Ericka Andersen’s test fits in one sentence, and it is aimed at the person who has had no crisis but keeps wondering anyway. Andersen, a writer who spent about twenty years in what she calls a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol while staying active in church, puts it this way: “If you don’t have a question, you probably don’t have a problem. But like, if you do have a question, that means there may be a little nudge there to think a little more deeply about this.”
The wondering is the signal. It is not a diagnosis, and it does not demand that you quit tonight. It is a reason to look closer. What follows is about what looking closer involves, and why sincere Christians often avoid it for years.
Permission Is the Wrong Place to Start
Christians tend to turn this subject into a debate about whether drinking is allowed, as Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, observes. If drinking is not a sin, the reasoning goes, anything short of drunkenness must be fine. Someone mentions the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine (John 2:1–11). Someone else brings up Paul’s counsel to Timothy: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (1 Timothy 5:23).
Those texts matter. Cana is narrative, and it shows that Jesus did not treat wine as unclean. Paul’s line to Timothy is personal advice to one man about his health, not a general command to drink. Read in context, neither passage condemns alcohol. Neither one settles whether your own drinking is healthy.
Scripture is just as plain on the other side:
“And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18).
Paul also gives a principle that fits this question closely:
“All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any” (1 Corinthians 6:12).
In older English, expedient means beneficial. Paul is asking more than what is permitted. He is asking what is good for him and what might start to rule him.
Andersen does not think drinking is sinful in itself. She agrees it is often treated as a matter of personal freedom, and she adds that it is also a matter of personal conviction. Each believer has to bring their own relationship with alcohol to God and ask whether they are using it rightly. She also refuses to call alcohol harmless. “It’s not just a benign substance. It’s not just like grape juice,” she says. It affects the mind and can dull discernment. One beer will not make you reckless, but the substance deserves to be taken seriously. You can be right that drinking is allowed and still be caught in a pattern you would not choose with clear eyes.
Why the Question Counts, and Where the Test Stops
Andersen’s test can sound too simple. Plenty of conscientious people worry about everything. But she does not say the question proves anything. She says it is worth evaluating, and that evaluating does not mean you must stop drinking right now. The question opens an investigation. If you are simply anxious by temperament, honest looking will show that, and you can set the worry down. If something real is there, looking will show that too. The one response her test rules out is waving the question away and hoping it fades.
Her own story shows why waving it away is the real danger. She started drinking in high school. Addiction runs in her family, and she says she knew early that something was a little off about the way she drank. In her twenties she drank irresponsibly, made choices she would never have made sober and pushed aside the conviction she felt. “I used the excuse of youth not to deal with it,” she says. The question did not leave. It waited and grew heavier.
The test also has a limit worth naming. It is one woman’s hard-won rule of thumb, not a clinical standard, and it depends on self-report. It works for people who are still asking. Some people have serious problems and never ask at all, because denial is very good at silencing the question. If you have never wondered, but a spouse, a friend or your doctor has raised it, their question deserves the same honest look as your own. That is one reason outside voices matter so much in Andersen’s account. They can see what the drinker has trained themselves not to see.
For a believer, the inner question can also be part of an answered prayer. The psalmist asks:
“Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23–24).
That is a request to be examined, not a demand for self-punishment. Andersen keeps returning to the word convictionbecause, as she says, it seems the most accurate term when you are talking about believers.
What Is the Drink Doing for You?
Once you agree to look, the most useful question is not how much you drink. It is what the drink is doing for you.
Andersen observes that “labels often prevent people from getting help.” People who do not match their own picture of an alcoholic decide they are fine. The word that described her best was self-medication. She drank for anxiety, for stress and to numb out. She puts it bluntly: “I take a Tylenol for a headache, I take wine for my anxiety.” The comparison exposes how she was using wine: as a dose, taken for a symptom, with an expected effect.
She draws the line around purpose. Drinking with a meal is one thing. Using alcohol to do a job beyond that is where she expects trouble. Then comes a gut check: can you take it or leave it? If having wine or not having it in the evening leaves you upset, notice that. “We shouldn’t be emotional about alcohol,” she says. A strong reaction to missing a drink points to a deeper root.
She also warns how gradually this can happen. Alcohol, she says, “can overtake you slowly and then very quickly.” So she suggests keeping track of your drinking even when it does not feel like a real problem yet. No one can predict which hard season will push a manageable habit over a line.
Looking Without Condemning Yourself
Andersen’s practical advice lets a person be aware without becoming legalistic. First, look back. How was alcohol presented in your home growing up? What did your parents think about it? Is there addiction in your family? That history helps explain how you got where you are, and it gives you wisdom about the next step.
Second, keep a record of when you drink and why. She describes it as “looking at your life and the way that you drink as data,” rather than a ruling on whether you are good or bad. Patterns appear when they are written down, and decisions can follow from what you find.
Third, and she treats this as most important, watch your posture:
“The most important thing is to not be condemning of yourself, but to be curious and open and to pray that God would open your heart and mind to what he has to say to you about it.”
— Ericka Andersen
This is the center of her approach. Condemnation feels like taking sin seriously, but it usually ends the inquiry early. Someone who expects to hear I’m bad has every reason not to look closely. Curiosity keeps the person looking long enough to see what is there. Grace is what makes honesty possible.
How a Bible Study Leader Hid It for Twenty Years
From the outside, Andersen’s life showed no sign of a struggle. She went on mission trips, volunteered in the church nursery and led Bible study. “Nobody would’ve told you that that was a problem for me,” she says.
She held both lives by keeping her addiction in a separate compartment from her faith, and then she corrects the idea that this was ever possible, “as if you can’t be a whole person at all times.” The person leading the study and the person drinking to manage anxiety were the same person. The effort to keep them apart was part of the problem.
She believes Christian women carry an extra layer of fear and shame here, with reputations to uphold, and that many are very good at hiding. The more spiritual your public role, the more an admission feels like a threat to everything people believe about you.
The turn came in her thirties, after having children and becoming more aware of her own mortality. She began to ask whether she wanted to struggle with this for the rest of her life, and then became curious about whether freedom was possible, though it did not seem so. She is now five years sober.
She offers a reframe that removes shame without excusing anything. In addiction, Andersen says, “we are seeking good things.” She describes them as the good things God has for our lives, and then she adds: “We’ve been seeking them in the wrong thing.” Rest, peace and relief are not shameful desires. The source is the problem. That is why Andersen insists that “alcohol is not more wrong or more shameful than anything else” people run to.
Honesty Works in a Small, Chosen Circle
The most consistent mark of failure in Andersen’s story was trying alone. Her early attempts to quit had no support and no one told. Of white-knuckling it by yourself, she says, “I don’t know anybody that that’s worked for.”
What changed things was a group of people who knew. In an online support group she could join quietly, at first without showing her face, and just listen. The people ranged from a young single mother to an older man with decades of sobriety. Knowing that a hundred people on a call had not had a drink that day gave her strength, and it changed how she saw herself. “It doesn’t make you abnormal, it doesn’t make you immoral, it doesn’t make you unethical,” she says of the struggle. It makes you a person dealing with a broken world and trying to do better.
Scripture assumes the same pattern: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2), and “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). Neither verse promises a quick cure. Both place healing among people, and among people who can be trusted with the truth. Andersen, who shares a great deal publicly, still says a smaller circle is usually safer while you are working through it, since “people should sort of earn the right to hear your story.”
Where you sit on the spectrum shapes who belongs in that circle. Andersen distinguishes between a rough habit and feeling unable to quit. If you are closer to the second, include a doctor or counselor, because stopping heavy daily drinking can be medically serious. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith. God works through trained clinicians as well as through friends who pray.
SAMHSA National Helpline (free, confidential, 24/7): 1-800-662-4357
Andersen wrote her book because she could not find recovery resources that kept Christ at the center, and in her view, “when you’re a Christian and Christ is not part of the recovery plan, it’s not complete.” That is what the persistent question was for. It never meant you were disqualified. It was an invitation to stop managing the struggle in private and bring all of yourself, the hidden part included, to God and to a few people who will stand with you.
Quick Answers
What if I tell someone and then drink again? Andersen says this fear held her back too, and she urges people not to let it stop them. Many people slip and still have a group to return to. Recovery is rarely one and done. “You are not gonna get there until you get here first,” she says.
Do I need to announce this publicly? No. Fields notes how social media pushes people to announce every change and then prove they have kept it. A few trusted people are enough, and usually safer early on.
I’ve been hurt by church. Does community have to mean church? Fields says “community could be outside of church environments.” Andersen spent about two years in a secular group, the Luckiest Club, and found it helpful before she wanted something more faith-based.
Does wondering mean I have to quit? Not by itself. Andersen treats the question as a reason to explore honestly, through prayer, tracking your drinking and looking at your history, and then to decide from what you find.