At Care for our City we're proud to host a Keys Recovery Group, part of The Keys Project - a church-based recovery ministry working across the UK to help people find lasting freedom from drugs and alcohol.
Keys builds recovery on three interwoven "keys":
Medical — safe, supported detox in liaison with each person's own GP or drug and alcohol service.
Spiritual — a Christ-centred 12-step programme, open to anyone open to a spiritual route to recovery, whatever their starting point of faith.
Community — a loving, long-term community of people walking the same road, connected wherever possible into the life of a local church.
If you're wrestling with addiction, or you love someone who is, this group exists for you. If you're part of our church family wondering why we give a room, a Monday evening, and our energy to this — read on. This page is really written for both of you.
Addiction affects the whole person
We don't say that to minimise the medical reality of addiction - the neurology, the withdrawal, the years it can take to rebuild a body and a life. Keys takes that seriously, which is why the medical key matters. But underneath the chemistry there's something Scripture has always named more precisely than any clinic can: the human heart is an incurable worship machine.
Augustine put it simply: God, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Calvin called the heart "a perpetual factory of idols." Both of these ancient thinkers understood something that addiction confirms every day - we were built to worship, and if we don't worship the true God, we will worship something else, and we will worship it with everything we have. Paul says the same thing in Romans 1:25 - humanity exchanges the glory of the immortal God for images, and worships and serves created things rather than the Creator. Addiction is what that exchange looks like when in real life.
That's why "just stopping" rarely works, and why willpower alone burns out. You cannot dethrone a god with a New Year's resolution. Substances, like every other idol, promise what only God can deliver - comfort, escape, belonging, control, the numbing of pain, the silencing of shame. They deliver something for a little while, which is precisely what makes them so much more dangerous than an idol that delivers nothing at all. An idol that half-works is much harder to leave than one that obviously fails. The tragedy of addiction is a person giving away everything - health, relationships, money, years - to a god that was never going to be able to pay what it promised.
The answer is personal
If addiction is disordered worship, the cure can't only be redirected behaviour. It has to be a reordering of love - the true God displacing the false one, not by force but by being more satisfying. This is the heart of the gospel: Jesus does not simply forbid our idols, he goes to the cross to free us from their power and rises to offer us something better than they ever could - himself. Recovery is not white-knuckle abstinence. It's an exchange of masters, an exchange of loves, an exchange of gods - and grace, not grit, is what makes the exchange durable.
That's also why redemption language fits addiction so well. To redeem is to buy back something that had been sold into slavery it couldn't get itself out of. Jesus doesn't meet the addict as a project to be fixed but as a person to be bought back, forgiven, and given a new master worth serving.
That is why we can genuinely talk about new beginnings. The gospel's most basic claim is that death is not the last word, and that new creation happens on the far side of things that looked terminal. Recovery, at its best, is a little parable of resurrection: a life that seemed to be ending finds itself, unexpectedly, beginning again
Twelve steps and beyond
One of the quiet gifts of the 12-step tradition - and part of why Keys can adapt it so naturally into a Christian frame rather than fighting against it - is that the steps were never neutral to begin with. Step One's admission of powerlessness, Step Two's confession that only "a power greater than ourselves" can restore sanity, Step Four's searching moral inventory, Step Five's confession to another human being, Step Eight and Nine's costly work of making amends - this is a programme built by people who had rediscovered sin, grace, confession, and restitution because reality kept insisting on them.
We don't think the steps need rescuing from secularism so much as unlocking. Bunyan or Augustine would recognise most of them immediately. What Keys does - and what we're glad to be part of in Brighton & Hove - is simply say out loud who the "Higher Power" actually is, and let the God who has been quietly at work in every honest recovery programme step forward and be worshipped by name.
What this looks like on a Monday evening
None of this is theory in the room. It's a handful of people, often exhausted by the god that has been running their life, learning again to tell the truth, to be known, to be forgiven, and to build a life around a love that doesn't run out. Some come as committed Christians. Many don't, and are never made to pretend otherwise in order to belong. All are welcome to keep coming back.
If you're struggling, you don't have to do this alone. Come as you are — we'd love to see you on a Monday.
If you're part of our church family, this is one shape our calling to remember the poor and love our neighbour takes — because idolatry doesn't only enslave "other people," and the gospel we hold out to the world is the same one we need ourselves. Get in touch: