Twelve Steps, One Cross
Recovery as the Way of Discipleship
Parallel Paths / Disconnected Development
In many church communities today, I have found that recovery is often quietly treated as a road map reserved for addicts, codependents, and survivors of trauma and developmental dysfunction. Many consider it a side ministry designed to stabilize and support severely broken folk, and perhaps as a prerequisite for those aiming for the structure and rigor of discipleship. Meanwhile, discipleship is generally described as the more challenging path that lies beyond conversion (at minimum), and it has also been modeled and treated (perhaps unintentionally) like a kind of pyramid scheme or recruitment and multiplication model that yields spread while lacking depth.
Having spent many years in both worlds — raised in a Christian home, school, and church; later wrecked by addiction and now undergoing the reconstructive surgery of recovery — I’ve come to recognize how unhelpful, even unwanted, associations with both discipleship and recovery have perpetuated a subtle but stubborn disconnect between the two paths.
From my perspective, the groups in churches that gather in these contexts do not appear to be on divergent paths; they seem to be parallel. They are not necessarily discussed together or in sync, and when they are, the overlap is often superficial or incidental. But the split itself has shaped and perplexed me. And it’s made me wonder:
What if Jesus never meant for these to be separate paths?
Throughout my recovery journey, I have discovered that the postures, liturgies, and rhythms of recovery — surrender, confession, reconciliation with God, self, and others — are neither package upgrades nor factory recalls. No; as I have failed and gotten up countless times in the struggle to live and walk in steady recovery, I’ve come to see that these habits are not accessories to the Christian life. They are the shape of it. They are how discipleship becomes real, embodied, and sustainable. When I have sidelined the confrontation and confession of my character defects or treated the sacred steps as optional add-ons, my spiritual formation has been stunted, shallow and performative.
I cannot begin to tally the number of face-plants I have accumulated while living under an assumption that salvation — so long as it didn’t look like self-righteousness — could be hard-won through a combination of effort and intelligence. The inevitable result was constant burnout that I disguised as devotion. Meanwhile, Jesus famously offered the exact opposite:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
— 2 Corinthians 12:9
If we’ve built a culture where recovery is seen as the warm-up and discipleship as the real race, we’ve not only misunderstood healing…
…we’ve redefined strength in a way Jesus never did.
Seeing is not Believing → Believing is Seeing
In secular recovery models, I’ve noticed a growing trend: treat the pain first, then invite people to transformation. Ease the symptoms, then address the root. Wait until someone is safe, ready, aware… then invite surrender. Certainly this has merit when life-threatening chaos is present; my own life depended critically on this form of treatment when I went into seizures and nearly died from acute alcohol withdrawal.
But when we try to treat the destructive patterns of addiction through harm reduction, academic insight, and cognitive-behavioral therapeutic models, we risk deferring that critical first step of surrender that is required for true healing to begin. When diagnostic routine or therapy become the preconditions for our willingness to change, and transformation is treated as something that happens only after we understand why we need it — like a head-on collision victim demanding a crime scene analysis before accepting paramedic care — we may be gambling with our very lives.
Likewise, in the face of our spiraling crisis, Jesus doesn’t coddle the information-addicted mind or psychoanalyze our wreckage. He simply calls.
When He called the first disciples, He didn’t offer a deep dive into doctrine, a wellness retreat, or a self-care plan. He said, “Follow me.”
He said, “Deny yourself.” (Luke 9:23)
He said, “Go and sin no more.” (John 8:11)
He didn’t wait for insight. He didn’t teach us to follow our hearts. He invited obedience, urging us to trust that transformation would follow. This echoes a central truth from the Twelve Steps:
We don’t think our way into right actions. We act our way into right thinking.
That’s not anti-intellectual. It’s spiritual formation. It’s the lost art of learning and growing with childlike faith.
It’s lifting the appropriate weights to build muscle; not waiting for muscle to magically show up so we can lift the heaviest load.
And it’s precisely why the journey of discipleship must begin with surrender, not certainty.
The Disciples Never Stopped Recovering
If recovery and discipleship feel disconnected today, it’s not because they’re fundamentally different paths. Rather, it’s because we’ve sanitized the hard truth out of the story. The disciples were clearly not men of noteworthy insight or moral strength. They would not have passed as qualified candidates. They were impulsive, defensive, insecure. Yet, Jesus still called them. And their journey with him did not begin as a vocational upgrade into spiritual leadership. It was more like a slow, convoluted unraveling. A messy awakening. A recovery of trust, truth, and humility. Familiar to any addict in recovery, it was an outbreaking and irreverent exposure of character defects laid bare before an unintended audience. And Jesus walked faithfully beside them through every relapse of self-reliance, fear and ego, patiently guiding their unlearning and reforming. That was their discipleship, their recovery.
If you have ever found it troubling to answer the question of whether to first understand or to simply respond to Jesus’ invitation to discipleship, it may be helpful to look more carefully at the story of Pentecost in the book of Acts. When the Spirit comes in power to make Jesus known and real to us, we gain an incredible advantage over the disciples at the time of their calling: they lacked not in their ability to choose to follow Jesus, but in their ability to discern spiritual truth from sales pitch.
As we read through the gospels, it’s clear that mere proximity to Jesus wasn’t enough (his death and resurrection make that point fairly obvious). In fact, to be close to him was almost certainly to become utterly perplexed and exhausted. Some — perhaps the women — appeared to “get it” somewhat more so than the men who followed him most closely, but when they all saw the cross, just as Jesus had warned them, they either mourned bitterly or lied, panicked, and scattered… and they were still confounded and horrified when he appeared to them afterwards!
When the Spirit finally arrived, the composition of the conscience changed forever as discernment became anchored not in social or cultural adaptation, but in the internal compass of His indwelling presence. The truth was no longer downsampled through the relativism of human perception nor frozen by a snapshot of momentary behavior — it was personified, interwoven, and alive. The commands they once fumbled and resisted had finally become the lifeblood of their communal existence. Jesus had to leave so that the Spirit could begin to guide and breathe life into the church.
Consumerism < Conviction
But the first step of this inner transformation — the slow and painful great exchange of broken self for Spirit-fulfillment — doesn’t translate very easily into compelling narrative. In an age of storytelling, we prefer scripts that dumb down the passages of barren desert and fast forward to the promised land. Even in films about recovery, we follow characters undergoing 90 wild days of upheaval packed inside 90 hectic minutes.
Fast-food versions of transformation aren’t limited to how we recover or how we disciple. They’re baked into how we tell nearly any story. The gospel narratives themselves are eternally rich, but they certainly aren’t long winded. And in our hunger to soak up as much meaning as possible from the text and box it up for delivery, we’ve repackaged surrender as sentiment, and crucifixion as character development. We’ve made His call feel hearty… but manageable. Nowhere is this clearer than in the stories we stream, where Jesus’ hardest truths are bathed in soft lighting and tucked in with a box of Kleenex.
Narrative lenses like The Chosen have capitalized on what the Gospels leave absent, filling gaps with unashamed speculation, accessible humor and layers of back story. The result is not far from the intent: to cast emotional hooks and reel in a profitable audience. But even if it gets us thinking about Jesus more, the sentimental resonance is unlikely to net obedience, and downgrades or altogether omits the deeper and less palatable truth: discipleship is costly.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it:
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Not admire. Not empathize. Die.
The crushing cost of following Jesus is a hidden fee that The Chosen quietly buries in the fine print. Even as it builds up to the Sermon on the Mount with theatrical weight, the show can’t deliver what the Sermon actually demands. To me, Jesus’ words are anything but cinematic; they are utterly confounding. His commands do not flatter the natural mind. They heap upon it great unrest: Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Looking twice equates to adultery. Entering heaven isn’t about name-dropping Jesus, it’s about being known by him, requiring us to reveal ourselves.
Were it not for the indwelling Holy Spirit who alone parses within to “open the eyes of our heart” and help us see the timeless truth embedded in these strange statements, we would (and we do) completely mistake them for mere moral inspiration when in fact they are impossible… unless he produces the fruit in us.
Bonhoeffer again:
“The commandment of Jesus is hard — unutterably hard — for those who try to resist it. But for those who willingly submit, the yoke is easy and the burden is light.”
G.K. Chesterton made a slightly different but related observation:
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
Whether in the gritty cheap-coffee scented rooms, or in front of a polished Sunday pulpit, or perusing streamed programming, we somehow keep reiterating the same mistake: we end up assuming the path to wholeness must involve some clever combination of learning more, thinking clearer, feeling different, moving slower, or even doing less stuff. But we avoid dying. It’s either the last resort, or worse, an option we no longer consider.
Recovery is Discipleship
The Twelve Steps aren’t a rite of passage reserved for those who are morally or physically broken by addiction. Their roots trace back to the gospel itself. Celebrate Recovery very intentionally recognizes this and reframes nearly a century of Twelve Step material to echo and engage fully in the pattern Jesus laid out for anyone who would follow Him:
Step 1: Admit powerlessness → Blessed are the poor in spirit (Matt. 5:3)
Step 4: Taking moral inventory → Search me, O God, and know my heart (Psalm 139:23–24)
Step 9: Making amends → First be reconciled to your brother (Matt 5:23–24)
And of course…
Step 12: Carry the message → Go and make disciples (Matt 28:19–20)
The language may differ, but the logic is eternally and spiritually the same. These aren’t mere tools of remedy, they are the very posture and communal mission that was developed and embodied by those who literally walked with — and later died proclaiming — Jesus.
When recovery is separated from discipleship, we end up with behavior-modification therapy. We frequent rooms where vulnerability is admirable, but treated as optional. And while we strive to facilitate a safe and unhurried space for revealing our hurts, habits and hangups, we must not forget that the unveiling isn’t just helpful, it’s essential.
And when discipleship is separated from recovery, accountability turns into managed compliance. The prestige of leadership rewards image over integrity, causing sound doctrine to warp and fracture under the pressures of performance in an age of personal branding.
Recovery without discipleship flounders in sin management. Discipleship without recovery becomes rehearsed and exhausting. And storytelling without surrender becomes existential propaganda.
But when recovery is recognized as the form discipleship takes in a broken world — when surrender, confession, and amends are seen not as marks of weakness but as movements of wisdom — we recover something vital: a faith that is honest, durable, and filled to overflowing with grace.
The Foundation Beneath the Steps
Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
That isn’t graduate-level Christianity. That’s step one. We don’t move past it; we return to it daily, admitting our desperate need, relinquishing control, and clinging to his grace: the only thing that sustains us.
So if you’re in real, honest-to-goodness recovery, you’re not waiting on the sidelines of discipleship. You’re already walking the same road Jesus called every one of us to walk.
And if confession, amends, and daily, often painful surrender have seemed like tools for the desperate, or patterns you’ve either outgrown or graduated from, maybe it’s time to go deeper, not higher. Rock bottom may sound like an awful place to end up, but we find our true foundation in Jesus, the Rock on which we stand.
He came down to end the futility of our striving: the desperate climb out of shame, suffering, and the exhausting illusion that healing can be earned. It is the same age-old Tower-of-Babel instinct that turns every worldview into a religious fallacy: the belief that we can ascend to eternity by human effort and enlightenment. Nope… We can’t defy gravity (we didn’t invent it).
Discipleship, by contrast, is recovery — a daily return to surrender, not a ladder toward achievement.
The weight of all twelve steps was never ours to carry. Only the Cross could bear it… and it already has.