CCEF Addictions Curriculum: “Crossroads” (by Ed Welch)

Over the past few weeks, my friend and I have been going through the The Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation’s (CCEF’s) Crossroads Addictions Curriculum. It has, like all CCEF resources I’ve read, been both a challenge and a blessing.

As I have progressed through the curriculum, I have also gone back and re-read many of my LiveBlogs from the 2008 CCEF Conference: The Addict in Us All.

(If you’re interested in this topic at all, or if your church is interested in better ministering to the addicts in your midst—and believe me, you DO have them in your church whether you admit it and help them or not!—I encourage you to check out my LiveBlogs. I am a very fast typist and I pretty much transcribed the pre-conference events, general sessions and many of the workshops too.)

I appreciated so much Dr. Ed Welch’s opening plenary session at the conference (“Addiction, Temptation & Voluntary Slavery“). Consider just a tiny excerpt from what he shared:

“We gather as kindred spirits who share a similar mission–we are persuaded that Scripture is alive and deep and we desire to bring it to the problems in living. We want to bring Christ and Him crucified to the problems of living. As we do that, we hope to encourage the Church with loving encouragement and wise counsel.

(After describing a disturbing case study from his early years as a counselor …)

In the moment we begin to see the addict as ‘abnormal,’ Scripture seems to drop below a whisper; it seems to go silent. And often we respond by putting addicts, ‘over there,’ in one category or sub-class. We buy into the AMA diagnosis of addiction being a ‘medical disease.’ We send people to AA—and they furiously underline and memorize passages in the AA Big Book because it just seems to relevant to their lives! But their Bibles remain pristine because it seems to be for ‘normal people’ and they are not feeling very normal.

So there I was with my biblical worldview and then I met Mr. Gray (the case study) …

Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have people to confuse the clarity of our own minds?“

(As a Tara-aside here … I think that was absolutely one of THE BEST LINES of the entire weekend. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have people to confuse the clarity of our own minds?’ So true! So true.)

Dr. Welch then went on to explain how the gospel DOES speak to this important topic and DOES bring not only clarity but REAL HELP for people who often feel very, very helpless. (As do the people who LOVE the people struggling with addiction.)

If you’d like to learn more, I encourage you check out all of the CCEF resources on their website. And you may also find these links helpful:

The entire LiveBlog of Ed Welch’s general session plenary can be found here.

In addition, I LiveBlogged Ed Welch’s pre-conference (half-day!) workshop on the Addictions Curriculum here. Or you can just read my summary of the pre-conference workshop here.

And, of course, ALL of my LiveBlogs and summaries from the entire conference can be found here.

Hope this material is helpful to you! It sure is helpful to me.

Blessings on your Sabbath—

Yours,
Tara B.