An Interview with Philip Dvorak on Recovery Church Movement

BY BECKY BARNETT

Pastor Philip Dvorak is a leader at the forefront of Christian addiction treatment in the United States and the founder of The Recovery Church Movement, a fast-growing group of churches that serve as a bridge between 12-Step Fellowships and the Church. Recovery Church is a transparent, encouraging, raw, and authentic place for those in recovery to find love, acceptance, and freedom from addiction through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ. “Recovery Church is not a perfect place for perfect people, but a healing ground for those who want to get well.”

BB: One of Recovery Church’s values is “raw” can you elaborate a little bit on what the vision behind that value is?

PD: Oh, absolutely! The heart of it is this: we are going to choose people over perfection, we are going to choose people over profit, people over performance. Sometimes if things are too shiny and too perfect and too clean, for the addict and alcoholic in their early recovery, that doesn’t represent their life very well. And so, by allowing a person to get up, and maybe they’re a stutterer or they’re not the best communicator, but it’s their time to share. We’re going to choose them over their performance.

And the second part of it is, we’re going to choose people over perfection or refinement. So, you might come into a Recovery Church and someone’s giving their testimony and they might slip a word that you’ve never heard in a traditional church out in the middle of their testimony. And we’re not encouraging that, but we’re still going to choose that person and their journey over the fact that they cursed, over the fact that something was a little more graphic than maybe the traditional church would feel comfortable with. can be a little more raw. We allow for a place for people to be real and honest and transpar ent. At the same time, we’re not using it as an excuse for them to be dishonoring of The Holy Spirit, or dishonoring of God or dishonoring of what a worship gathering is supposed to look like.

BB: When you grow up in the church you learn from the beginning what is considered acceptable and what is not. Entering into church culture for someone wasn’t raised in the church, and seeing how people often act a certain way, I’d imagine that’s strange. We sometimes forget that Jesus wasn’t just sitting in the temple doing what church culture of His day thought was normal…He was out in the mud with the people.

PD: Absolutely! And that’s at the heart of this! Jesus friend of sinners, that’s the idea here. When a person starts out, we can’t expect them to come in, a prostitute two weeks ago and be the preacher this week, or be the Sunday school teacher, or step in two weeks later and be perfectly refined and understand all the cultural norms that we expect in a church setting.

PASTOR PHILIP DVORAK

sanctification. Yes, they are positionally sanctified before Christ, but actually working out their sanctification, actually allowing God to refine them, is going to be a process. And we’re not going to focus on those little character defects as much as what God is doing and celebrate what God is doing.

BB: That is an awesome approach. You’ve talked a bit about how Recovery Church is focused on loving and accepting people right where they’re at, but also not wanting them to stay where they are. How do you at Recovery Church bridge that gap of being loving and accepting, while also encouraging forward progress toward freedom and growth in a relationship with Christ.

PD: It’s a beautiful mess. I mean the first thing I kind of touched on is we get dirty. It’s hard at times. We understand people are coming from brokenness, but man, we’re calling them to rise. From the teachings, from the accountability, from the sponsorship relationships, we dive into their life with them and as long as they’re making progress we’re not asking for perfection. But if their heart is not repentant and they’re not willing, and they’re not trying to move forward, and not being honest with us, and not allowing us to walk alongside them, then we’re holding them accountable. But its messy, because we don’t want to throw away people either.

Our leaders, we walk alongside them when mistakes happen, but we hold a high bar. I’ll give an example, we had one of our church leaders relapse and obviously he couldn’t be leading that location in active addiction. But now we have walked alongside him for almost two years, we’ve been filling in the leadership, we have a team in place, and for almost two years we’ve been walking alongside him and now he’s back into teaching on occasion. He’s not leading the location, but now he’s in the rotation of teaching and we’ve been in a process of BB: In a previous interview you spoke about realizing that for a lot of people walking through the doors of a traditional church can be a big hurtle. Even if the church is loving and meets them with love, it can be hard. And we know Jesus went to people’s homes, he met them in the streets, on the roadsides, among the tombs. He didn’t require them to go to the temple if they wanted to hear Him, He went to them.

How would you encourage the church to reach out into the communities around us and share the gospel in ways that are tangible and maybe less-intimidating?

PD: A lot of churches spend the majority of their time and finances focused on the Sunday morning worship experience. To me that should be an outflow of community, that should be an outflow of what is the real ministry that’s taking place.

To reach addicts and alcoholics it’s going to be messy, it’s going to be hard, you can’t reach people who are enslaved by this world and stay clean and tidy. There is rarely a week that goes by where someone I know doesn’t pass away. And these are people we’re praying with and loving on and talking to their families and spending time with. That’s hard. That’s a weight that if people are really willing—you’re going to be stepping into that.

There’s brokenness and divorces and there is abuse and all the things that we think go along with substance abuse—all that pain exists. And you have to be willing to sit with that, you’re not going to be able to get in and fix it. You’re going to have to be okay with some of that mess. Share the gospel, and allow the Holy Spirit to minister to a person, and walk alongside them as they’re making a decision to pull toward Christ and pull away from these other things. Until those roots grow down, they can really get tossed by the waves and tossed by everything to the side. It’s going to take time to help them and disciple them and walk alongside them.

The other practical thing a church can do, is understand their language. Sometimes Christians are afraid of things like Alcoholics Anonymous, afraid of things like the big book of Alcoholic Anonymous or other recovery literature. But if you’re going to reach any culture, any group of people,

you would learn their language, you would learn their culture, you would understand where they’re coming from and you would find common ground. Just like Paul did with the statue of the unknown God. He found a way to speak a language that made sense to the people he was trying to reach.

I think the larger church world would really be blessed and really see much more fruitful ministry into the recovery community if they were open to learning and reBB: What would you say to someone who is struggling with the feeling that they need to “clean themselves up” before they can come to Jesus?

PD: Well, I would say to them that that’s NOT the message of Jesus. That might be the message that they’ve received, or maybe they have been a part of churches that have presented a distorted gospel. Jesus is very clear—come to Him all that are heavy laden and He’s going to give us rest. He says “WHOSOEVER believes in Me,” that wasn’t a conditional statement—that wasn’t “okay the religious or the perfect”— that was the prostitute, that was the drug dealer, that was the drug addict. And He was calling ALL of us to repentance and to follow Him. And we don’t have to wait to be perfect, because that’s not going to happen. We can’t do it in our own strength—you can try to clean up but you’re never going to achieve it. With the power of the Holy Spirit and with Christ in you, you’re going to be able to live this new life, but without that you’re going to stay on the roller coaster.