Why TurnBack?
Our Founder, Paul Zunker, struggled with Pornography for decades to the point where it became an addiction for him. As a result, he allowed his sexual sin to became deeper to the point where it spilled over off of the computer screen and into his real life where he crossed the line into illegal activity which resulted in Paul spending 4 months in jail and his marriage coming to an end. After realizing that he desperately needed help and that he needed to get his relationship with God radically turned around, Paul began intensive counseling and treatment for his addiction and plugged himself into a Pure Desire group at his church. After 3 ½ years of going through those programs, Paul was walking in freedom and sobriety and felt a calling on his life to help other men break free from sexual sin and addictions, teach them how to keep sexual sin from getting ahold of them in the first place and point people to Jesus Christ either for the first time or again after they have become stuck in sin.
Our team at TurnBack Ministries is made up of people who have been through their own sexual addiction or bondage or whose spouse was in an addiction and found freedom through Jesus Christ. This allows the men and women coming through our programs to relate to our staff in a very personal way and helps them develop a deeper trust with us as they know that we can relate to the exact position they are in, because we’ve been there. The personal stories of victory that our staff can share bring new-found hope to these men and women because they can see that it is possible to find freedom and healing. All of our staff and volunteers also have a heart for evangelism and use the platform of pornography and sexual sin prevention and education to open doors to talk to people about Jesus Christ.
We will be using the 7-Pilalrs of Freedom curriculum from Pure Desire Ministries and the Conquer Series from KingdomWorks Studios as the foundation for our men’s program and the 8-Pilalrs of Freedom from Pure Desire along with the Conquer Series for our women’s program along with various supplemental materials from Faithful & True Ministries. After evaluating other curriculums out there, we decided that the materials from Pure Desire and Faithful & True are the best fit for TurnBack Ministries to use because they incorporate all the areas that a person needs to address to break free from an addiction; neurological, psychological and most importantly, spiritual. There are many ministries out there who have developed their own curriculum to help men and women find freedom from sexual addictions, but TurnBack has no desire to "reinvent the wheel", and we will focus all our energy and resources on meeting people right where they're at to come alongside of them to help them find freedom. We believe that spending an immense amount of time and financial resources creating our own curriculum is not a wise investment of either of those resources since the curriculums from Pure Desire and Faithful & True are firmly rooted in the truths of God’s word and correctly apply the proper amounts of the psychological and neurological aspects of recovery against what we find in God’s word.