Many pastors can relate to Dave Browning's former "addiction."

Dave's high didn't come from a bottle or a needle, but from those Sunday mornings when a big crowd packed his church, everything went just right and he hit the ball out of the park with another power-packed sermon. The need for that rush nearly destroyed everything Dave cared about.

"I had to admit my first addiction was to ministry and to church leadership," says Dave, pastor of Christ the King Community Church (Burlington, WA). "Ministry was more important to me than my family, and even more important to me than God. It was in the way of my love for God."

As the years went by, Dave's addiction to ministry
spawned other relational and personal problems. When he finally hit rock-bottom, Dave found the courage to seek help in a strange place for a pastor--in a 12-step group.

"It was like a bad joke . . . a pastor, sitting in an AA meeting," Dave says. "That's where they confess all their sins, right? I thought I wouldn't need all of that. But I realized in that group how broken I was. I had no idea the stuff in me that was not redeemed and healthy."

Dave's story highlights a powerful trend in some of America's leading churches--a shift toward triaging the wounded, helping them deal with their sources of pain and walking with them through the winding, bumpy road to recovery and restoration.

While churches that lead the way in recovery ministry still address the long-standing destructive paths of alcoholism and drug abuse, many of those churches are paving the way by addressing the gamut of life's hard curves that bring devastation and despair.

"Recovery is not about 'those people,' the ones who are seen as really having problems--it is about all of us," says Liz Swanson, director of recovery ministry leadership communities for Leadership Network. "At different times in our lives, each of us will be faced with the need to experience healing."

A growing number of U.S. congregations are developing multi-tiered and multi-staffed efforts aimed at offering a place of compassion and hope at the deepest points of need. Innovators in church recovery ministries are providing help through seminars, small groups and counseling ministries for everything from applause and adrenaline to workaholism and worry--with some powerful driving forces behind it all.

Call it the motivation behind the movement. Church leaders are discovering it isn't just the tattooed alcoholic hitting bottom who needs help. These congregations are responding by making restoration ministries a common thread in much of what they pursue as a congregation.

"We've mainstreamed recovery," says Robert Emmitt of Community Bible Church (San Antonio, TX). "We don't want recovery to be a secret ministry in a back room on an off night of the week, or some secret society."

Robert was motivated to cultivate a recovery culture in his congregation because of statistics such as this one: According to a Barna survey (Aug. 14, 2006), one out of every eight adult Americans say they are "dealing with an addiction that personally haunts them." Some would put the number of people who are dealing with pain, difficulty or loss as high as 40 or 50 percent.

"When I look at our congregation and know that out of 10,000 people, at least 1,000 are probably struggling with some type of serious addiction or hurt in their life--and probably even more than that--we have to do something about it," Robert says.

For Jorge Acevedo and other church leaders like him, the focus on recovery at Grace United Methodist Church (Cape Coral, FL) came from a simple desire to care for people who were being left behind.

"An old Baptist preacher taught me a prayer: 'Lord, bring us the people nobody else wants and nobody else sees,' " Jorge says. That focus turned Grace into a thriving multi-site congregation with recovery ministry at the center of all of its locations.

"It set the tone for who we are as a church," Jorge adds. "It's not a style thing; it's a substance thing. This is not just for the down-and-out. We have six-figure attorneys who are very empty and are trying to fill the void with things that are destroying them. This is a way we can offer a place where people can come and get well."