Into the Local Church
One of the things that we believe in at Finding the Family is transplanting our families into the local church.
All the things that we do, agree with what is being taught at the local church. Every Wednesday night, we get the pleasure of taking our families into a ministry called Living Free. It starts out with a 12 step Christ-based curriculum. And so the 12 steps of AA and NA actually agree with scripture. The whole dynamic of Living Free is based on three resources – The Word of God, the Spirit of God and the People of God.
WORD OF GOD
So the Word of God is how I became a Christian. I explained my story on this a few weeks ago, but it was in the book of Nehemiah, chapter 9 when I heard God speak to me through His Word. We can take what we think we know and we can measure it against something that is Holy, which is His Word.
THE SPIRIT OF GOD
I always say that I didn’t come to know Christ because of the rules. I came to know Christ because his Spirit drew me in. I like to put it like this – so, there’s this comedian, his name is Michael Jr. He says the Holy Spirit has another name. “Something” told me something… I felt “something”… And it’s that nudging that we recognize as we develop in our walk with the Lord and that is the Holy Spirit.
THE PEOPLE OF GOD
I can make excuses to justify what I want to do sometimes or why I feel a certain way. And it’s really great to sit around groups of people, and they are your eyes. So as I say something that I think it’s profound and I have just justified a feeling that I have, a facilitator is there not to teach but to facilitate. The people of God are there to help support you and to be your eyes and your ears when you’re really not tuned into that. Because we’re used to putting our best face forward and putting our excuses up for our behaviors.
4 D’S FOR OVERCOMING ADDICTION IN LIVING FREE
- Deliverance is learn how to believe in, and receive the delivering power of God.
- Dependence is to remain and abide in Christ to reproduce his character.
- Devotion is to learn to hate the sin that hurts us and love God who saves us. (Many times we do not hate the sin that hurts us, we just hate the consequences).
- Discipline is the result of dependence on the Holy Spirit, called self control.
If there is a formula for anything it is this: TRUTH + FAITH + OBEDIENCE = VICTORY!!
FINDING THE FAMILY
The moment that God put the idea for Finding the Family in my heart and in my husband’s heart was actually at the same time but we didn’t know it. Each of us had the same prompting from the Holy Spirit, individually. As we watched people walk into Living Free, many times, they were literally just barely making it there. So there was no homework done, there was no thought processes going into the night, and we just thought, “Man. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just hold her hands all the way through the week. Wouldn’t it be great to tell them how important it is to open that book.” So we started Finding the Family almost 10 years later. We have always come back in our church to this ministry that ministers to those people who are forgotten. When they decide to come into the doors of the church and they decide to sit down and think about this healing thing, maybe aren’t all the way in, but when they get it, then they understand the safety of having a ministry to go to and people that understand them.
If our participants are struggling with something in a curriculum, we love it when they bring their books to us and they ask us questions. We want them to understand and know how to apply what they’re learning to their daily life. So we get to walk with them and hold their hands not only on Wednesday nights but through their whole week. So that’s how we take a family, transplant them into the local church, and take them strategically into an area of the safety of the church, called Living Free.