Beyond Abstinence: Recovery as Christian Formation—A Wesleyan-Holiness Account of Grace, Agency, and Ecclesial Responsibility

This article asks how Wesleyan-Holiness theology can account for sustained recovery without spiritualizing substance use disorder or reducing recovery to abstinence and clinical stabilization. Using Richard Osmer’s four practical-theological tasks, it places addiction medicine and recovery research in disciplined dialogue with Scripture and Wesleyan accounts of grace, formation, and holy love. The article’s distinct contribution is to join conversations that usually remain separate: constrained agency, responsible grace, formative practice, and bounded ecclesial care. It argues that sustained recovery, considered theologically, is a graceenabled reformation of agency within truthful, accountable, and sustaining community. Agency is treated as real but graded and socially conditioned; prevenient grace is not equated with willpower or a clinical mechanism. The means of grace are distinguished from treatment and recovery supports, and sanctification from symptom-free stability. After addressing objections concerning severe impairment, blame, the brain-disease model, and enabling, the article proposes accountability without disposability as an ecclesial norm: churches should tell the truth, protect those at risk, refer beyond their competence, preserve appropriate belonging, and never confuse forgiveness with automatic reconciliation, restored trust, or reinstatement.