Churches are essential conversation partners in Canada’s addiction crisis

Across Canada, provincial leaders agree that the nation is facing a crisis of addiction but grapple with how to respond. Last year, Ontario announced that it would invest 303 million over three years to support community-led and delivered mental health programs, including turning nine Consumption and Treatment Services sites into HART Hubs, “delivering expanded recovery and treatment services to ensure timely, high-quality care for vulnerable individuals while keeping communities safe.”

I asked Quentin Genuis, physician at St. Paul’s Hospital in East Vancouver and ethicist, if these budget items are a sign that there’s a general shift in attitude towards addictions in Canada. He said yes – there used to be an “optimism” that a cure could be found, but now in healthcare, Genuis says addiction is increasingly seen as a “whole person issue”: “It’s not just about their opioid receptors in their body. It’s about their story. It’s about their culture, their personal and family history, their beliefs about the good. It’s about their skills and vocations.” 

But even so, the scale of need pushes people to seek quick action in both public and private sectors. “They want to do something,” Genius said. They’re looking for the quick fix: “you see public figures – on one day, they’re talking about safe supply. The next day, they’re talking about mandated involuntary treatment.” He recognizes the desperation that’s behind those flip-flopping policies, and the desire to do “anything that works.” “Part of what they need is cheerful conversation partners who can really patiently do the work of investing in the true fixes which are not quick or easy.” That’s where the church can come in. 

What is addiction, really? 

He spoke to Christian Courier about the difficulty in having no agreed-upon definition for addiction. Definitions range between two poles, says Genuis: the choice model (which is voluntarist and says “addiction is all about the will of the person) and the disease model (which is determinist and says “addiction is not primarily caused or perpetuated by the will of the person at all). Both of these models, Genuis believes, get some things right but reduce humans to less than they are. 

In Vancouver, Genuis mentioned, the disease model is “dogmatized.” Driving down the roads, you’ll see billboards that say: “addiction is a medical problem, stop the stigma, addiction is not a choice.” Genuis said he’s given his life to working with the people who place those billboards and that he supports their motivation to love and care for people with addiction, “but their insistence, that this is a medical problem – what they don’t realize, at times, is that they’re undercutting the agency of the people. And they’re eroding the ability of communities to recognize their role in care of persons with addiction.” 

In medical circles, the disease model is especially present: “many people I work with, well-meaning people who I have much in common with, speak as if the opposite of an opioid addiction is a methadone prescription. I’m in favour of methadone prescriptions in many cases, but that is a reductive and ultimately, in my view, depersonalizing way to speak. A methadone prescription may be a useful tool to provide a person with a measure of stability and safety from which the work of recovery can begin, but it is not the work in itself.”

In 2025, Genuis published Recovering People: Addiction, Personhood, and the Life of the Church. His book attempts to give a more robust model: a personal model. “The reason why I use the language of a personal model is from the core conviction that addiction is a phenomenon that occurs or happens to persons – whole persons, bodies, minds, spirits – not to some isolated part of the person. And the things that drive addictive behaviour are rooted in common categories of mind and behaviour that everybody shares.” 

He uses the ethical language of an ordering principle: “Everybody orders their life in terms of certain views of the good. What addiction offers to people is a powerful ordering principle for their life.” 

This is also a profoundly theological principle: “the healing of addiction has much in common with the common human sanctifying journey of displacing fruitless disordered loves with rightly ordered loves, ordering all the other lives of all the other loves of our life beneath the God who loves us.” This means that all Christians can learn from their brothers and sisters in recovery: “Many of my friends who have had severe addictions . . . are the holiest people who I know and who excel in many of the Christian virtues in ways that should be inspiring to all of us.” These friends are important role models and mentors to Genuis’ young children, too. 

Genuis hopes that this is an encouragement to churches, who often take a disease model approach and believe there’s nothing they can do about addiction. 

Finding fruitful ways to pursue good things takes community, Genius says. He offers the example of theologian and poet Christian Wiman, who discovered that poetry gave him the transcendent feeling he had looked for in opioids. Genuis believes everyone has a vocation that answers their deeper search (his is being in the ER in Vancouver’s Eastside): “But pulling those out of people takes time, it takes patient friends, it takes mentors, it takes trying and failing, it takes frustration. And if we want to be a place of healing from addiction, we need to commit to those kinds of relationships and journeys with people.”

Canada-wide responses 

This is a conversation the church can be part of, Genuis says. He’s aware some readers will think that talking about “friendship and refuge and belonging and mentorship and vocation” doesn’t sound like enough when it comes to addiction. But that’s what’s needed. “We are befriending strangers and confessing our sins and sharing our needs with others and meeting the needs of others,” Genuis says. “And we’re participating in mentorship and community groups and we’re inviting strangers into our homes and we’re willing to be hosted by other people. We respond to the addiction crisis in the same way the church responds to all crises of all times, which is by being a church, a community that points to the possibility of a healed world.”

This piece follows an earlier article: “A door to recovery” (June 2).