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Acknowledgements

The Spirit of the Holy Triune God, my Higher Power, first and last inspired and nudged me to complete this work.

I owe much to the Rev. Dave Else, to whom, along with my husband and the African Community Church this book is dedicated. Dave has spent most of his ministry trying to educate clergy and laity that lives do not have to be lost to alcohol and other drugs. He has indeed been a seed planter and a catalyst across the width and breadth of the Episcopal Church in the USA, founding Episcopal Recovery Ministries, formerly the National Episcopal Coalition on Alcohol and Drugs, among other firsts. Dave joined the first mission team I led to the former Soviet Union to open up the first 12-Step rehabilitation program in Moscow. Dave also helped me after my husband’s stroke when his drinking became a problem

Jack Webb, my husband of fifty eight years, began his recovery from both his alcohol abuse and his addiction to nicotine after his stroke in 1981. Even though he relapsed many times he had ten good years when he could enjoy his retirement with me.

The Rev. Sam Wanjau, of the African Community Church of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, carefully reviewed the draft manuscript and gave me some excellent advice on specific African religious beliefs and culture.

The Rt. Rev. Benjamin Nzimbi guided and encouraged the SARAH Network that received a USG NPI PEPFAR grant in 2007 in Prevention Education.

Without the encouragement of the First Word and other Christian writer’s workshops, I never would have persevered to perfect the crafts of writing and editing since the first edition of this book was published. Their critiques and prayers undergirded this effort.

Bob Godley, chair of the Alcoholism Commission of the Diocese of New York, provided more clergy support as well as Steve Smith and Brother Tom. My Chatham Hall big sister, Sally Robinson, loaned me some special books of her father’s and served as GOAL’s guest speaker at a Calvary Church fund raiser in Pittsburgh, where her father had been rector. My friend and Chatham Hall roommate, Betsy Evans, taught me about the Oxford Group or Moral Rearmament Movement and Frank Buchman. Her father, a Baptist minister, along with Sam Shoemaker were the American leaders of that movement for many years. Charles Bishop and John Dowker provided much-needed historical information about the Washingtonians and Faith at Work. David Baker, a Lutheran pastor, guided me through my doctorate thesis project, the first edition of this book.

Thanks to my Russian friends and colleagues, Katya Savina and Irene Yakubova who assisted in preparing the text for the Tree’s Russian translation, to my Romanian friend, Iona Ciobanu, and to Floyd Frantz for help researching and translating the Romanian edition of Tree. I thank Bill White, who with his comprehensive research into the history of Recovery in the USA, reviewed this edition of the Tree. To Pastor Sam Wangau, Susan Ruturi, Janet Githu, Benter Ndede, Peter Kihungi, Francis Odhamboi, Edith Adembasa, and Kirimi Barine, I owe a debt of gratitude for their invaluable cultural insights.

I especially want to thank the anonymous persons in recovery who were willing to risk sharing their stories for this edition of the Tree because they believed the Church needed to hear.

Thanks also to my many friends in recovery who listened to the many bits and pieces of my own experience, strength, and hope and who accepted me and loved me back to sanity, especially Joe, Don, Marty, Christ, Bill, and Bob who helped build up my self-esteem in the midst of family crises to be able to write and rewrite this work with confidence.

Foreword

“Tree of Life – The Grace of God and Addiction Recovery” is a very useful and important book to us in Africa. The book introduces the issue of addiction and gives the 12-Step recovery process which can be used to come out of addiction.

Today, Africa is faced by all types of addictions just like the western world. Terry Webb, in her experience of many years dealing with the subject of addiction and drugs, has written this book that gives relevant information, examples, encouragement and affirmation on how to go through the recovery process.

Alcohol and tobacco have been in use in Africa for many years. They are associated with celebrations and social gatherings. Addiction problems affect all age groups. These issues of addiction are also found among men and women of all religions.

This book has several addiction examples, in the form of stories, from Africa. The children, parents, neighbours, and the whole society are affected by the way the addict behaves in the society. In most cases there is shame and guilt which go together with this behavior. But recovery is possible.

An example of a common tree in Africa, the Acacia, is used in this book to illustrate how we can overcome addiction and become useful. The acacia tree is surrounded by drought and other challenges yet it can survive and its parts become useful. The 12-Step recovery process should be practiced by recovery groups. There is need for more recovery groups and more training. The recovery process needs patience, understanding, listening, confidence building, and unconditional love to addicts.

The issues of addiction are well known in the West and also in Africa, but how to stand with the addict and walk with him/her has raised much debate. It is upon us to accept and own these challenges of addiction and bravely face the challenges, individually and collectively, using the available tools.

I recommend this book for Social Workers, Counselors, Pastors and others involved in the healing and welfare of the communities.

The Most Rev. Dr. Benjamin Nzimbi
Archbishop Emeritus
Anglican Church of Kenya

Introduction

“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing and her people a joy.” (Is. 65: 17 & 18 NIV)

The healing process from the disease of addiction promises abundant life and a new beginning. The 12-Steps, written down by Bill Wilson in 1938 and then adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), constitute the core for the twentieth and twenty-first century phenomena known as 12-Step mutual help or recovery support groups. This book describes the anonymous mutual help group process of 12-Step recovery that draws deeply from the well of an evangelical English Christian renewal movement in the 1930s. The recovery philosophy, rooted in Christian religious traditions and biblical principles, has become the evidence-based treatment methodology for those suffering from alcohol and other drug dependencies beginning with AA.

Only a few church-going Christian lay persons and clergy know that the beginnings of AA were molded by devout Christian men, ordained ministers in their denominations. Many church-going Christians in Africa do not know much about this rich and varied recovery history and philosophy.

This book is not an attempt to rewrite AA history, so well documented by Nan Robertson, Ernest Kurtz, Dick B., and William White, but to recapture and reclaim the Christian roots and the significance of the 12-Step group process or philosophy of recovery. In 1955, in a talk given in St. Louis at the twentieth anniversary of AA the Rev. Sam Shoemaker, an Anglican priest, said that AA has received its inspiration and impetus indirectly from the insights and beliefs of the church.

Father Ed Dowling, a Roman Catholic priest, compares the process to that of Christianity: ¹

“I believe that the 12-Step Movement, beginning with their use in Alcoholics Anonymous, is a story which is best described as a mighty work of the Holy Spirit to solve the problem of addiction in this century. I agree with Dr. Sam Shoemaker that God is the moving force, that inspires it and keeps it going, which is why the movement is having such a powerful impact on today’s world and has been the chief source of evangelism in this century.”²

My hope is that African churches become familiar with the practices, principles, and philosophy of the A movement (AA and other anonymous fellowships that follow the 12-Steps). Consider this book to be Course 101 on how recovery from addiction can work with biblical spirituality and relationally in community.

I am attempting to address two very basic questions: What role can A groups have in African Christian churches today? How will this spiritual/social/psychological program be integrated into the disease model of addiction adopted now by the medical community who treat addiction as a relapse brain disease?

Crossroads Publishing Company published the first edition of this work in the United States and featured the influence of the New Age Movement on the A movement and the origins of AA in the former Soviet Union. This edition was then translated into Russian and made available to the recovering community in Russia and the former Soviet-block countries. The third edition captured the origins of AA in Romania with the text translated into Romanian. This edition has been especially rewritten for African Christians, hopefully to be translated into local African languages.

My vision for this book came in the form of a tree and, symbolically for Africans, an Acacia tree, whose roots draw inspiration and food from the earth, whose branches are 12-Steps and whose leaves and fruit are every recovering person, beginning with Bill W., Ebby T., Dr. Bob, and Fr. Peter Odhiambo. This tree’s roots thrust themselves into their biblical spiritual roots, their leaves reach for grace-based sunlight and need nourishment from Heaven. The tree risks disease, withering, and dying during seasons of Christian spiritual droughts.

I was born and raised in the Anglican tradition and the inspiration for this book came after I had attended an Anglican Fellowship of Prayer Conference which met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at Chatham College in June, 1989. At that time, I had an opportunity to be a part of a group discussion on the 12-Steps with my friend, Sally. She described how her father and Bill W. spent hours behind closed doors examining how one could stay sober with basic Christian principles, that have come to be known as the 12-Steps. The day after the conference, I created the outline for this book.

Recovery or working the steps and their principles can be equated with following a rule of life in community. Evangelism spreads through personal story telling and sharing while sitting in a circle. Many anonymous individuals, some known only by God and some known only by their first names, are used by God for the purpose of giving new life to other hopeless, helpless addicts and their family members.

Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, the pioneer of the A movement began in Akron, Ohio and now brings healing and new life all over the world. I have been humbled that God chose me to be a part of this healing movement and to attempt to capture its essence. The phenomenal growth of the movement has occurred over an eighty year period.

In AA alone, there are over two million members in more than one hundred and fourteen thousand groups in over 180 different countries. Seeds have been planted in many African countries but some are struggling to survive. AA records some registered groups in Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Kenya – mostly in the big cities. In these African countries most of the groups who meet do so in populated areas in churches and rehabilitation centers. Groups in rural areas are few and transportation is an issue for regular attendance. However, in South Africa, AA has 370 AA groups. In Egypt there are now fifteen groups and over sixty-one meetings of NA. After the Arab spring, since drug abuse has exploded in Arab countries, planting new A seedlings everywhere in Africa is desperately needed to stop the violence and stabilize new democracies.

My own rebirth began in 1981 as my friend Polly and I sat together in a restaurant in the town of Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while she introduced me to the 12-Steps. Soon after that I walked into my first Al-Anon meeting in the basement of the former church building where my father had been pastor for twenty years. I felt I had finally found a group of people who seemed to understand and accept me. These new friends showed me how to take my personal inventory and helped me work the 12-Steps.

Today, thirty years later, I find that the continual process of working the steps, allows God to prune the deadwood from my life, like the parable of the fig tree that Jesus told to his disciples. Working through the 12-Steps and attending 12-Step meetings has given me gifts of biblical insight, discernment, and indescribable experiences of peace and serenity. Not only have I been thus renewed but I have been empowered to a new way of living, a 12-Step kind of living, with each day a new beginning, that included attending Trinity Seminary down the road from that restaurant where I first listened to my friend Polly read the 12-Steps.

In December of 1989, I went for a retreat at an Orthodox Monastery near Ellwood City, Pennsylvania to dedicate this work to God. While there, I met and wrote down the steps for a fellow retreater and started her on her own A journey. My journey has many such God-moments of opportunities for “12fth step” service (see www.marytheresawebb.com) around the world.

For many years treatment specialists have considered dependence on brain altering substances, such as alcohol, cocaine, bhang, heroin, and pain medicines, as a bio-psycho-social disease that can be prevented and treated. However, one does not want to neglect the spiritual component of this disease that I describe as follows: loss of a sense of God’s presence and a violation of one’s own moral principles, that may or may not include dropping out of attendance at worship services. This definition also does not include the following:

Uses rationalization and projection as defenses; angry when subject of usage is discussed
Mood swings and personality changes; the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome
Social and marital problems
Sexual functioning problems
Financial difficulties
Deteriorating job performance

In other words, addiction is a disease of mind, body, relationships, and spirit.

Dr. Gerald May, in his book Addiction and Grace, defines addiction as “the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity’s desire for God and makes idolaters of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of our attachment.”³ Addiction conquers and destroys will power.

Medically and scientifically oriented western societies look for medical and scientific solutions to problems, particularly problems of disease. African societies, on the other hand, historically depended on witch craft, superstition, and spirits from their natural world to solve problems. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Africans have been introduced to the Triune God of Christianity and medical solutions to problems.

The disease of addiction in African countries has now become an epidemic that makes the bubonic plague and HIV/AIDS pale by comparison. NACADA, in a 2012 Rapid Situation Assessment Survey, provides statics that show that alcohol and other drug abuse pose significant health risks and social problems in Kenya. This disease strikes down children before they are born, destroys families, and wrecks havoc with nation states. Yet, government agencies spend far more money in trying to help persons recover from the HIV/AIDS than in combating addiction, especially alcohol and medication addiction. The efforts that UNODC, the international narcotics control board, has put in place are geared towards helping nations to reduce supply and accessibility of drugs. Until governments join churches to put addiction prevention and treatment first they will not eradicate HIV/AIDS because addiction adds fuel to the spread of the virus.