Partnerships In Recovery
You don't have to tread into the healing journey alone. Together, we can heal the holes and build a life filled with hope and purpose. In today's conversation, Fr. Jim met with Drew Brook, the director of Faith Partners, a surprise gathering that offered great insight and understanding of how we all work and minister together to heal a hurting heart. Drew sheds light on the crucial role faith-based communities can play in addiction recovery. Through Faith Partners' training programs, people within your congregation gain the knowledge and skills to create a support system for those battling addiction. The path to recovery may not be easy, but you don't have to walk it alone. Join Drew Brook and discover the transformative power of faith and community in healing the "hole in the soul."
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Listen to the podcast here
Partnerships In Recovery
Can I just share that right out of the blue, we're walking home or walking out the door, and this young man walked in the door by the name of Drew Brooks, the Executive Director for Faith Partners, throughout the country is my understanding. All of a sudden I said, hey Drew, with John Curtis, and I said, “Do you want to do a podcast? Let's sit down.”
Drew and I have been sitting here talking about faith and our experiences. We're just going to sit and talk about faith and recovery and try to learn what Drew does in our lives of trying to heal the hole in the soul of people's lives, if I may be as bold. That's what we're doing here at The Retreat at Serenity Sit Down in Minnesota. Drew, tell me what you do.
The Executive Director Of Faith Partners
As Executive Director, I still do a lot of training and we train around the country. There was a study done in 2001 by Joseph Califano. What they discovered was that 94% of clergy thought this issue was important but only 12% had any education about it. We wanted to fill that gap and the two ways that we fill that gap. And we've been around before then, but it's to train clergy. They have some understanding of addiction, substance use disorders, and mental health issues as co-occurring experiences. Our main focus is that we don't want to overburden clergy. They're the gatekeepers but they can't do it all. They already have way too much on their plate so we train laypeople to do this ministry. Generally, some people have been touched by any of these issues that we just mentioned and they have a heart for it.
Some of the best team members have a heart for it, they are on their healing journey, and they're teachable. Those are the characteristics we're looking for but we train them to do awareness, education, and recovery support. Within their congregation and this is interesting, what we suggest is they take the basement ministry and bring it to the sanctuary. Then take the sanctuary ministry and bring it to the community.
What tends to happen sometimes is they get excited in the basement ministry that they want to go to the community, but they don't work to clean their own house or prepare their own house. People will get excited about what they hear and they come to their congregation and the congregation is ill-prepared to receive them. That's what we do, we help prepare them.
If we could just help the faith community, the congregation. That will trickle on in many ways but those of us in recovery and understand addiction, we want to avoid it sometimes. It's better not to look at my own house, but look at somebody else's house. That might be exactly what you're talking about, Drew.
Exactly. I'm in a long-term recovery, and I did not go into treatment, but I've been in many rooms over the years in 12-step groups. It's interesting because only the first step speaks about the disease. The other 11 is getting into the right relationship with God, with yourself, and with others. We all can learn from that.
Walking through the 12 steps, I would say in six words, you may have heard that. Trust God. Find out God, your higher power, God of our understanding. Clean house. Deal with our own stuff. Our hurts, our pains, our hunger, and then the most important thing that we must do in many ways is to help others. To bring it to serve others. Once you serve others, you end up serving yourself and our God all at the same time. Tell me a little bit about the curriculum, if you would.
Partnerships In Recovery
Generally, we work in three different ways. One is we've done it in distance learning. We've done it with a network of congregations or we've done it on a statewide level, but generally on a community level. In the first part of it, I use a building analogy. It's a series of three trainings, and then we do quarterly network meetings to develop the collaborative efforts between the congregations. It just has a greater impact by doing that. The first training is just what are the blueprints of this model, and what are some of the tools to build congregational support. Then the second, and that's the leadership training, the team training is pouring the foundation, just getting a certain amount of knowledge and understanding of the issue. Some people went to treatment, why aren't they cured?
They don't realize that some people have setbacks and that's part of the process. Then we frame up the walls and we look at five areas in this ministry. One is Prevention, Early Intervention, Recovery Support, Referral Assistance, and Advocacy. There are ministry points along the whole continuum. Congregations will take on what the greatest need is, what the congregation is receptive to, what the capacity of the team is, and what's the missional focus of the congregation.
Those four things help move them along and then in about six months after the team training, we do what we call a Skills Training. That is looking at a building inspection. How are things going? What's working? What's not? What have you learned? What can you share with the other congregation sitting in the room and build on that? That program sharing, that excitement, and how we've saved lives and strengthened families and all of it.
That's great. Do you have a relationship when you go to a congregation, whatever it be, interdenominationally? Do you go to the local first or do you go to a bishop or hierarchical status, Catholic bishop who's a head of his diocese or Lutheran bishop, his or her diocese, episcopal? Do you get permission from them and then it will trickle down or do you begin it on the floor and then bring it up?
It's great to have a relationship when you go to a congregation.
We have done it all of those ways. Sometimes it's a congregation that wants to see something happen in their community. Sometimes it's an agency that has some money from the federal or state government, and they say, “We want to engage the faith community.” They're one of the most powerful sectors of the community, but we don't tap into them. They're underused and they're probably one of the most powerful. Being in recovery for over 40 years, I have yet to find somebody who has long-term recovery that doesn't have a spiritual component as part of their recovery.
The faith community has a huge place to play in that. Sometimes we were endorsed by the United Methodist Church, we've been endorsed by the Presbyterian Church, we've worked at a Diocesan level, we've worked in the Episcopal Church, we've worked with the Unitarian Universalist Association on a national level. We've worked with all different levels and adjudicatories, in the different regional areas, or it's been an agency that wants us to work with a locality. That's all of it.
A lot of referrals. Do you work with hospitals? Hospitals that have chaplains. I’ve been an administrator in the hospital system. We had chaplains all over the place that we did train or they would have to do a thing called CPE. You may know of that but then to be able to help them find the resources within the community. I think that's always the key, which is to find the resources within the community that you can refer out to and I'm certain that with what you do, but have you worked with the hospitals and their chaplains?
Not specifically, but oftentimes when we do clergy training, chaplains will come. They get that clinical pastoral education. They will come and be a part of our clergy training and then they'll say, “God, why aren't we doing this in our parish or our congregation?” They become a conduit to start doing this in the localities. That is really what we're looking at doing, to train a team of people. This is the analogy we use if you would imagine a motivated person in a family where there's addiction.
It doesn't have to be the person who has the qualifier or the issue that necessarily is the first person. It's the person who's the most motivated. They go out and they maybe go to an Al-Anon meeting and start to go to that and they start developing self-care skills and healthy boundaries, coping skills, and whatnot. They come back to that family system and it changes the dynamic of the family system.
That's what these teams are. The teams go off, get some education, come back to the congregation and they change the culture in the congregation so people can feel safe. Our underlying rule is to develop a safe place to have the conversation and to meet people where they are in their experience and understanding. That's what we train these people to do so then they can listen and get them the help that they need. We're not training them to become counselors.
Heal The Hole In The Soul
No, you're just trying to be the appropriate referral source. What you do is we do that in our 12-step work is an open mind to become more aware, have a compassionate heart, to have a sense the word compassion means to walk with but what you do then is you develop an imaginative spirit to help people find out where to go and how to offer to heal the hole in the soul in some ways.
I love the idea of the hole in the soul. I used that when I was introduced to it. It was from Addiction and Grace from May. We used to talk about this God-sized hole. It's the idea that I want to love and I want to be loved. We're trying to fill that hole and sometimes we find love in all the wrong places. What I've learned through my recovery is the importance of what we often fill up that hole with materialism, getting busy, or addictions. What I've learned is we need to go in the hole and that's where we meet God. That's when we're most vulnerable. We've come to the end of ourselves and we're no longer, “I can do it on my own. I need help.” That whole world picture for me has great significance.
We often fill the hole with materialism, getting busy, and addictions. We need to go in the hole to meet God.
How many years have you been doing this then, Drew?
I started my recovery in 1980. I went through counselor training at Hazelden in 1983. I've been working either in treatment or health promotion services or prevention or public health in the last 25 years, strictly with the faith community.
It's been fed your soul too, hasn't it?
John and I, that's one of the things we just said. Here we are, we're men with gray hair. I had seen him maybe a couple of times, but I hadn't seen him for 40 years. We've met a couple of times, but this is probably the third or fourth time that we've seen each other and reconnected. I said, “Here we are, men with gray hair and we still have a heart for this.” I can't imagine doing anything else, to be honest with you, but it's good to have your contemporaries doing it as well and supporting that.
Do you know what? I often say that I'm in the fourth quarter of life, but not in a red zone but our joy is to be able to bring it to the next generation too. Is to walk with them, to help them know that. You and I may have gotten beat up, pushed down, and fallen down time and time again, but you keep getting back up because of a sense of faith and hope in who we are and how we can pass that on.
For me, a big piece of this is giving back, as we would say in the 12-step program, but it's also a personal mission I have. I want the church to be relevant, and I see people leaving the church because my belief is they don't feel it's relevant. It's not meeting them in their need. You either can leave the church or you can equip the church to meet people in their needs. That's the path I've chosen.
Thank you. It is right. How do you make it relevant as clergy within a community? As I just mentioned, 71 nieces and nephews, but no children, and watching them walk in and walk out but have no sense of community. They love the neighborhood. They love to work at the food pantry sometimes. All my nieces and nephews are involved, but in terms of a faith community, that's not connected. It's about relevance. You're spot on. How do you make that relevant?
This is what I mean, the pandemic killed several congregations. They’ve reduced their size and all that. It's not that people are leaving the faith community, but they're going to other communities. A place where they have a sense of identity, a sense of belonging, and a sense of purpose. That's what we need. I think in many faith communities we have that, but some need to develop that further.
That's what we do in our 12-step recovery programs. You use the sense of purpose, identity, and community.
Faith And Acceptance
That's another piece that we talk about. The faith community is, you've made a mistake, you feel guilty, and you ask for forgiveness. That's not necessarily the need for a person who's in recovery. They don't necessarily feel guilt or feel like they've made mistakes. They know they've made mistakes, but they feel they are the mistake. Instead of feeling guilty, they feel shame. The remedy of shame is not forgiveness. The remedy of shame is acceptance. How do we create a climate within the congregation that's accepting of people in their brokenness? The people that haven't experienced any brokenness just haven't lived long enough.
I share with folks who sometimes struggle to understand the scriptures in some way. Go to Paul, 17 and 18. Maybe you would say that Paul had either addiction or mental health issues because he says it very simply, “Why do I do the things that I don't want to do?” Welcome to Jimmy's life. I did things that I didn't want to do time and time again, struggling with addiction or mental health, but then in the first line of Romans 8, it says, “This I know, there's no condemnation of Christ Jesus or some people would say God.” Do you know what I mean? There's no condemnation. I beat up myself more than anybody else as far as I'm concerned.
I think I'm part of that same club.
Welcome to that club. We beat ourselves up more than anyone. You don't like me lying. It's a mile and a half long and you're at the end of it.
It's interesting. This is one of the things I struggled with early on in recovery. The greatest commandment is to love your God and to love your neighbor as yourself. I'm thinking, “I'm filled with self-loathing. Is that the way I want to treat my neighbor?” I began to realize that I needed to have people around me who love me, so I can begin to love myself. That's what the faith community can be for people. That's what we try to breathe into these ministries.
Faith Partners: I needed people around me who loved me so I could begin to love myself. And that's what the faith community can be for people.
The word breath, often in Judeo-Christian context, is the word Rua. To all of us listening to this, as well as you and I, Drew, breathe in and out, and have relationships. It's all about having relationships. Thanks, Drew.
When I walked through the door, I hadn't planned to do this, but this is a wonderful opportunity. Thank you.
It's a delight. Again, this is Serenity Sit Down with Drew Brooks, who is the executive director of Faith Partners, which is around the country.
We are around the country. We've trained in about 30 different states and worked with probably 24 to 25 different faith traditions.
Wow, that's great. Serenity Sit Down, presented by The Retreat in Wayzata, Minnesota. I'm your host, Father Jim, being with Drew. If you or your loved one is struggling with addiction, there is hope, and The Retreat can help, as well as Faith Partners. If you want to, you can go to their website.
It's Faith-Partners.org.
To find out more about Faith Partners and Drew Brooks as well as The Retreat in Wayzata, Minnesota, because there is hope, there is joy, and recovery, and all are welcomed into it. Thank you, Drew, for being here. It is just an honor to have met you 45 minutes ago. I didn't have a clue who you were nor you, me.
That's right. I'm blessed.
I'm blessed too. Thank you, my brother. Have a great day.
Important Links:
Drew Brooks - LinkedIn