The twelve step program of Alcoholics Anonymous is considered to be the most effective recovery program in the world.  Extensively used in the United States, it is also found pervasively in alcoholism riddled countries like the Russia Republic.  It has a well deserved reputation.  In fact, AA Recovery has become the model for a huge variety of other programs (recovery from sex to chocolate).

The Becoming What God Intended Ministries (BWGI) approach that emphasizes the Christian Trinity and the Christian’s identity in Christ is not a substitute for the AA Recovery program.  BWGI does have something of great importance for the Christian recovery movement that can certainly supplement the AA approach.

The recovery movement is powerful because it assaults two of the great weapons of addiction: relational isolation (loneliness) and the availability of the great variety of addictions.  By placing the addict in a group and supplying a sponsor, the movement assaults the social isolation that addiction creates, and it also does an effective job of restructuring the life so that the opportunities to obtain the addictive material is greatly diminished.  Furthermore, it forces the addicted individual to openly and repeatedly confess the addiction, “Hi, I’m Joe; I am an alcoholic.”  All of this can be very helpful.  The goal of the AA program is the restructuring of the life and of the heart.

Becoming What God Intended Ministries is particularly dedicated to the restructuring or actually the trans-formation of the heart.  Countless numbers of people have happily shared how the material has been profoundly affecting to them.  They have experienced transformation in the inner life.  The lectures, the books, tapes and video material, and counseling all are directed to that aim.

BWGI trains the heart to:

• Relate to God as a Father instead of remaining isolated

• Live from the New Identity in Christ, and not from the addiction identity

• Use the imagination the way God intended

• Manage moods and desires instead of being drowned in them

• Become an observer of compulsive temptations instead of a slave to them

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Addiction and its behaviors create a powerful com-pulsive mindset within an atmosphere of anticipation, moods, and self-absorption.  BWGI material is designed to attack that compulsivity by helping the person to create a completely different approach to the inner life.

The recovery movement restructures the life and relationships and several of the steps deal with the inner life, but BWGI specializes in helping people with the life of the heart so that the dreadful scourge of compulsion can be nullified and replaced by the Fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, and peace).

A person named Janie, who has struggled with alcohol and prescription drug addiction, described the benefits of the recovery group and the BWGI small group:

“I was blessed to be in a bible study group of women to whom I could be honest and open and who held me accountable to dealing with my addiction issues.  And I joined a Christian recovery group which I still attend. The third thing was at that time we joined a small group fellowship where we began studying Becoming What God Intended.  After struggling for about a year, I finally was able to see past my problem with sub-stances and get my focus on being loved by God.”

Note that her sense of being loved by God came out of the BWGI material.

She went on to answer why the BWGI material was so important in the recovery process:

“Because I felt like such a miserable failure in life, I thought for sure God had turned His back on me . . . Once I got my focus off the sin, I was able to work through a relationship with God.  I realized that my identity wasn’t as a substance abuser - it was as a child of God.  Then freedom just became a normal progression.”

BWGI Counseling and materials can be a powerful supplement to the Recovery experience!  As the Recovery Movement works on reconstructing the life, our materials, small groups, and counselors work on reconstructing the heart.