Music unlocks parts of Tony Bennett's memory of meaning and purpose

Despite his Alzheimer's, Tony Bennett prepares to perform with Lady Gaga 

Video from 60 Minutes segment with Anderson Cooper.

Appx 15min segment about memory, dignity, and the majestic mystery of the aging brain... and the endurance of parts of our brains imbued with deep emotional sense of meaning and purpose (sometime triggered by evocative music) 

NPR interview: Life in the Time of Coronavirus

 IT'S BEEN A MINUTE WITH SAM SANDERS

Life in the Time of Coronavirus

December 4, 20207:00 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/29/929203560/life-in-the-time-of-coronavirus

(31:15 - 37:40 is short excerpt from my hour-long interview with Sam Sanders)

"What has this pandemic been like for you?"

When we put that question to people, the answers we got depended a lot on where they were in life — if they were in school, if they had a job, if they had lost a loved one, if they were vulnerable to the virus. So in this special episode of It's Been a Minute, we'll hear from people of all ages, from all over the country — and world — about how their lives, from young to old, have changed forever.

This episode was produced by Jinae West with help from Star McCown. It was edited by Jordana Hochman.

National Coming Out Day + Clergy Appreciation Day

This year 

#NationalComingOutDay and #ClergyAppreciationDay 

coincide on Sunday, October 11, 2020. 

Some experience these two as painfully irreconcilable. In my life, they’ve been humbly woven together through God’s prodigious grace.

I take this moment to reflect on how far I’ve come out.... and how far we’ve come as a queer coalition of communities as well as people of deep abiding faith.

I offer thanks to our elders and ancestors who cut paths of awareness and acceptance that have made my journey less burdensome and threatening, and whose faithful sacrifices and hopeful steadfastness have opened minds and hearts to the love and healing available though the Holy Spirit.

With God’s help, may I be in the right places at the right times with words and actions that help continue to pave paths of more just equality and loving acceptance for those still burdened by shame and/or fear to live fully as who they are and who they’ve been created to be (helping me/us see and experience more fully the expansiveness of God’s creation and family).

   

Hospital Chaplains Grapple With COVID-19's 'Tsunami' Of Grief (HuffPost)

 (excerpted from: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hospital-chaplains-coronavirus-patients_l_5ed15ab8c5b6520bd9fb5501) 

Hospital Chaplains Grapple With COVID-19's 'Tsunami' Of Grief

Six chaplains share stories from the spiritual front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

By 

Carol Kuruvilla

06/23/2020 06:50pm EDT

Rev. Michael S. Bell

Episcopal priest and director of spiritual care services at PIH Health Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles

Are you able to be physically present for patients?

While we’re always mindful of respecting cultural and personal preferences with regard to physical touch and proximity, the climate of fear around COVID-19 has made some of our natural comforting instincts taboo. Daring to reveal one’s full face without a mask can now seem startling and yet also more meaningful. Even some cultural and personal preferences about sustained direct eye contact are being challenged, as we all have to read more into what is being communicated with just our eyes in some cases.

What are the most stressful things about your work now?

Keeping my own roller coaster of emotions in check while hoping to be a non-anxious, compassionate presence to others who are expressing strong frustrations and tearful fears as they cope with daily trauma and grief. It’s sometimes painful to witness our care team professionals trying to compartmentalize so much distress while continuing to offer their best care.

What are some things that you do that you’ve found to be especially comforting for coronavirus patients and their families?

In one instance, a patient was dying in an isolation room and the patient’s spouse feared being inside the room due to her own health conditions. One of our chaplains remained at the spouse’s side just outside the room to help share the pain of not being at her partner’s bedside as he died. In another instance, using both smartphones and a camera-equipped tablet, one of our chaplains remotely collaborated with a nurse on a COVID unit to connect family with both their dying loved one and a clergy person from their tradition. Only the nurse and the dying patient were in the physical room, but a sacred virtual space was created whereby people could see and hear from each other before the patient died.

How are you coping with this personally?

Beyond ingesting more emotionally comforting carbs and sugar than I would normally, I’m limiting my exposure to televised news as well as reducing my intake of social media. My prayers at night and in the morning have become more raw, sometimes offered without words, just cathartic tears.

 (excerpted from: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hospital-chaplains-coronavirus-patients_l_5ed15ab8c5b6520bd9fb5501) 

Kintsugi restoration as metaphor for moral resiliency

“Kintsugi...’golden repair’... is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage [with golden adhesive]... it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

h/t to lecture on moral resilience by Cynda H. Rushton, PhD, MSN, RN (https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Resilience-Transforming-Suffering-Healthcare/dp/0190619260)

See also Bessel van der Kolk M.D.'s work on Healing of Trauma
https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/0143127748

Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care

A New Normal: Ten Things I’ve Learned About Trauma

A New Normal: Ten Things I’ve Learned About Trauma

By Catherine Woodiwiss 1-13-2014

Print

I wasn’t really expecting painful things to happen to me.

I knew that pain was a part of life, but — thanks in part to a peculiar blend of “God-has-a-plan” Southern roots, a suburban “Midwestern nice” upbringing, and a higher education in New England stoicism — I managed to skate by for quite some time without having to acknowledge it.

After a handful of traumas in the last five years, things look different now. Trauma upends everything we took for granted, including things we didn’t know we took for granted. And many of these realities I wish I’d known when I first encountered them. So, while the work of life and healing continues, here are ten things I’ve learned about trauma along the way....

Atul Gawande: What Matters in the End

Atul Gawande: What Matters in the End
“What does a good day look like?” That question — when asked of both terminally-ill and healthy people — has transformed Atul Gawande’s practice of medicine. A citizen physician and writer, Gawande is on the frontiers of human agency and meaning in light of what modern medicine makes possible. For the millions of people who have read his book Being Mortal, he’s also opened new conversations about the ancient human question of death and what it might have to do with life.
(from On Being with Krista Tippett)

Accepting living water and amazing grace at wells where we thirst

Saturday, March 16, 2019 (Lent)
Listen to Choral Evensong Homily Rev. Michael S. Bell from St. John's Episcopal Cathedral on SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/user-487997803/choral-evensong-homily-rev-michael-s-bell

Listen to Choral Evensong Homily Rev. Michael S. Bell from St. John's Episcopal Cathedral Podcast:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-episcopal-cathedral-podcast/id1183951881?mt=2&i=1000432119546

There is no white Jesus (humor)

Thanksgiving for our bountiful variety of friends...

...seasonally appropriate to post this one again - a beguiling reminder that we're all potentially nourishing parts of a sacred whole (Ref: 1 Corinthians 12:12-27). With thanksgiving for a bounty of friends, each a reflection of God's creative love....

"For children who are our second planting, and, though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are.

For generous friends…with hearts as big as hubbards and smiles as bright as their blossoms;

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us we had them;

For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn — and the others — as plain as potatoes, and so good for you.

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes, and serious friends as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions;

For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who — like parsnips — can be counted on to see you through the long winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time, and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils, and hold us despite our blights, wilts, and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past, that have been harvested — but who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter;

For all these we give thanks."

[credited to Rev. Max Coots, a Unitarian Universalist minister]

some guidance on how to be with someone grieving

NOTES for a St. Luke's Day Healing Service

Notes to guide as I preside at the “Holy Eucharist and Healing Service for St. Luke’s Day” at the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont (a.k.a. Bloy House), which I’m doing by invitation on the morning of Saturday, September 30, 2017.

HEALING / MEANING MAKING THROUGH STORIES (telling and listening)

• What stories are being told – that we’re telling ourselves; that we’re telling about other people and situations; that we’re listening to?  They matter and they have the power to promote dis-ease or to heal (make whole).
• Both/and - add years to our life; add life to our years (complementary, but different)

[Arrange chairs in a circle with altar at one end and an opening at the other for people to enter and sit.  Offer intro remarks.  Have readers stay within the circle to read. Offer some reflection questions before or after each reading. Sit within circle with everyone to facilitate story-telling and listening in preparation for hands-on healing prayers]

Dearly beloved of God… dear theophilus…   I once was sitting right here as a Bloy House student on Saturday mornings at 11am.  Not to presume what you’re experiencing right now in this moment, but I am having some flashbacks - not all of them pleasant - of having slogged my way out here to Claremont after an exhausting week or work (and homework) in a couple of hours of traffic, sometimes barely in time for the Friday evening class.  Forcing myself to stay awake in class sometimes… and yet somehow still staying awake too late with my classmates talking into the wee hours.  Then forcing myself to get up early Saturday morning to perhaps finish some part of an assignment before the first class.  By ‘chapel’ time on Saturday, I wasn’t always fully present to the ‘now’...  already imagining  what was past lunch and the afternoon class and into all that I had to get done when I got back home before getting back up early yet again on Sunday for parish stuff.  Frankly, I kinda endured chapel time most of the time. I don’t remember a single sermon delivered (sorry to anyone, classmates or otherwise, who might hear me admit that) but I do remember feeling the creep of chronological time right about now on Saturday. I yearned to be well.  I coulda used some healing prayers. Resonate with anyone?  

When accepting the invitation to be here this morning, I did so with ambivalence -- honored by the invitation and also nervous about, if not resistant to, ‘preaching’ to my colleagues.  Nervous because the frame for today’s service ‘Healing Services - St. Luke’s Day’ is so close to the heart of our ministry as I’ve come to know it that I fear there’s simply not enough time to really even skim the subject in this forum.  Resistant because the image of me standing at the lectern to offer you yet another lecture, no matter how brilliantly composed or skillfully delivered seems like avoidance. I now feel so deeply that being here together like this on Saturday mornings is a fleeting, unique, holy workshop. Outside the academic classes and chronological anxiety; inside a sacred space in opportune kairos time; we’re among colleagues who are going through similar emotional and spiritual crucibles of formation and discernment.  It’s a rare opportunity for us to risk being even more authentically vulnerable as we try something new / as we exploring relationship with God and each other through experimenting with liturgy rather than defaulting to the routine or expected. Let’s try our hand at slightly differently using the elements we’ve inherited in our tradition and been gifted by God so that we get experience with more options in our toolkit for when we are the designated liturgical authority in whatever context.  In God’s name, let’s ‘afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’

HEALING:  Given that this time together has been framed as a ‘healing service’, I also want to bring to the surface sometimes unspoken tension in us between belief/faith in God transcendent and God imminent.  As a mentor of mine (The Rev. Cn. Hartshorn Murphy) used to say, “The transcendent God is the God beyond the heavens whom we implore to transcend space (to "come down") and to act to make us whole. The imminent God is God within. It is the Spirit received in Baptism which is Emmanuel ("God with us".) It is the prayer to release those things in me which hinders the free flow of the Spirit to heal and make well. (To be "made manifest.")”.  This morning, in re-membering a few sacred stories from the past about the transcendent God manifest intimately as imminent, we’re then going to share a small, but significant piece our current story in a single sentence our own as wounded would-be healers. As we move through this experience together, consider where you are most comfortable connecting with the healing power of the God’s grace through the Spirit.  Wonder in what ways you are most comfortable engaging with this potent part of who you are, beloved and anointed by God, to use storytelling and/or story listening to affect change and healing, in whatever form is needed in yourself and among ‘the people.’  Which narrative tools are you most comfortable holding and using toward the art of healing in God’s name?

[invite a deep breath] Whatever stresses you’ve carried with you into this space this morning… Whatever might be strained or broken in your life....  Whatever your deepest longing to hear or feel from God…. may we enter this space together to feel anew God with us - in our struggles, in our doubts, in our deepest pains and silent sufferings.  God loves you.  God yearns for you to know how beloved you are.  God yearns for us to be made well together.

[use guiding questions ‘B’efore and ‘A’fter each lectionary reading and provide some silence for absorption]

Ecclesiasticus 38: 1-4, 6-10, 12-14

• B: What has been your relationships to traditional physicians/doctors?
• A: What needs to be healed?

2 Timothy 4: 5-13

• B: When have you been imprisoned, abandoned, or near death?  
• A: Who do hope to be with you in your time of mortal need? What do you need them to understand about you?

Some context before hearing from the Holy Gospel according to Luke: Luke is credited with about a quarter of what we have today as the New Testament (combining the Gospel and Acts; more words combined than all the writings attributed to Paul)... yet, we actually don’t know that much about Luke.  It is apparent that this physician writer believed in the art and efficacy of storytelling in healing - particularly in the power of uniquely evocative narratives about healthy relationships, as God through Christ would have us engage in them (with God and with each other).  E.g,. the Pharisee and Tax Collector, Mary and Martha, the rich man and Lazarus, the Prodigal Son, and Good Samaritan… and of course Acts - tales of our ancestors in the faith trying to become the healthy body God through Christ revealed.  Even as he was a doctor whose medical skills the wisdom of Ecclesiasticus would have us honor, Luke understood that as a Proverb (18:14) reminds us, “The human spirit will endure any sickness-infirmity; but a wounded spirit - who can bear?”  Or, as I once read, our soul can only be loved and ‘touched’ back to life.  And, in today’s Gospel selection, Luke invites us to hear God’s primary intentions for healing through the story he puts toward the beginning of his telling of the ‘good news’ - that of Jesus staking claim as Christ through using a piece of Isaiah’s storytelling about what God intends to be healed in our human family.

Luke 4:14-21

• B:  When you first experienced yourself as anointed or called, can you remember where you were - what was going on around you - what were you hearing or feeling through the Spirit?
• A: Do you believe the Spirit is upon you? If not, why not?  If so, toward what sort of healing are you being most called?

AN EXPERIENCE IN PLACE OF THE ‘SERMON’

My ministry as a chaplain (with younger adults on college campuses, older adults in a retirement community, and now in a hospital) has been saturated with storytelling and story listening… which I’ve come to believe is a primary healing art that we’re empowered with as beings created in the image of a creative God.  Even before words come out of our mouths, we’re telling our stories through: how we carry ourselves; what we do in chronological time; all means of non-verbal signals; and in the tone and rate of our voice as well as when we choose to remain silent.  When we ‘listen’ with our hearts to all these forms of communication, we’re invited into each other’s most human narratives and can sense what, with God’s help and our compassionate presence, can be re-connected where relationships have broken apart; how make new sense of circumstances that have challenged or disoriented life as we knew it; and to inspire our next chapter so to speak.  At our best, we’re able to co-author an interconnected, interdependent narrative inclusive of every human being around us… all of whom are loved as characters of God’s grand story.

Some of you have experience offering hands-on healing prayer.  Some of you might be uncomfortable with it, or perhaps lacking confidence if we asked you to move to the middle of the room and demonstrate some best practice in hands-on healing prayer.  No worries.  Whatever your prior experience, we all can benefit from a little more experience with touch and word in the sacred art of healing in God’s name.  Remember also, that among people who are easily comfortable with touch, there are also people who experience touch, even from a friend, as uncomfortable or potentially threatening, perhaps because it has been used inappropriately against them in the past.  Be sensitive to this and seek consent for holding hands and/or anointing with oil.

Using Isaiah’s words as read by Jesus, let’s take a few minutes to go further inward... to call up what we feel comfortable sharing and asking for today from among our deepest places of need…  to practice being vulnerable and honorable with each other before we lay hands on each other in healing prayer.  You may want to participate in this for the well being of the broken world around us… you’re also welcome at this time to participate in this for the health of the broken world within in you.

[guided, brief meditation; “in your answers to one of these questions, may you find a few words from your own stories that you’ll feel comfortable sharing privately with a prayer partner in a few moments”]

“to bring good news to the poor” - Where do you see or experience poverty?  Who is involved and what do is most needed?

“proclaim release to the captives” - What is inappropriately captivating you?  What’s holding you hostage?

“recovery of sight to the blind” - What do you fear you might be blind to?  What do you yearn to see more clearly?

“let the oppressed go free” - What is pushing you down? What does true liberation look or sound like?

“to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” - What needs to be true in 2018 that would most resemble a Jubilee year / debts being forgiven / a resetting of right relationships?

[take some deep breaths]

Now, quietly and gently, I invite you to pair up with someone near you who you are ready listen to.  Hold each other’s hands (with consent).  For some people, direct eye contact might be distracting.  Accept your partner’s body language as it is.  Honor whatever you’re about to hear from your partner as private and sacred - just between you two and God.

Take turns.   In one sentence, share what needs to be healed right now in your life.

Take a moment to absorb that sentence and then simply acknowledge what you’ve heard.  

Respond with: “I’ve heard you.  God hears you.  God’s healing Spirit is here with us now.”    

When everyone has been heard, we’ll proceed with the hands-on healing prayers.

[Invite people to stand and offer healing prayers for one another using form presented in the order of service for today, using holy oil if desired]

Blessing of the Bicycles at Good Samaritan Hospital

https://blessingofthebicycles.wordpress.com/

Thank you, Mayor Eric Garcetti, for being a good sport again during our annual Blessing of the Bikes...

And, thank you to colleagues who volunteered this morning to help with prayers and blessings from various traditions: The Rev. Yein Esther Kim, Sister Yolanda Vega, Sufi John Ishvaradas Abdallah, and Rabbi Rami M. Sadeghi.

Good Samaritan Hospital's "Good News" Spring 2016

...featuring farewell for my predecessor The Rev. Jerry Anderson as well as highlights of our Clinical Pastoral Education program coordinated by The Rev. Dr. Ronald David.  

http://www.goodsam.org/documents/Hospital-News/GOOD-NEWS.pdf

What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness |Robert Waldinger | TED Talks

Published on Jan 25, 2016What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone – but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. As the director of 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.

http://youtu.be/8KkKuTCFvzI

"What Should One Expect From Prayer" - Dawn Unity panel discussion

"What Should One Expect From Prayer"
presented by the Dawn Unity Group
date: January 12, 2016
venue: St. Francis Episcopal Church, Palos Verdes Estates
(https://youtu.be/K5Z5gHHnq9k)

Video: Interview with The Episcopal Church's new Presiding Bishop-elect Michael Curry

[Episcopal News Service] In an 18-minute interview with the Episcopal News Service, Presiding Bishop-elect Michael Curry speaks about his priorities for leadership and administration, the role of the church in engaging God’s mission in the world, the state of race relations in the U.S., the importance of Anglican Communion partnerships, and his commitment to what he calls the Jesus Movement, to go out into the world “to bear witness to the good news of Jesus.”

Facilitating Farewell with Rites of Remembrance for a Home

[names and other identifying info in this story have been changed for privacy]

Mary had arrived in our community in grief from the recent losses of both her husband and an adult child.  What I didn’t know is how deeply she was also grieving separation from her home of many years, a hasty separation that hadn’t allowed her opportunity to intentionally honor the meaning and memories there… to say ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ in her own way.   Noticing that Mary appeared particularly sad one morning, I asked, “How’s it going?”  Not surprisingly, she responded, “Not so well.  I’m really feeling it today.”  Assuming I knew what she was referring to, I continued, “You’re really feeling the grief today?”  “Yes” she answered.  But, as she continued to talk, I soon learned that what was most upsetting her right now was not the grief following the recent deaths of her husband and adult child, but the way she had been moved from her homestead.  “I went with my kids to a movie one afternoon and instead of them taking me home afterwards, they brought me here.  I know they meant well and thought that way would be easier.  And, I guess I played along with it for a while also, pretending it was for the best…. but now I can’t stop thinking that was a mistake.”(*see note below)  As we continued to explore her feelings, it became clear that she didn’t so much believe she needed to be back in her house, but that she was haunted by having been ‘taken’ from it without a chance to say goodbye to all that it had meant and represented.  “What if we could go back to your house together to say goodbye on your own terms, honoring all the memories there, giving thanks for what it provided, and blessing it for the next family?”  Mary’s eyes brightened and after a pause she smiled and said simply, but with clear conviction, “I’d like that.”

With Mary’s permission, I contacted her family to make the arrangements.  They were concerned that she might be shocked upon seeing its current condition – empty.  After relocating Mary, they had quickly cleared out the house and staged it for sale (in fact, we also needed to coordinate our visit with the realtor so that there wouldn’t be a showing while we were there).  I assured them that I would prepare her for seeing things physically rearranged and the house mostly empty, while also suggesting to them that Mary would likely see past all that and be more attentive to what wasn’t as visible to the rest of us as we walked from room to room remembering stories, offering thanks, and bidding the spaces farewell with her blessings.  For safety, a colleague from our resident care team would accompany Mary and me the afternoon of our trip.  I prepped my colleague by reminding her about the intention of this ritual and reinforcing our aim of facilitating Mary’s memories and actions of farewell – listening with compassion while non-anxiously accompanying her from room to room without rushing to reassure her or diffuse the power of her feelings in this process.  We would walk with her on this emotional journey, providing companionship as she asserted control to say goodbye in her own way.

On our drive to Mary’s house, I began the journey by asking her to tell us the story of how she and her husband had decided on this particular house in this location.  As we pulled into her drive, I reaffirmed the purpose of trip and asked Mary how she hoped to feel after this farewell visit.  “I don’t know.  But, I know this is important” she answered.  As we entered her home, I reminded Mary that we were there for support, would walk with her as she went through the house at her own pace, and that we’d join her in giving thanks and offering blessings to each room and space that she wanted to visit.  Mary led us first to the master bedroom, where she initially noted how much of her stuff was missing and even how the bed linens weren’t hers.  Within seconds, however, she was sitting on that bed, looking fondly out through a sliding glass door into a garden patio and telling us stories about her husband as she let tears flow freely.  Within each room, once she seemed to have concluded her stream of memories, I would ask if there was anything else she wanted us to know before we offered thanks and blessed the room.  When the stories in each room were done, I invited her to say out loud what she was most thankful for from those memories.  My colleague and I would affirm her thanksgivings in a brief prayer form.  To close our time in each room, I invited Mary to offer an affirming word of blessing for the next family to live there while she or I symbolically sprinkled holy water from a small aspergillum. Our journey concluded in her garden, where we collected some fruit and even a trimming from one of her favorite plants to take back to our community for symbolic continuity.  Before getting back into the car, we all took one last look at the property from the curb and restated some of the thanksgivings and blessings that had been offered.  I asked Mary, “Though we’ll never want to forget all that this home has been for you, are we now ready to say farewell to the structure and offer it in love to the next family who will build their own memories here?”  Mary smiled and softly said, “I believe so… yes.”   

submitted by request to a blog for California Lutheran Home's Center for Spirituality & Aging 
http://www.spiritualityandaging.org/facilitating-farewell-with-rites-of-remembrance-for-a-home-by-rev-michael-bell/

by The Rev. Michael S. Bell, Chaplain with Episcopal Communities & Services

*NOTE: Some believe that this process of relocating someone with use of a seemingly pleasant distraction might work well for someone with advanced dementia.  Mary, however, did not have dementia at the time.  

15 THINGS ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS CAN TEACH THE CHURCH

By Rebekah Simon-Peter
June 15th, 2015
http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/6101/15-things-alcoholics-anonymous-can-teach-the-church?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

Alcoholics Anonymous has forever changed the church. And it has done it right under our noses. Or better put, in our church basements, classrooms and meeting rooms. AA introduced the concept of spirituality apart from religion. It took away the middleman. It has put into place the most successful self-duplicating, small group model in recent history. And it has done this by emulating the model of the early church. On June 10, AA turned 80 years old. From extremely humble beginnings, an estimated 23 million people in the US now live with long-term recovery from alcohol and drug addiction.

Here are the top 15 things AA can teach the church:

1. Stick to your primary purpose. AA doesn’t try to be all things to all people. Its primary purpose is to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. That’s what it does, and it does it very well. If someone wants to apply the 12 steps to overeating, smoking or hoarding, a new fellowship is formed. This laser-like focus allows for great success. What if the church kept the main thing the main thing? Such as making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world?
2. You can’t keep it unless you give it away. AA members know that in order to maintain their sobriety, they have to work with others and share the message of recovery. That’s how Bill W. and Dr. Bob got sober. And it hasn’t changed since then. Evangelism is built right into the 12 steps. 
3. Get a sponsor. Sponsorship is the key to success. Every AA member who hopes to remain sober gets a sponsor to help them work the 12 steps. Then they turn around and sponsor someone else. What if churches focused on creating sponsors or disciples who disciple the next person? 
4. Insist on experiencing God. God is very loosely defined, if at all in AA. Each person works on their own concept of God, and it changes and grows as they change and grow. The church has made much of trying to define God instead of helping people experience God. 
5. Promise a spiritual awakening. It’s the results of working the 12 steps. The church is short on this promise and long on trying to get people to join. 
6. Focus on spirituality. Deepened spirituality is the marker of growth among AA members and groups. Is that what drives your church growth? 
7. You don’t need a building. AA has an estimated 2 million members worldwide in 115,000 groups. Most of them meet in someone else’s space, paying rent instead of mortgage and repairs. That frees up a lot of time and energy to stick to their primary purpose. 
8. Don’t sponge. AA has a tradition of being self-supporting through its own contributions. Is your church looking for someone else to foot the bill? 
9. There are no stars. Anonymity, not celebrity, is the key to the success of this program. Humility is also a characteristic of Christ. How about your church? 
10. Don’t shoot your wounded. Relapsers are welcomed back with open arms. Judgment, or the perception of judgment, is often felt in churches. 
11. Have fun. Lots of laughter emanates from AA rooms as people laugh at their former follies. “We absolutely insist on enjoying life” is an oft-quoted line from the "Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous." Laughter keeps people coming back. 
12. Let the hierarchy serve the local group, and not the other way around. The General Service Office of AA exists only to serve the local groups. Denominational offices sometimes give the opposite impression. 
13. Share your story. Early Christians had stories of salvation and they shared them. This also helped them stay strong in the faith and hold one another accountable. AA is all about sharing stories. 
14. Focus on the newcomer. The newcomer is the most important person in the rooms of AA. They are actively welcomed, told to keep coming back, and encouraged to get a sponsor. Their transformation begins immediately. Churches too often stay focused on the longtimers, and are reluctant to make space for newcomers. 
15. Expect resurrection! People come back from the dead all the time in AA rooms. It’s what AA specializes in. New life is expected and demanded. How about in your church?

---

Rebekah Simon-Peter blogs at rebekahsimonpeter.com. She is the author of "The Jew Named Jesus" and "Green Church."