BANGOR, Maine — This time last year, Eddie Silguero, 33, was in the hospital recovering from a drug overdose — again.
The Blue Hill man had used opiates illegally for a decade, after starting to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana when he was 13. He had been through rehab several times, but Silguero always went back to the drugs.
“I was at the point where I was willing to try anything to get well,” he said last month. “My mom’s pastor suggested I talk to Pastor Bobby Bledsoe at City Reach Church in Bangor.”
Silguero lived for nine months in a rented house in Bangor with other addicts as part of City Reach’s recovery program. He said he graduated last month clean and sober and on a new path. What made the difference this time “was the whole God factor,” he said.
Silguero is one of 16 people over the past two years who have graduated from the City Reach program, according to Bledsoe.
“I can’t overcome this addiction on my own,” Silguero said. “I need someone to lean on. Now, I realize that I can do it with Him.”
Bledsoe knows what it’s like to live from one fix to the next. A former gang member and drug addict who bounced in and out of jail in his native New Jersey, Bledsoe, 37, of Bangor has traveled through the drug epidemic plaguing Maine’s small and midsize towns.
He says he also has the “cure” — a God-centered program that gives recovering addicts the tools they need to be productive members of society and spread the “good news” of the Gospel.
“The Lord gave me a vision to reach the ones nobody wants, and he’d give me the ones everybody wants in return,” he said recently. “I’ve always wanted to be in the darkest places so we could be the greatest light.”
Since starting City Reach Church two years ago, Bledsoe said he has helped dozens of addicts turn their lives around, without relying on substitute medications or government dollars.
“We don’t allow methadone or Suboxone, nor psychotropic medication,” he said. “We go cold turkey.”
Participants, City Reach, other Assembly of God churches and donations from individuals support the recovery program financially. There is no set cost to participate, but individuals contribute what they can based on income, Bledsoe said.
City Reach also does not use the familiar 12-step program followed by Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous.
“We don’t do it the NA way or the AA way,” said Bledsoe, who said he found Christ in 2004. “We do it the faith-based way of teaching men and women that they are no longer a drug addict, they are no longer an alcoholic. I try to really get that into their minds, have them speak that over themselves, so they can see themselves in a new light. Our motto is, ‘Reach the one who is far from God, and help them become a passionate follower of Jesus Christ.’”
Bledsoe said 86 percent of the addicts who have entered the nine-month recovery program graduated, all without the use of an opioid substitute. The other 14 percent left the program because of a relapse or for personal reasons.
In a state with a well-documented drug addiction problem, word has spread and the City Reach ministry is expanding.
Over the past two years, City Reach has been housed temporarily in 10 locations in or near downtown Bangor, all of which the congregation outgrew. Now headquartered in the former YMCA on Hammond and Court streets, Bledsoe has an option to buy the building for $1.7 million from New England School of Dental Technology . Bledsoe said it has been important for the church to be close to downtown and city’s poorer neighborhoods.
Once the funds are raised, he hopes to move his recovery program, now located in four rented houses where men and women live separately, into the red brick building. The pastor said he expected the building could serve between 40 and 50 people.
“The vision for this building is to be the City Reach Hope Center, a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week church where anytime anybody who’s looking for help, whether they’re prostitutes, drug addicts, gang members or just somebody who’s broken and hurt from life, will be able to knock on the door and find help. We are asking the community to help invest in lives being changed,” he said.
Bangor is not the only community in which Bledsoe has found a demand for his church’s program.
In September, City Reach launched 10 satellite churches in Ellsworth, Old Town, Bath, Oxford, Belfast, Auburn, Lewiston, Augusta, Presque Isle and Essex Junction, Vermont. All have pastors and homes for recovery, with Bledsoe supervising their activities and with the same vision of “reaching lost people.” Most of the locations are staffed by people who graduated from Bledsoe’s recovery program or are ministers ordained by the Assembly of God denomination.
Bledsoe described City Reach Church as “an evangelical, Bible-teaching church.” Services are relatively informal and structured with a praise and worship segment at the beginning, an offering, a sermon by Bledsoe, an altar call at the end, and opportunities for testimony by those who have graduated from the recovery program.
The men and women in the program wake up at 7 a.m. for breakfast, then meet at 8 a.m. at the church for devotions, according to the pastor. They work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. either at paying jobs or volunteer jobs in the community. They also attend church services two or three times per week, and do outreach to those living on the streets.
“Our focus is on taking the addict and [having] them focus on others instead of themselves,” he said. “We do faith-based counseling.”
Patricia Kimball, executive director of Wellspring, an addiction counseling and outpatient center in Bangor, said “there are many roads to recovery including those that are faith-based.”
Because addiction is a medical condition, for safety and ethical reasons, she prefers to refer people to programs with state-licensed professionals who perform medical assessments and offer treatment.
Bledsoe said that although he is not licensed by the state to do counseling, he is a licensed minister through his denomination and trained as a faith-based counselor, as are most pastors, priests and rabbis.
Statistics comparing the success rate of faith-based and secular recovery programs do not exist, according to Rachel Steidl in the communications office of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a federal agency located in Maryland.
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted in 2005, examined the relationship between religious service attendance and beliefs and substance use by adults. It found that adults who reported their religious beliefs are a very important part of their lives were less likely to have used cigarettes, alcohol or illegal drugs in the past month than those who reported faith as not very important to them.
Bledsoe graduated in 2008 from Faith School of Theology in Charleston, then left Maine to work in Baltimore as a youth pastor. In 2011, he said he felt called to return to Maine, though he wasn’t born and raised here. He worked as a car salesman during the week and preached “here and there on Sundays.”
“I felt this burning,” he said. “I felt the Lord wanted me to reach the ones nobody wants, the person that may never come to church, or, the person that’s far from God. So, in 2013, I took a step of faith and quit my job and just started walking down the street handing out waters and hot dogs with me and my kids and loving on people.”
It was during those walks through the downtown section of Bangor that he encountered people addicted to drugs and alcohol who were as hopeless as he once was.
If the church is successful in buying and renovating the YMCA building, Bledsoe would put the word “Christian” back into a space used by an organization that over the last 50 years de-emphasized its religious roots.
“It means a lot to our older worshippers and supporters to have the YMCA become a church,” he said. “This speaks to them in a language I don’t understand, but I do find it ironic that this used to be a Christian establishment.”
Using the YMCA building as an outreach center would be allowed under the city’s zoning rules if he meets certain code requirements, such as installing a sprinkler system similar to those in motels, he said.
It might be more complicated than that, according to Tanya Emery, community and economic development director.
While it’s zoned for residential uses, “the question is about how the residential uses are constructed — rooming houses, efficiency apartments, boarding houses, etc. — these things all have different standards under the code,” she wrote in an email.
In mid-October, City Reach added an 8 a.m. Sunday service to relieve the crowded 10:30 a.m. service that was drawing nearly 200 worshippers. Services also are held Thursday and Sunday evenings.
“Thursday night is our outreach,” he said. “We drive around to all the homeless shelters, our recovery houses, all the homeless camps, anywhere there’s homeless or just hurting people. We bring them in. We cook a potluck meal, we feed everybody and we preach the gospel to them and then we’ll take them back home. During the wintertime we’ll give them socks and hats. We just really reach out to our community.”
Ali McLaughlin, 21, of Old Town was in an abusive relationship and using drugs when she dropped into a City Reach service.
“God just got a hold of me,” she said. “I was depressed, anxious and addicted to drugs. Through God’s love, I realized that I did not have to stay in the place.”
McLaughlin said she wants to bring other women to Christ who are struggling with alcohol, drugs and abuse.
Silguero said he seeks to give young people the tools he did not have as a teenager to avoid using drugs and alcohol.
“That’s why we do what we do — to see the joy in someone who was once overtaken by their bad choices now have a new lease on life. They are some of the most faithful people you’ll find because someone gave them a chance,” Bledsoe said.