When Gary first began attending Woodland Hills he was just fine sitting in the back, enjoying the music. Then one Sunday he decided to come to the front for prayer. During that conversation, the prayer minister asked him, “What do you do on Thursday nights?” Gary said, “I got a feeling you’re going to tell me!” And that was how Gary ended up at Woodland’s Thursday night recovery support group, which he has now been helping facilitate for over a decade!
“Recovery in Christ” is a hybrid group for people to walk together in their recovery journeys, and meets on Thursdays at 6:30pm. It’s called “Recovery in Christ” because Jesus is at the center of the process. Gary says, “We go through the 12 steps, and we invite Jesus into that. So we heal internally and externally, we pray, listen to music and meditate, and we use scriptures as guideposts. Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous are very scripted because all the prayers are already laid out and the time slots already filled, but I try to keep it experiential. I just let the Holy Spirit move.”
Because the group is hybrid, people from all over the country, and even internationally, have joined. Pat is a podrishioner participant who shared his experience with us.
“I’ve been in recovery for a long time and when a group I was in ended, I was looking for something else. My wife told me about Greg Boyd and we started listening to the services. I joined a Gathering Group and met a guy who was in recovery who connected me with Gary, so I started to Zoom in. It’s really helpful to me to have a faith-based meeting. There’s a lot of different types of spirituality in recovery but I have this belief in a loving God that I really found in attending groups like Woodland’s. I go to a lot of kinds of meetings, but not one like this. The big difference is that I can talk about God specifically and deeply in this meeting.”
Woodland’s Recovery in Christ group is open to others beyond those in recovery from drugs and alcohol, whether they are struggling with sexual addictions, eating disorders, anxiety issues, gambling, codependency or something else.
Pat sees that variety as a strength. “If I’m sitting next to someone with an eating disorder, then that tears down a little bit of my judgment about people with eating disorders or people that are doing something else that I don’t really have any experience with or don’t understand. What I can understand is they’re in recovery and they’re trying to practice the same principles that I am and apply them to their issue.”
Sometimes just showing up can be a challenge, and Pat knows what it’s like to overcome that. “I was very cynical and very paranoid when I got into recovery. You go in there thinking, ‘I’m the only one with this problem and everybody else has it together.’ Or, ‘I don’t want to give too much information so they know anything about me and I’ll just sit there and listen.’ And all of a sudden you hear somebody talking so honestly—it’s frightening in the beginning how honest people are. You don’t have to bare your soul like that, but the process just seems to encourage people to be honest. When I heard things that I could identify with, that gave me the motivation to come back and to believe that I could try this myself. I thought that if it worked for them, it could work for me, and I could get out of my own little world of dysfunction and get healthy. This addiction was a disease that I had, and these people had found a solution for themselves and were willing to give it away to me.”
Gary encourages anyone considering Recovery in Christ to give it a shot. “It’s not a group you need to sign up for or commit to. You don’t have to be sober, you can try it out and go from there. We have people just starting out or people like Pat who have been doing this a long time, and everything in between. I believe that the Spirit sends people to the group at just the right time. I’ve walked with hundreds of people who have come through the group. Some stay, some go. We’ve had as many as 25 people and as little as two, yet as Jesus says ‘where two or more are gathered….’ It takes all the courage someone can muster to admit that this is a problem, and getting sober is hard, so this is not something we take lightly. But it can be a beautiful thing. One woman said, ‘You’ve accepted me into this group with unconditional love, and I didn’t plan on that.’ That’s it in a nutshell: we set out to show God’s unconditional love to people at a time when they need it the most.
Thank you Gary and Pat for your courage, humility and compassion.
If you are interested in Recovery in Christ, contact Gary at gbeste@whchurch.org,. For other support group information, visit our Healing Well page.
