You put an untrained volunteer alone in a room with someone in crisis, and you called it ministry

I've done it. That's why I can write the sentence.

He had nine months clean and he was better with people than anyone on my team. He'd been where they'd been. He knew the words. When a family came to me in a mess I couldn't untangle, pointing them toward him felt like wisdom rather than convenience.

Nobody trained him. Nobody agreed with him in advance what he would and wouldn't do. Nobody supervised him, nobody kept a record, and nobody would have noticed if his own recovery had started to thin out while he carried somebody else's.

He was doing exactly what I asked. The question was never about him. It was about what I had asked of him, and whether I had any business asking it.

Nobody decides this

That's what makes it so common. No church holds a meeting and resolves to place an untrained person alone with someone in crisis. It arrives by accretion.

Someone in recovery starts attending. They're good with people — genuinely, unusually good, in a way that's obvious within a fortnight. A family turns up in trouble and you're out of your depth, so you introduce them. It goes well. You do it again.

Eighteen months later there's a man in your congregation seeing four or five people a week, some of them in real crisis, and there is no record anywhere that this is happening. He has become your addiction ministry, and nobody ever said so out loud.

Every step was reasonable. The accumulated position would have been obviously unacceptable if anyone had described it at the start.

What actually goes wrong

This is the part I want to be precise about, because "it might go wrong" is a useless warning. The failures in peer support are specific, well documented, and they follow a pattern.

Here is the thing that should stop us. None of these announce themselves. From the outside, every single one looks like exceptional dedication. The man heading for collapse and the man doing this well look identical from the third row on a Sunday morning. That's precisely why he needed someone watching who knew what to look for, and why he could never have assessed it himself.

The question I couldn't answer

A safeguarding lead asked me something once that I still think about.

If it went wrong tomorrow, what would you show the insurer?

Not what would I say. What would I show. What document existed, anywhere, evidencing that I had assessed this man's readiness, agreed limits with him, supervised him, recorded concerns, and reviewed whether the arrangement was still safe.

The answer was nothing. There was no file. There was no policy. There was a good man, a real need, and my judgement — and my judgement, it turned out, had never been written down because it had never actually been made. I had drifted into it.

I don't raise the insurer to make this a legal matter. I raise it because the question exposes something a moral argument doesn't. Most of us can tell ourselves our intentions were sound. Very few of us can produce a file.

The lived experience isn't the problem

I want to be careful here, because this can easily read as an argument against using people in recovery. It's the opposite.

People in recovery are the most effective helpers in this field, and it isn't close. They recognise what a clinician cannot. They've used the same words, told the same lies, made the same promises and broken them on the same Tuesday. When someone in crisis hears I have been where you are, something happens that no amount of professional training reproduces.

That's a rare asset. Rare assets get protected, not deployed casually.

The people most at risk of being damaged by this work are the same people best equipped to do it.

That is the whole problem in one sentence. The qualities that make someone extraordinary at sitting with a person in crisis — the empathy, the recognition, the refusal to give up — are the same qualities that carry them past every sensible limit.

They don't need less responsibility. They need a structure that makes the responsibility survivable.

What good actually looks like

It's less than most churches fear and more than most are doing.

And one more, which I've come to think is the load-bearing one.

Somebody has to be willing to be unpopular. The whole structure rests on a supervisor who can say you're not ready yet to a man he likes and has been praying for, and who won't be talked out of it. If the obvious person for that role finds it hard, choose someone else, however experienced they are.

The answer that's allowed

I'll finish with the one I didn't expect to write.

At the end of any proper process, somebody from your church has to sign their name to a statement that this person is safe to sit alone with a vulnerable adult in crisis.

If you're not willing to be in a position to make that judgement, don't place anyone.

That's a perfectly legitimate answer. It's a far better answer than the arrangement most of us have now, which is a good man, a real need, and no one watching. Declining to run something properly is not a failure of faith. It's the recognition that the person you'd be placing deserves better than your good intentions, and so does the person they'd be sitting with.

I got there late. He was fine — he's still sober, still helping, now properly supervised and rather better at it than he was. That outcome was luck, and I've stopped being comfortable calling luck providence.