On Sunday, it was announced to the congregation (Park Cities Presbyterian Church) that (Skip) Ryan is returning to the church staff as an assistant pastor.

When a drug addict gets rehired by his old employer, that’s a great story of recovery.

When that drug addict is a minister and is rehired by his old church, that’s a living sermon.

“It’s a story of rescue and redemption,” said the Rev. Skip Ryan, former senior pastor of Park Cities Presbyterian Church.

On Sunday, it was announced to the congregation that Ryan is returning to the church staff as an assistant pastor.

Ryan, 64, abruptly resigned from the church in 2006. The story was that he had health problems. But news accounts quickly gave the full explanation. He was an opiate addict, hooked on prescription pain medicines.

Percocet, hydrocodone, OxyContin — Ryan took them all while presiding over the booming church. “I was hiding so much. My life was a sham,” he told me this week.

Outwardly, Ryan seemed a model of success. Park Cities Presbyterian was formed in 1991 as a more conservative offshoot of Highland Park Presbyterian. Ryan was called to be the new church’s first senior minister.

And in just a few years, the church had grown from 1,000 to 5,000 and had purchased the former Highland Baptist Church facilities on Oak Lawn Avenue.

But inwardly, Ryan said, he felt less and less capable and ever more burdened by all his responsibilities. One day in 2002, he was suffering from a pounding headache. Instead of the usual remedies, he took some leftover pain pills.

“Alarm bells should have gone off in my head, but they didn’t,” he said. And at first, the painkillers were great, seeming to cure all that ailed him. “The pills helped with more than one kind of pain,” he said.

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