Where the hurting find a home: Celebrate Recovery marks two years of healing in Blackwell

On Friday nights, the parking lot begins to fill outside First Christian Church long before the singing starts.

The church at 306 E. Coolidge is difficult to mistake. Its triangular structure rises in front of a swath of trees, a familiar landmark that has been part of the landscape of Blackwell for generations. For many in town, the building carries memories of childhood — summer church camps, Wednesday night gatherings, youth programs and years spent growing up beneath its roof.

But every Friday evening, it becomes something else. It becomes a place where people come carrying things.

Grief, addiction, anger, divorce, childhood trauma, loneliness, shame, memories locked away for decades and questions about God all find their way through the doors. Sometimes people simply come hungry. They are the things Celebrate Recovery collectively calls life's "hurts, habits and hang-ups," and nobody is asked to leave them outside.

Last Friday evening, dozens gathered around tables inside First Christian Church for dinner before Celebrate Recovery's weekly "Big Group" meeting. Conversations overlapped throughout the room. People smiled and embraced when they saw one another. There was talk about the approaching deer season and what a blessing successful hunters could provide in the form of venison for the Celebrate Recovery food pantry.

It felt, in many ways, like a family getting together for dinner. That is exactly what the group's leaders hope it feels like.

"The focus is on healing," Women's Leader Rebecca Littlehale said. "We really become family, and we learn how to love each other in a healthy, respectful way."    

After dinner, the group moved into the chapel. Music soon filled a room First Christian Church once used for storage but has since dedicated to Celebrate Recovery. People stood together and sang songs of worship before taking their seats. Some have been coming for years. Others once had to summon the courage simply to walk through the door. Some may not yet have said much of anything.

That's OK.

"You don't even have to share anything," Celebrate Recovery Leader, Teacher and Pastor Jason Gerhard said. "You can just listen to what everybody's going through or has been through."

Sometimes it takes weeks before someone is ready to talk. When they finally are, Gerhard said, the people around them are ready to start digging.

"If they don't open up, we can't help them," Gerhard said. "But when they open up, we're digging in. We're taking all shovels in, and we're digging in to help them."    

For Gerhard, those aren't merely words. Eight years ago, he was the person who needed help digging.

He was facing the possibility of 10 years in prison. Alcohol had become a means of coping with a life that had begun unraveling after a divorce and separation from his children. Underneath the drinking, however, was something much older. Gerhard said he had struggled with suicidal thoughts since he was 12 years old and had never received help.

"I figured out why I drank," he said.

Gerhard was offered the opportunity to enter Kay County's drug court program and began attending Celebrate Recovery. Through its step studies, he said he developed a relationship with God and returned to church after 22 years away. More importantly, he finally started talking about what had been happening inside him.

After carrying his struggle for 24 years, Gerhard began telling the men sitting beside him what he was really going through. He graduated from drug court in 13½ months and has now been free from alcohol for more than eight years. He said November will mark six years since he was freed from suicidal thoughts.

"It allowed me to open up," Gerhard said. "And now I share about it all the time."    

Today, he is one of the people waiting when somebody else walks through the door.

Celebrate Recovery began in Blackwell in October 2024, growing out of the experiences of local residents who had been attending a program in Ponca City. As the Blackwell group approaches its second anniversary, its leaders want to dispel perhaps the biggest misconception surrounding it: Celebrate Recovery is not simply a drug and alcohol recovery program.

Ministry Leader Tom Cannon estimates only 30 to 40 percent of participants come because of addiction. The rest come carrying everything else.

"Celebrate Recovery is where miracles happen every week," Cannon said. "And it is not only for people with addictions." 

The program is built around 25 Christ-centered lessons, eight recovery principles and the 12 steps, with Gerhard describing it at its core as a discipleship program rooted in Scripture. But the reasons people find themselves sitting in the room are as varied as the people themselves.    

For Christina Cassady, it began with anger. Then she began pulling at the thread.

Beneath that anger, Cassady said, she discovered experiences she thought she had already dealt with — domestic violence in her past, childhood sexual trauma and other wounds that had never really disappeared. "No wonder you're angry," she recalled realizing.

Gerhard sees that pattern repeatedly. People learn how to survive things when they are young, he said, but surviving something and healing from it aren't necessarily the same thing.

"Most of our stuff started in childhood," Gerhard said. "We couldn't talk about it. We didn't have nobody there to help us with it, so we had to carry it. And then this happened. Then we had to carry that, and then this happened, and then we fall apart."    

Celebrate Recovery tries to provide a place where people no longer have to carry it alone.

Sometimes recovery begins not by walking through the doors but simply by making it to the parking lot.

Littlehale remembers a woman who did exactly that. She arrived intoxicated and sat outside, unable or unwilling to take those last few steps. Someone went outside and brought her in. Cannon has picked up intoxicated people himself and driven them to Celebrate Recovery, and he remembers seeing one become alcohol-free within a month.    

The group's leaders are emphatic that someone does not have to get sober, straighten out their life or become "religious enough" before they are allowed inside. They can come drunk. They can come high. They can come skeptical, angry or frightened. They can come and say nothing at all.

"We're gonna love them," Cannon said. "We're gonna feed them."    

That last promise is literal. Celebrate Recovery serves dinner every Friday evening and maintains a food pantry. The organization accepts donations ranging from food and clothing to financial contributions, and its members have picked people up and driven them home when transportation stood between them and a meeting. Those participating in drug court and other court-ordered programs can also receive attendance signatures.    

Friday means Friday, too. Cannon said the group intends to be there regardless of holidays or winter weather because the needs that bring people to Celebrate Recovery don't disappear because the calendar says Christmas or snow begins falling outside.

"There's hungry people in this community, and we're going to care for them," Cannon said. 

"Everybody that comes is going to be loved and fed."   

Last week's joking about deer season, then, carried something more behind it. A deer harvested in northern Oklahoma could become meat in the pantry. A hunter's successful morning could become another family's dinner. Within Celebrate Recovery, recovery itself operates in much the same way: something one person has can become something that sustains another.

Littlehale knows something about needing other people to sustain you.

She first began attending Celebrate Recovery programs around 2000. Eventually, life took her elsewhere and she stopped going. Then her son died.

"My family didn't know what to do with me," she said.

Littlehale did. She searched for Celebrate Recovery and found a meeting.

"I dragged myself in there," she said.

More losses followed. Her husband died the following year, and she lost the family's farm. Yet somewhere in the middle of her own grief, Littlehale became a person other women began turning to.

She still sometimes struggles to understand that.

"All I see in me is mess," Littlehale said. "I'll go in a small group and I'll cry through the whole thing, and I'm thinking, 'Lord, how can you use that woman to be a leader?'"

The answer she believes she received was simple: honesty.

"And that gives other people permission to do the same."   

Littlehale is a survivor of childhood trafficking and abuse. Growing up in Maine, she believed she was alone in what had happened to her. Years of sharing her testimony taught her otherwise. She estimates she has since sponsored 30 to 40 women with similar histories and continues to sponsor women in Maine as well as five women in this area.

The power, she said, is often in hearing another person describe something you thought belonged only to you. Someone else says the words first, and suddenly you realize you might be able to say them, too.

"It's easier to talk about if other people are talking about it," Littlehale said.    

The closeness among Celebrate Recovery's leadership is readily apparent. They tease one another, interrupt each other and laugh about the ways they occasionally get on each other's nerves. Beneath the humor, though, is something they take seriously. They have learned to assume the best of one another.

"Isn't it amazing how things change whenever we start assuming the best in people?" Cannon said.

If someone's words hurt, he said, perhaps the first assumption shouldn't be malice. 

"This leadership team of C.R. in Blackwell assumes that we care for each other first."    

For Cassady, the lessons have included something deceptively difficult: allowing other people to help her. With back surgery approaching, Littlehale began talking about organizing people to care for her afterward. Cassady initially resisted. She has a husband and a son, she protested. She didn't need everyone taking care of her.

Then she caught herself.

"In this, God has taught me I have to ask for help," Cassady said. 

For a ministry built around recovery, that may be one of its simplest and most difficult lessons. Nobody gets through everything alone.

The Blackwell group itself is growing. Attendance dipped into the 20s during the summer, Cannon said, but has since climbed to around 40 on an average Friday night. 

One recent gathering brought 48 people together. 

Its presence has spread beyond Friday nights as well. Celebrate Recovery members have participated in community activities and maintained a booth at the Kay County Free Fair, where their outreach began even before the Blackwell ministry formally launched. Gerhard remembers one man who came to a cookout they promoted through the fair.

"He hasn't left us since," Gerhard said. 

First Christian Church has given Celebrate Recovery its own chapel, which seats approximately 80 people, and provides regular financial support to the ministry. Leaders eventually hope to expand programming for children and teenagers, giving young people tools for confronting pain before they spend decades carrying it into adulthood.

This Friday will bring something different to the chapel. Singer-songwriter Heather Layne will perform a free concert at First Christian Church on Oct. 9, with dinner at 5:45 p.m. and the concert beginning at 6:30 p.m.

Layne's story makes her a fitting guest for the ministry. The singer-songwriter shares during her concerts how she overcame domestic abuse and the effects of trauma. 

According to promotional materials, Layne found an outlet through music while working through a 12-step recovery program and Christian-based ministries, with songwriting becoming a form of therapy. 

Later this month, Celebrate Recovery will mark two years in Blackwell, including an anniversary celebration Oct. 16 and a special service at First Christian Church on Oct. 18.  

Then the celebrations will pass, and another Friday will come.

The parking lot outside that familiar triangular church will begin filling again. Food will be served. People will embrace. Someone will probably make somebody else laugh. Someone may sing loudly. Someone else may sit quietly and listen.

And somewhere in Blackwell, there may be a person who has spent years believing whatever happened to them is too ugly to talk about, that whatever habit controls them is too powerful to escape or that they need to fix themselves before they are worthy of walking through a church door.

The people gathered beneath that familiar roof would tell them otherwise, because many of them once believed the same thing.

Celebrate Recovery doesn't promise that walking through the door makes the hurt disappear. What waits inside is, at first, something much simpler: a meal, a chair, someone willing to listen and the possibility that whatever a person has been carrying alone doesn't have to be carried alone anymore.