Community Life celebrates recovery
CLC’s Celebrate Recovery was started on January 24, 2022, and has been growing ever since. It averages around 40 people a night, according to Steve Shates, who leads the ministry at CLC.
Shates also serves as a state representative of the organization.
Celebrate Recovery started in 1991 at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. According to their website, Celebrate Recovery’s very first meeting had 43 people attend. Now, after more than 30 years at Saddleback, they have served 27,000 people.
According to Shates, Celebrate Recovery is a nondenominational ministry and because of this, it has expanded rapidly to churches of all types.
There are now over 35,000 churches with Celebrate Recovery ministries across the world. According to the find a group map on their national website, there are 13 churches within a 50-mile radius of Pensacola that have a Celebrate Recovery program. There is even one on Hurlburt Field.
“I have been on mission trips around the world, teaching pastors about it and how to bring Celebrate Recovery to their congregations,” Shates said.
Shates says that the biggest thing that holds back people from getting the help they need is the stigma attached to being associated with addiction.
“Some people think that others will think they are an alcoholic or drug addict, but that’s not true,” Shates said. “This is for anyone dealing with disfunction in their marriage, relationships, and in life.”
According to Shates, only 30% who attend have substance abuse issues. He says that no matter what someone faces, the program helps open communication about topics that are quite often not discussed due to embarrassment or out of fear that it will negatively impact the way a person is viewed.
Shates brought the idea of starting a Celebrate Recovery at CLC to Pastor Scott Veroneau in March 2021 and it was met with enthusiasm. Later, Kat Siler, the church’s adult discipleship director, got involved with the creation of the ministry too.
According to Shates, it was a long process to set it up. He says that having the support of church leaders was important and that they were able to make it happen because of that support.
“We took the idea of ‘go and make disciples of the world’ and put it to work in our church,” Shates said. “In Celebrate Recovery, everybody greets each other like family.”
Shates says that they consider one another to be “forever family.”
While family plays a large part in Celebrate Recovery, the CLC’s version of the ministry is adult only as of right now. Currently, the group meets for two hours each Monday. The first hour of the meeting features a teaching lesson or testimony from the program literature. That is done in a large group.
The second hour is more issue specific and is done in smaller groups. Usually these smaller groups are separated along the lines of gender or background, such as Welcome Home, which provides a safe space for military members and first responders to talk about things they go through.
While there are many 12 step programs out there, the big difference between those and Celebrate Recovery is the emphasis on God’s role in people’s lives.
“Secular programs are vague about a higher power,” Shates said. “Our program features Jesus at the center.”
Shates says that despite the program having a Christ based message, a person attending does not have to be Christian or even believe in God.
“People see Jesus in what we do and then they may want to know more,” Shates said.
Shates recalls that at another church he attended with a Celebrate Recovery ministry there was an atheist who started coming to meetings. According to Shates, the atheist had been in a failing marriage and was looking to turn it around by overcoming her issues with adultery.
One day, after being involved with the program for some time, she said that she was a believer in Christ. Shates says that those in the room, who had grown to know the woman, were stunned silent by the admission.
“We always say ‘I am a follower of Jesus and these are my issues,’ and when she said it, you could hear a pen drop,” Shates said. “We knew God was gonna do the work and he did.”
According to Shates, he became involved with Celebrate Recovery because of his own battle with addiction. He says that he got clean in 1987 after a long and arduous struggle with drugs.
“I started drinking at an early age,” Shates said. “My parents would be having parties and I would bring beer from the fridge to them. Somewhere along the way, I started drinking.”
Shates began with cigarettes and then started to turn to alcohol, marijuana and downs. By 17, Shates was a full blown heroin addict. It was not until he turned 32, that Shates got off drugs.
He was jobless, penniless, homeless and hopeless during that period of his life. Shates says that he was a lost soul, the kind of man that you hear about going down the wrong path and never coming back.
“Its been a long, dark path,” Shates said. “I didn’t think I could be forgiven.”
But God had different plans.
After getting clean through a secular 12 step program, Shates was free from addiction, but he felt that something was lacking. He says that he had tried to fill the “void” in his heart with all kinds of things, but nothing sufficed. In the early 2000s, a friend told Shates about a Bible study for recovering addicts at a church outside of Nashville called Long Hollow Church.
Shates admits that he was skeptical of whether the church group would be as inviting to him once they found out all the things he had done in his life.
“The leader of the study asked what brought me there and I told them everything,” Shates said. “I gave them the rated R version of what I had experienced. I thought they would reject me and not want me back, but they accepted me.”
Shates kept coming back to Long Hollow and in 2004, accepted Christ as his personal savior. In 2005, the church started a Celebrate Recovery. Shates was at that church up until he moved to the Navarre area just four years ago.
“The piece of the puzzle in my heart was found,” Shates said. “Jesus has changed my heart to a place where I am no longer that person I was before.”
Shates hopes that CLC’s Celebrate Recovery provides that same kind of thing for those who attend.
For those interested in attending, Celebrate Recovery meets Monday nights at 6 p.m. at 4115 Soundside Drive in Gulf Breeze. Check on https://www.clc.life/ for further information.