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Yearly meeting covers a wide range
of topics
Pastoral Pondering: Are you willing
to be taken
where the spirit is blowing?
Recovery
ministry
blooms at church |
Friday night meetings welcome those struggling with
addiction to talk anonymously |
By Christie Scotty, Newberg Graphic
Reporter
Email Christie at cscotty@eaglenewspapers.com
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When Eric Ouellette decided to stop drinking alcohol, he traded one
addiction for another.
After walking into an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting in 1992, he found
recovery to be almost as compelling as drinking. For four years, he said, he attended as
many as 10 or 12 meetings a week, then threw himself headlong into service projects.
He still travels to recovery groups at the state mental institution and a
correctional institution in Tillamook, and wants to serve by opening the door for others
to help themselves.
“Service work is beneficial for my sobriety,” he said.
“Whether it’s emptying ashtrays or setting up for a meeting ... it really has
helped my recovery.”
But his newest service effort is a recovery ministry at Newberg Free
Methodist Church. The ministry joins a plethora of area recovery groups, including those
held at Newberg Christian Church, the Dundee Women’s Center, St. Michael’s/San
Miguel Episcopal Church, Providence Newberg Hospital, and the local KISS meeting at C.S.
Lewis Academy’s building.
“There’s meetings every day of the week,” Ouellette said of
Newberg.
After some “church shopping” to find the most comfortable spiritual
home, Ouellette’s family settled at the Free Methodist church. But Ouellette, a
soft-spoken man with a shaved head and salt-and-pepper beard, kept his struggle with
alcohol to himself. “I had no intentions of bringing it up,” he said.
But during a marathon prayer event at the church, the idea of beginning
a new recovery group came to mind. He said he prayed about the idea for about a year
before finally talking to the church’s pastoral staff.
After more discussion and praying among church leaders, the group was
launched about 18 months ago. Now, once a week, about a half-dozen people come to an open
room to work on recovery.
Like AA the recovery group works on an anonymous basis, with people free to
come and talk without fear of judgment or of other people finding out.
Unlike AA, the church’s ministry is explicitly Christian.
“In AA, there’s a ‘higher power’ and it’s whatever
you want it to be,” Ouellette said. “It’s small steps because a lot of
people are coming right off the street with no faith ... We follow the AA structure, but
we call our higher power God.”
Ouellette said he’s not knocking AA’s effectiveness. In fact, he
encourages people with substance problems to visit several recovery groups. Many times, he
said, people say they tried recovery and it wasn’t for them, when it was really a
case of attending one meeting a couple times and not “clicking” with the other
people or the format.
“I think AA is a great program, but I view it as a doorway to a life,
not as my life,” Ouellette said.
Like many people in recovery, however, Ouellette says his life is different
today than it was when he was drinking. It’s a daily struggle — one woman he met
at a recovery meeting in Lafayette was in her 70s and had been sober for four decades, yet
still attended meetings.
It’s that daily work that can change not only a habit, but an entire
life.
“I was not a nice person,” Ouellette said. “People didn’t
mean any more to me than a chair or a couch. Friends were something to get things from and
God was a vengeful, spiteful God. I scorned him every day.
“After (beginning recovery) I found out I had three wonderful kids
at home — they weren’t annoyances anymore,” he said, noting in June he
marked his 21st wedding anniversary.
The recovery group meets from 8 to 9:30 p.m. every Friday night at Newberg
Free Methodist Church, 1800 N. Hoskins (to find meeting places and times for other groups
in the area, check the Community Calendar in this newspaper). |
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From July 19,
2003, Newberg Graphic
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