The St. Dimitrie Program

I mentioned Floyd in previous posts, who has become the 'godfather' (in the not-kneecap-breaking sense of the word!) of Orthodox recovery programs.  Here is a link to his OCMC page:

http://www.ocmc.org/missionaries/missionary_profile.aspx?MissionaryId=4

Floyd is responsible for getting the Church of Romania to recognize the effectiveness of the 12-Step program for the treatment of alcoholism, and now his materials are being integrated into the seminary curriculum in Romania's schools and he has been tasked with training thousands of Romanian priests in how to establish AA groups in their villages and towns.

The Romanian Church is also working to set up in- and out-patient treatment programs which use the Minnesota Model for clinical treatment.  Gradually, Patriarch Daniel of Bucharest (who has supported Floyd's work from the beginning when he was Metropolitan of Iasi) is getting the entire Church to embrace Floyd's work.

In 2008, I spent a few weeks with Floyd and we did trainings in three cities.  It was really amazing to see the openness that the clergy had towards what we were talking about once we got past the terminological problems.  American recovery programs have a whole bunch of terms that Romanians either don't understand or misunderstand, and so we first had to unpack the whole 12 Step model in Orthodox terms.

As this blog develops, I will be posting Floyd's work on this topic.  Floyd has already written a book for the Romanian Church which has been officially adopted by the BOR as a definite source on addictions recovery.