Drew Powell spent twenty years hiding at the highest levels of ministry, and the last several learning what it took to stop.
He is a former pastor, an author, a Pastoral Sex Addiction Professional, and the founder of Awake Collective. He wrote a book about what he found. This is the shortest version of the story that is still honest.
For most of his twenty years in ministry, the first thing Drew did on Sunday morning was throw up.
Not every Sunday. Enough of them that it stopped surprising him. Somewhere between the shampoo and the hot water running out, his body would start rejecting the day. And then he would keep getting ready. He would towel off, go over the sermon, walk downstairs, and be on the moment he reached the first person at the bottom of the stairs. Warm. Quick with a joke. The performance started in the lobby, not on the stage.
Sit with that for a second. A man throwing up before work every week, and the two people who knew about it both decided it was normal.
From the book
The two people were Drew and his wife Jamie. They had been married since Drew was nineteen. They filed it under the cost of doing ministry, and neither of them said a word about it for years.
That, more or less, is the whole book in one paragraph. What kept getting called the cost of doing ministry was, in fact, a slow kind of dying. Drew did not know that yet. Nobody around him could see it, because he was very good at hiding, which is what a growing church rewards and what pulpits are practically designed to enable.
It ended in 2022, the way that particular kind of hiding always ends.
There was an intervention. A treatment center in Colorado. Ninety days. A group of men Drew had never met, who slowly became the closest thing to church he had ever attended. The sobriety date is August 1, 2022, and it also happens to be the date of the worst day of his family's life, which is either a cruel bit of scheduling or the whole gospel in date form, and Drew has stopped believing it is the first one.
He lost the job. He lost the platform. He lost the church he had spent a decade building. He nearly lost the marriage, and did not, though the saving of it took years and belongs to Jamie to tell in her own words when she is ready. Four kids watched their father come apart, and then watched him spend the next several years learning how to come back together in a way that did not require them to perform their own recovery on his schedule.
“The performer, the projection, the twenty-five-foot version, the hider, that man went into the creek, and what came up was just me, dripping, forty-one years old, surrounded by every person who had blocked a door or sent a note or made a phone call to keep me alive long enough to get there.
From the epilogue
The creek was outside Franklin, Tennessee. It was one year after the crash. Drew was baptized again, by a priest named Chad Jarnigan, in front of the people who had done the digging. He had been baptized as a child, and he does not disown a drop of that water. But this one was different. The man going in this time had actually died.
I was sick, not evil.
Awake Collective is what Drew has done with the years since. It is a resource for churches, and for the people inside them, built out of the specific thing he needed and could not find: a bridge between the church and the treatment world, run by someone who has stood in both rooms and can carry language across.
Drew has spent the years since the crash doing three things at once. Learning to be married to Jamie in the version of the marriage they now have, which is different than the one they lost and, by both of their accounts, honest for the first time. Serving with Valiant Living, the treatment program that gave him the tools he now teaches, and where he continues to work in ambassador capacity. And writing the book that Awake Collective now organizes around.
The book is called Everyone's Medicating Something. It is the story above, told long. It is also a book about you, and everyone you know, and the medicine cabinets we all keep stocked and rarely look at directly. It is forthcoming.
Drew is a Pastoral Sex Addiction Professional through the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals. He is a Certified Enneagram Guide. He serves in an ambassador capacity with Valiant Living, a residential and outpatient treatment program in Colorado. He hosts the Loving Leverage podcast, presented by Valiant Living. His story has been featured on I Gotta Ask with Annie F. Downs, a Wonder Project original streaming on Prime Video.
He lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with Jamie and their four children.
Everything Drew does is downstream of one sentence he did not know he was going to write until he wrote it, and now cannot stop saying.
Everyone's medicating something, and nobody has to keep doing it alone.
The room where that stops being true for a person is often, in the church world, exactly one floor down from where they are sitting on Sunday. Sometimes it is across a kitchen table they have not sat at in months. Sometimes it is a treatment center in Colorado. Occasionally it is a folding chair on a Tuesday night, or a note card with a joke on it slid under a door. Awake Collective exists to shorten the distance between the person who needs that room and the room itself.
That is the whole work.
The story above is the shortest version. The full one is the book.