Our Goal and Plea

I got well in A.A., not outside of it.

Despite all the nonsensical "higher power" chalk talk that abounds in fellowship chatter, I discerned that God and the Bible had a vital role in the organization's beginnings, and particularly in its unique successes.

To be sure, AA’s themselves have provided me and countless thousands, with love, service, understanding, and support - which are unequaled elsewhere. But far more is needed for recovery and cure. The alcoholic has dug a hole so deep that, as co-founder Rev. Sam Shoemaker wrote, "a divine derrick is needed to pull him out." Once I turned to the Bible, to God, and to Jesus Christ for the answers - just as the early AA’s did - the battle was over. I have never, since Day Number One, needed, wanted, or sought liquor or other mind-damaging stuff for my answers.

If Christian churches, clergy, leaders, ministries, and programs would steep themselves in the early A.A. Christian Fellowship history - its roots in the Bible and its astonishing successes in the 1930s - and join us in disseminating those facts, a completely new face can shine again! AA’s once vital Divine Aid, as Bill Wilson called it, can be restored to dignity and honor and healing - and perhaps either replace or -at the least- contrast with the wild, new efforts and approaches that are failing so miserably today. If only Christians would get behind the effort to provide good, rock-solid information; the 'good news', if you will. 

Alcoholics and addicts today can still go to all the doctors, the detoxes, the hospitals, the rehabs, the jails, the therapists, the recovery books, and the mental wards they like. In fact, most of us have done just that. But we lacked exposure to the history, details, principles, and practices of our own successful roots. As a result, many of us succumbed to secular influences. 

There is compelling evidence that Christians, in and out of recovery fellowships and programs, need to put on the whole armor of God, in order to defeat the illusory snake-oil scholasticism that is the dominating problem today. Christians need to help us carry the message that it was God in early A.A., and it can be God in today’s programs as well. God can and will do for the alcoholics and the addicts what neither they, nor any human power, can do for themselves.

Jesus is the Way. There are other ways which seem right to men. But to ignore the good news in the Christian message does little to make man’s ways right in our Creator’s eyes, or insure the validity of man’s experiential research, or warrant to the sick alcoholic and addict that mans ways are superior to God’s ways, and will triumph through today’s secular approaches alone. For Dr. Bob and for many an A.A. pioneer, our Creator was as much a part of medicine and surgery as the scalpel and the stethoscope.

Respectfully,

Dick B.

Gloria Deo

Copyright, Dick B., 2007. All rights reserved. Posted with permission. You may contact Dick B. by writing to PO Box 837, Kihei, Hi 96753-0837; by email to dickb@dickb.com or visit his site at http://www.dickb.com/index.shtml.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Just as DICK B discerned "that God and the Bible had a vital role in the organization's beginnings, and particularly in its unique successes," God also made me aware in 1999 that if I failed to properly grasp and exercise "the spiritual aspect of the program," I would never recover and/or be restored to sanity. I knew that I could not 'dance around' the foundational truth that the 'Big Book' made perfectly clear; "But there is ONE who has all power -- that ONE is God. May you find Him now!" (Alcoholics Anonymous, Third Edition, Chapter Five, "How It Works," page 59). In essence, it was The Big Book that led me back into The Good Book! I do not beleive that would've happened if my sponsor had not been a man of God.

ALL italic, bold-type, and underlined emphasis in this article was added by the editor.