Favorable Comment on Chuck Huckaby's Christian Recovery Talks and Work

Chuck: It is refreshing and important to see your posts and interviews on Christian recovery. There is a vast and growing Christian Recovery Movement today. And it is centered on International Christian Recovery Coalition www.ChristianRecoveryCoalition.com. It faces many obstacles: (1) AAs and 12 Step fellowship folks who don't know their own Christian roots in the Bible and in the organizations that fed the origins, history, founding, original program, and astonishing successes of the Akron A.A. Christian fellowship founded in 1935. Those roots were not Oxford Group. They were evangelists like Moody and Sankey, Gospel and Rescue Missions, YMCA lay workers, the Salvation Army, and the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor. In that backdrop, A.A. cofounders Wilson and Smith had their Christian upbringing in Vermont and took the principles and practices of successful healing of alcoholism into their own deliverances and then into the program. The roots were in existence and learned long before either the Oxford Group or A.A. were thought of. (2) AAs and 12 Step fellowship folks who have been fed on the nonsense gods (higher powers that are light bulbs, Santa Claus, radiators, and chairs), strange "spirituality" that is not defined, and the idea that one need not believe in anything at all to utilize the A.A. program. (3) The secular scientists, academics, professionals, and historians who have called A.A. everything from "not-god-ness" to New Thought to the "spirituality of imperfection" to lacking in evidence-based proof. (4) A small cadre of Christian writers who quote a Bible verse or two for the proposition that a Christian dare not put his foot in the fellowship of A.A.. (5) The courts who define A.A. as a religion and therefore preclude court-ordered A.A. attendance. (6) The proliferating A.A. "imitators" like Celebrate Recovery who develop their own "steps," their own definition of a "higher power," and their own interpretation of Bible verses thought to be supportive of A.A. ideas.The bottom line is that much still is needed to fill the information gap. God, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Bible played a critical role in the whole movement to overcome alcoholism with the power, love, and healing of God. And, if people don't know where A.A. came from, and persist in attributing to it roots it didn't have, failing movements which didn't influence it, and biblical ideas which never saw the light of day in the simple basic biblical ideas of early A.A. and the dominance in it of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Book of James, 1 Corinthians 13, Quiet Time, Anne Ripley Smith's Journal, and many of the ideas later of the Episcopal Rector Rev. Samuel Shoemker.Even more, people need to know that Jesus Christ and the Bible were deliberately dumped in recognition at the last moment in 1939 before the Big Book went to press. Yet God and biblical ideas and actual verses remained prolific despite the attempt to soften them when Steps Two, Three, and Eleven were altered to remove "God." They also need to know that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of Christians in A.A., 12-Step fellowships, and recovery situations who are delighted to hear that they are free to believe what they choose, worship God in a way of their choice, and pursue Christianity in the church of their choice.A big challenge, Chuck. And the best vehicle for meeting it today is the internet and its accompanying techniques-- that enable information to be dispersed. These include facebook, twitter, blogs, forums, chats, U-Tube, radio, podcasts, TV and a host of others yet to be seen, learned, or even developed.Carry the torch of truth, Chuck. And congratulations for your effort and role