Worshiping Along the Way to Recovery

Rev. Tom Kragt opened the Sunday-evening Faith and Spirituality service at Evergreen Ministries in Hudsonville, Mich., by leaning into the microphone and describing in a few words who he is.

“Hey, everyone, I’m Tom, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Many of the people seated in chairs in the room serving as a sanctuary replied,  “Hi, Tom!”

A number of those attending are also alcoholics, drug addicts, or persons addicted to other things such as gambling or overeating.

“Let’s get this thing going tonight with the Serenity Prayer,” said Kragt, pastor congregational life and recovery at Evergreen, a large church that was built several years ago amid cornfields in West Michigan.

Standing by their seats, people followed the pastor’s lead and said, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Repeated in 12-step meetings nearly everywhere, the Serenity Prayer traces its history back to 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It is noteworthy in its practical approach, making clear a person’s position in the world, and, among other things, saying that with courage you can change some things in and about yourself, and only with God’s help and wisdom.

But the evening service at Evergreen is not a 12-step meeting such as those run by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Rather, it is a weekly Sunday-evening time for persons with addiction concerns and the people who love them. Together, they meet, sing, pray, and listen as Kragt and others link the Christian gospel with recovery.

This recovery ministry mirrors in many ways the mission of Evergreen Ministries since its founding in the early 1990s with the help of Christian Reformed Home Missions (now part of Resonate Global Mission).

“We have always been a church that opened itself to the broken and the lost, to those people on the edges who were familiar with church, who knew the language but no longer could find a place for themselves in a church,” said Rev. Larry Doornbos, who planted the church and has helped to guide it as a ministry for people who feel forgotten and for those seeking a more contemporary style of worship and messages with everyday applications.

“I got to know Tom pretty well when he started attending here more than 20 years ago,” said Doornbos. “In hearing his story, I knew we had a place in ministry for him — certainly those with addictions, especially in the church, back then and even now, often can’t find a church where they feel they fit in.”

Especially in its recovery ministry, the idea is for Evergreen members to have open hearts and open arms to welcome people who have wandered and stumbled and hit bottom in the world. Broken and depleted, they often want to find their way back to a better way of living.

“It is awesome to see those people who are hurt and ignored and to see them accepted and become outstanding members of our church,” said Donna Sills, who regularly attends the evening service with her husband, Don, to show support for the ministry.

At the core, people find not only acceptance but grace at this church, once on the outskirts of Hudsonville, Mich., and now surrounded by subdivisions.

Whether someone is recovering from an addiction, trying to find their way out of a divorce, or hurting from a bad experience at another church, what is evident here, coming from imperfect people trying to find a better way, is grace — like that shown by the father of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).

“The power of God’s love is clearly shown in this story that Jesus told,” Kragt said the recovery service sermon.

The father’s love shown to the lost son in this story is incredible, given the tribal Middle Eastern culture in which it was set. Populated by close-knit families run by patriarchs, it would have been unthinkable for a son to come right out, as did the prodigal son, to ask for his inheritance.

“Those who listened to this story must have been shocked to hear how shamefully he was dishonoring his father,” said Kragt. “They would have expected the father to explode, but the father didn’t explode. He let his son go,” giving him his share of the inheritance to do with as he wished.

The son went off to a “distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living,” only to end up working, as severe famine covered the land, for “a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs’’ (Luke 15:13-15). It turns out the pigs ate better than he did.

Realizing just how far he had fallen, the son, who now had nothing, decided to return home to plead with his father to take him back and make him one of his servants so he could have something to eat.

But when his father sees him from far off, he runs out to welcome his son home. “This is Jesus’ posture to us — acceptance and love,” said Kragt.

“We are all deeply loved by God; you can’t make God love you more than he already does. God is there waiting for you to grab his hand and to begin this beautiful journey through the 12 steps.”

Several of the people listening to Kragt know what it is like to end up covered with filth, desperate, badly in need of a drink or a drug and yet wanting to quit. Many, like Don, know what it is like to end up in the far country of drunkenness with seemingly no place to turn. Their drinking led them down dark alleys they couldn’t escape.

After years of drinking, Don landed in a recovery program in Chicago. The program asked people to believe in a higher power but didn’t define that power.

Then, on a family visit a few years ago to Hudsonville, Don attended Evergreen. At first, he didn’t like how the church connected recovery with Jesus Christ. But he got over that and, when his family moved here, he joined the church and has become part of the recovery ministry.

“Being here now, helping out with the service, and being part of the community helps me have a bigger purpose and a direct impact on people who come here for healing,” Don said after the service. “I know people want to correct their mistakes. This ministry is a perfect gateway for them to do that. They are able to see faith at work and kindness and forgiveness and love.”

After the recovery service, which runs from fall through spring each year, Kragt sat down in the Evergreen cafeteria area as others ate a picnic dinner at nearby tables. In a few minutes, they would attend a meeting dealing with the overall topic of addiction. And this was open to everyone, since it was designed by the church and not by AA.

AA is a well-known organization that the church endorses and strongly encourages people to join and attend for help with recovery. And unlike many evangelical churches that use Celebrate Recovery, a Christian-based approach to the 12 steps, Evergreen wants to remain open to all who have questions and yet not to direct them on a spiritual path, unless they want to explore faith in Christ.

“We want to be a church for God’s world, for all people of all places, and our recovery ministry reflects us,” said Kragt, who supports and is a board member of National Association for Christian Recovery, a clearing house for material on recovery.

More than 20 years ago, Kragt lost his job at a Reformed Church in America congregation because of his drinking and landed at a recovery center in Grand Rapids, Mich. Before that, he said, he “had danced around the edges of recovery.” Staying in the recovery center, he learned “the painful lesson that addiction was a powerful foe and that [he] needed to take recovery seriously.”

Kragt said he came to see that even though he’d been a pastor, he had not taken the first three of the 12 steps. He had not admitted, as the first step states, that he was “powerless over alcohol” and that his life was unmanageable. Nor, as the second step says, had he come to believe that “a power greater” than himself could restore him to sanity. He also hadn’t, as the third steps asks, turned his “will and life over to the care of a higher power” — in his case Jesus.

After taking those steps, he delved into the rest, which all demand humility and a deep willingness to change, often brought on by the desperation of alcohol addiction.

Kragt considers the steps as a to-do list that he has to keep going over and working at, but not a theology. His belief is in God as defined by creeds and confessions, and, he says, that fits comfortably in how he works with Evergreen’s recovery program. “I see the steps as helping me in the process of sanctification,” he said.

Once he got sober, Kragt worked for a time as a counselor at the Grand Rapids treatment center where he had been a patient. Meanwhile, he started attending Evergreen and was “very happy being an unconcerned layperson trying to figure out this recovery thing” when he began meeting with Doornbos and was offered a job.

He eventually began his work in this recovery ministry, and he started the recovery service several years ago.

Over the years, many people have come to the recovery service, hurting and alone, with no belief in God whatsoever, and Kragt has seen them turn around. He has seen them come to faith, not as an event, but as a process, “as a series of things that bring our faith to fruition.”

They have often turned, Kragt said, to Philippians 2:1-4 as a guide: “Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”

“That passage has echoes of the 12 steps, and we try to help flesh that [passage] out,” said Kragt. “We want to make practical followers of Jesus. Our goal has always been outreach.”