatment as a result.

To do our part in reducing stigma, we need language that’s unified. The Recovery Research Institute has published an A to Z list of terms, their level of provoking stigma and preferable terms to use. It will take time for us to incorporate these terms into our vocabulary, but we must be part of the change we seek. https://www.recoveryanswers.org/addiction-ary/