Conference Questions (2012) forum discussion (contd)

Committee No. 5

Question 2:

With specific regard to the history of our AA service structure, can the Fellowship share experience on how we can best strengthen unity by trusting and valuing the decisions of the group conscience at all levels of the Fellowship?

Background

‘The unity, the effectiveness, and even the survival of AA will always depend upon our continued willingness to give up some of our personal ambitions and desires for the common safety and welfare. Just as sacrifice means survival for the individual alcoholic, so does sacrifice mean unity and survival for the group and for AA’s entire Fellowship’.

AA Comes of Age, pp. 287-288 (Quoted in As Bill Sees It, p. 220)

Consider the contribution to the carrying of the message, financial and practical implications when deliberating each question.

See also:

The Traditions

Preamble

Concepts

Extract:

“Suggest the book “The Language of the Heart” is given a higher profile within the fellowship and put in group and intergroup guidelines for suggested literature reading for those in service at these levels. First published in 1988 it contains virtually every article written for the AA Grapevine by AA co-founder Bill W. In more than 150 articles, written over a span of twenty-six years, Bill documented the painstaking process of trial and error that resulted in AA’s spiritual principles of Recovery, Unity, and Service, and articulated his vision of what the Fellowship could become. He reminds us of what it used to be like, documenting what happened and why it happened, and he gives each new generation of the fellowship a timeless insight into how to overcome present and future difficulties, with the wisdom of AA’s experience in its first thirty years. The role of “The Language of the Heart” in strengthening unity for now and future generations is yet to be fully recognised. Besides being available from GSO (GB), it is also available as an eBook from: https://store.aagrapevine.org/Showgroups.aspx?

“YOUR THIRD LEGACY” by BILL W. (Extracts) (AA Grapevine December 1950, The Language of the Heart page 126):

“WE, who are the older members of AA, bequeath to you who are younger, these three legacies--the "12 Steps of Recovery," the "12 Traditions" and now the "General Services of Alcoholics Anonymous." Two of these legacies have long been in your keeping. By the 12 Steps we have recovered from alcoholism; by the 12 Traditions we are achieving a fine unity. Being someday perishable, Dr. Bob and I now wish to deliver to the members of AA their third legacy. Since 1938 we and our friends have been holding it in trust. This legacy is the General Headquarters Services of Alcoholics Anonymous--the Alcoholic Foundation, the A.A. Book, The A.A. Grapevine and the A.A. General Office. These are the principal Services which have enabled our Society to function and to grow. Acting on behalf of all, Dr. Bob and I ask that you--the members of AA--now assume guidance of these Services and guard them well. The future growth, indeed the very survival of Alcoholics Anonymous may one day depend on how prudently these Arms of Service are administered in years to come……

Suppose then, all these years, we had been without those Services. Where would we be today minus the A.A. Book and our standard literature which now pours out of Headquarters at the rate of three tons a month? Suppose our public relations had been left to thoughtless chance? Suppose no one had been assigned to encourage good publicity and discourage the bad? Suppose no accurate information about AA had been available? Imagine our vital and delicate relations with medicine and religion left to pot luck. Then, too, where would thousands of AAs be today if the General Office hadn't answered their frantic letters and referred them to help? (Our New York Office received and answered 28,000 letters of all kinds last year.) Or in what shape would hundreds of distant AA Groups now be if that Office hadn't started them by mail or directed travelers to them? How could we have managed without a world Group Directory? What about those foreign Groups in 28 countries clamoring for translations, proved experience and encouragement? Would we be publishing the A.A. Book at Oslo, Norway and London, England? What of those lone members on high seas or in far corners of the earth, those prisoners, those asylum inmates, those veterans in service or in hospitals? Where might we one day be if we never had the A.A. Grapevine, our mirror of AA life and principal forum of written expression? How grateful we are for those Secretaries and those volunteer Editors and those friendly Trustees who have stood sentinel all these years over our principal affairs. Without all these things, where would we be? You must have guessed it. We'd be nowhere; that's sure.

So it is that by the "Steps" we have recovered, by the "Traditions" we have unified, and by our Headquarters Services we have been able to function as a Society.

Yet some may still say--"Of course the Foundation should go on. Certainly we'll pay that small expense. But why can't we leave its conduct to Dr. Bob and Bill and their friends the Trustees? We always have. Why do they now bother us with such business? Let's keep AA simple." Good questions, these. But today the answers are quite different than they once were.
 
Let's face these facts:

1. Dr. Bob and Bill are perishable, they can't last forever.
2. Their friends, the Trustees, are almost unknown to the AA movement.
3. In future years our Trustees couldn't possibly function without direct guidance from AA itself. Somebody must advise them. Somebody, or something, must take the place of Dr. Bob and Bill.
4. Alcoholics Anonymous is out of its infancy. Grown up, adult now, it has full right and the plain duty to take direct responsibility for its own Headquarters.
5. Clearly then, unless the Foundation is firmly anchored, through State and Provincial representatives, to the movement it serves, a Headquarters breakdown will someday be inevitable. When its old-timers vanish, an isolated Foundation couldn't survive one grave mistake or serious controversy. Any storm could blow it down. Its revival wouldn't be simple. Possibly it could never be revived. Still isolated, there would be no means of doing that. Like a fine car without gasoline, it would be helpless.
6. Another serious flaw: As a whole, the AA movement has never faced a grave crisis. But someday it will have to. Human affairs being what they are, we can't expect to remain untouched by the hour of serious trouble. With direct support unavailable, with no reliable cross-section of AA opinion, how could our remote Trustees handle a hazardous emergency? This gaping "open end" in our present set-up could positively guarantee a debacle. Confidence in the Foundation would be lost. AAs would everywhere say: "By whose authority do the Trustees speak for us? And how do they know they are right?" With AA's Service life-lines tangled and severed, what then might happen to the "millions who don't know." Thousands would continue to suffer on or die because we had taken no forethought, because we had forgotten the virtue of Prudence. This should not come to pass.

That is why the Trustees, Dr. Bob and I now propose the "General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous." That is why we urgently need your direct help. Our principal Services must go on living. We think the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous can be the agency to make that certain.” (Bill W.)

“LETS KEEP IT SIMPLE – BUT HOW?” by BILL W. (AA Grapevine July 1960, The Language of the Heart page 303):

This Grapevine will be read as we celebrate AA's Twenty-fifth Anniversary in July at Long Beach, California. We shall be stepping over a new threshold into our future. We shall rejoice as we think of the gifts and the wonders of yesterday. And, as we rededicate ourselves to fulfilling the immense promise of AA's tomorrow, we shall certainly survey how we stand today. Have we really "kept AA simple"? Or, unwittingly, have we blundered?

Thinking on this, I began to wonder about our fundamental structure: those principles, relationships, and attitudes which are the substance of our Three Legacies of Recovery, Unity and Service. In our Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions we find twenty-four definitely stated principles. Our Third Legacy includes a Charter for World Service that provides thousands of General Service Representatives, hundreds of local Committeemen, eighty General Service Conference Delegates, fifteen General Service Board Trustees, together with our Headquarters legal, financial, public relations, editorial experts and their staffs. Our group and area services add still more to this seeming complexity.

Twenty-two years ago last spring, we were just setting about the formation of a trusteeship for AA as a whole. Up to that moment, we had neither stated principles nor special services. Our Twelve Steps weren't even a gleam in the eye. As for the Twelve Traditions--well, we had only forty members and but three years' experience. So there wasn't anything to be "traditional" about. AA was two small groups: one at Akron and another in New York. We were a most intimate family. Dr. Bob and I were its "papas." And what we said in those days went. Home parlors were meeting places. Social life ranged around coffeepots on kitchen tables. Alcoholism was of course described as a deadly malady. Honesty, confession, restitution, working with others and prayer was the sole formula for our survival and growth. These were the uncomplicated years of halcyon simplicity. There was no need for the maxim "Let's keep it simple." We couldn't have been less complicated.

The contrast between then and now is rather breath-taking. To some of us it is frightening. Therefore we ask, "Has AA really kept faith with Dr. Bob's warning, 'Let's keep it simple'? How can we possibly square today's Twelve Steps, Twelve Traditions, General Service Conferences and International Conventions with our original coffee-and-cake AA?"

For myself I do not find this difficult to do. Genuine simplicity for today is to be found, I think, in whatever principles, practices and services that can permanently insure our widespread harmony and effectiveness. Therefore it has been better to state our principles than to leave them vague; better to clarify their applications than to leave these unclear; better to organize our services than to leave them to hit-or-miss methods, or to none at all.

Most certainly indeed, a return to the kitchen table era would bring no hoped-for simplicity. It could only mean wholesale irresponsibility, disharmony and ineffectiveness. Let's picture this: there would be no definite guiding principles, no literature, no meeting halls, no group funds, no planned sponsorship, no stable leadership, no clear relations with hospitals, no sound public relations, no local services, no world services. Returning to that early-time brand of simplicity would be as absurd as selling the steering wheel, the gas tank and the tires off our family car. The car would be simplified all right--no more gas and repair bills, either! But our car wouldn't go any place. The family life would hardly be simplified; it would instantly become confused and complicated.

A formless AA anarchy, animated only by the "Let's get together" spirit just isn't enough for AAs here and now. What worked fine for two score members in 1938 won't work at all for more than 200,000 of them in 1960. Our added size and therefore greater responsibility simply spells the difference between AA's childhood and its coming of age. We have seen the folly of attempting to recapture the childhood variety of simplicity in order to sidestep the kind of responsibility that must always be faced to "keep it simple" for today. We cannot possibly turn back the clock, and shouldn't try.

The history of our changing ideas about "simplicity for today" is fascinating. For example, the time came when we actually had to codify--or organize, if you please--the basic principles that had emerged out of our experience. There was a lot of resistance to this. It was stoutly claimed by many that our then simple (but rather garbled) word-of-mouth recovery program was being made too complicated by the publication of AA's Twelve Steps. We were "throwing 'simplicity' out the window," it was said. But that was not so. One has only to ask, "Where would AA be today without its Twelve Steps?" That these principles were carefully defined and published in 1939 has done (only the Lord knows) how much good. 

Codification has vastly simplified our task. Who could contest that now?

In 1945, a similar outcry arose when sound principles of living and working together were clearly outlined in AA's Twelve Traditions. It was then anything but simple to get agreement about them. Yet who can now say that our AA lives have been complicated by the Traditions? On the contrary, these sharply defined principles have immensely simplified the task of maintaining unity. And unity for us AAs is a matter of life or death.

The identical thing has everywhere happened in our active services, particularly in World Services. When our first trusteeship for AA was created there were grave misgivings. The alarm was great because this operation involved a certain amount of legality, authority, and money, and the transaction of some business. We had been running happily about saying that AA had "completely separated the spiritual from the material." It was therefore a shocker when Dr. Bob and I proposed World Services; when we urged that these had to head up in some kind of a permanent board, and further stated that the time had come--at least in this realm--when we would have to learn how to make "material things" serve spiritual ends. Somebody with experience had to be at the steering wheel and there had to be gas in the AA tank.

As our Trustees and their co-workers began to carry our message worldwide, our fears slowly evaporated. AA had not been confused--it had been simplified. You could ask any of the tens of thousands of alcoholics and their families who were coming into AA because of our World Services. Certainly their lives had been simplified. And, in reality, so had ours.

When our first General Service Conference met in 1951, we again drew a long breath. For some, this event spelled sheer disaster. Wholesale brawling and politicking would now be the rule. Our worst traits would get out in front. The serenity of the Trustees and everybody else would be disturbed (as indeed it sometimes was!). Our beautiful spirituality and the AA therapy would be interfered with. People would get drunk over this (and indeed a few did!). As never before, the shout went up, "For God's sake, let's keep this thing simple!" Cried some members, "Why can't Dr. Bob and Bill and the Trustees go right on running those services for us? That's the only way to keep it simple."

But few knew that Dr. Bob was mortally sick. Nobody stopped to think that there would soon be less than a handful of old-timers left; that soon they would be gone, too. The Trustees would be quite isolated and unconnected with the fellowship they served. The first big gale could well bowl them over. AA would suffer heart failure at its vital center. Irretrievable collapse would be the almost certain result.

Therefore we AAs had to make a choice: what would really be the simpler? Would we get that General Service Conference together, despite its special expense and perils? Or, would we sit on our hands at home, awaiting the fateful consequences of our fear and folly? What, in the long run, we wondered, would really be the better--and therefore the simpler? As our history shows, we took action. The General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous has just held its tenth annual meeting.

Beyond doubt we know that this indispensable instrument has cemented our unity and has insured the recovery of the increasing hosts of sufferers still to come.

Therefore I think that we have kept the faith. As I see it, this is how we have made AA truly simple!

Some may still ask, "Are we nevertheless moving away from our early Tradition that 'AA, as such, ought never be organized'?" Not a bit of it. We shall never be "organized" until we create a government; until we say who shall be members and who shall not; until we authorize our boards and service committees to mete out penalties for non-conformity, for non-payment of money, and for misbehavior. I know that every AA heart shares in the conviction that none of these things can ever happen. We merely organize our principles so that they can be better understood, and we continue so to organize our services that AA's lifeblood can be transfused into those who must otherwise die. That is the all-in-all of AA's "organization." There can never be any more than this.

A concluding query: "Has the era of coffee-and-cake and fast friendships vanished from the AA scene because we are going modern?" Well, scarcely. In my home town I know an AA who has been sober several years. He goes to a small meeting. The talks he hears are just like those Dr. Bob and I used to hear--and also make--in our respective front parlors. As neighbors, my friend has a dozen AA cronies. He sees them constantly over kitchen tables and coffee cups. He takes a frequent whack at Twelfth Step cases. For him, nothing has changed; it's just like AA always was.

At meetings, my friend may see some books, pamphlets and Grapevines on a table. He hears the lady secretary make her timid announcement that these are for sale. He thinks the New York Intergroup is a good thing because some of his fellow members were sponsored through it. On World Services, he is not so clear. He hears some pros and cons about them. But he concludes they are probably needed. He knows his group sends in some money for these undertakings, and this is okay. Besides, his group's hall rent has to be paid. So when the hat comes by, he cheerfully drops a buck into it.
 
As far as my friend is concerned, these "modernizations" of AA are not a bit shattering to his serenity or to his pocketbook. They merely represent his responsibility to his group, his area, and to AA as a whole. It has never occurred to him that these are any but the most obvious obligations.
 
If you tried to tell my friend that AA is being spoiled by money, politics and over-organization, he would just laugh. He'd probably say, "Why don't you come over to my house after the meeting and we'll have another cup of coffee." (Bill W.) ”

(our emphases)

Cheerio

The Fellas (Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)