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The 12-Step
Movement and
Becoming
What God Intended
A Study for
Spiritual Transformation
| BWGI Ministries materials are a powerful supplement to the
Recovery experience! As the Recovery Movement works on
reconstructing the life, our materials, small groups, and
disciplers work on reconstructing the heart. |
 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 recovery programs, including addiction from sex to chocolate.
The 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 effectively 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 are 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.
BWGI
Ministries
is particularly dedicated to the restructuring or transformation 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. A testimony to this effect is provided
below. The seminars, books, tapes, video material, and
discipling all are directed to that aim.
BWGI
trains the heart to:
- Become a liberated observer of compulsions
instead of a slave to them
- Use the imagination the way God intended
- Live from the new identity in Christ, and not
from the addiction identity
- Relate to God as a Father instead of
remaining isolated
- Manage moods and desires instead of being
drowned by them
Continued in Column 2...
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 Jerry
Myers approached Dr. Eckman at a recent seminar and said, "The
seminar Creating a Healthy Family you gave six or seven years ago
was the most important event of my life. I finally was able to understand what happened to me in my family." Read the testimony! |
Continued from Column 1...
Addiction
and its behaviors create a powerful compulsive mindset within an
atmosphere of anticipation, moods, and self-absorption. The
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
Ministries 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.
How It Works: A Testimony
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 that I still attend. The third thing was that
we joined a small group fellowship where we began studying
the workbook
Becoming What God Intended.
After struggling for about a year, I finally was able to see past my
problem with substances 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.”
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