May, 2007 Calendar In This Issue: The Twelve Steps and the Church Confession: None must… All may… Some should… Hail Thee Festival Day: A Pentecost Picnic Invitation A Divorce the Church Should Smile Upon Reflection on Healing

(As shared in a handout at the Lenten Program March 21st…)

Alcoholics Anonymous began on June 10, 1935, co-founded by William Griffin Wilson (Bill W.) and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith (Dr. Bob). Wilson conceived the idea of Alcoholics Anonymous while he was hospitalized for excessive drinking in Dec. 1934. During his hospital stay, Wilson had a spiritual experience that removed his desire to drink. In the following months, he tried to persuade other alcoholics to stop drinking just as he had. Wilson found his first "convert" in Smith, who was willing to follow Wilson's method to find freedom from alcoholism. Four years later, Wilson and Smith published the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, which contains the 12 Steps and a spiritually based program of recovery from alcoholism

The Oxford Group: Various sources influenced the formation of A.A.'s program. Of these, the British-born Oxford Group movement and its American leader, Episcopal clergyman Samuel Moor Shoemaker, Jr. (Rector, Calvary Episcopal Church, in New York City), contributed most significantly to the Christian basis of Alcoholics Anonymous. Both Wilson and Smith attended Oxford Group meetings and based much of the A. A. program on this framework.

In the 1920's and 1930's, the Oxford Group movement became a revolutionary answer to anti-religious reaction following World War I. Aiming to rekindle living faith in a church gone stale with institutionalism, the Oxford Group declared itself an "organism" rather than an "organization." Group members met in homes and hotels, mingling religion with meals. Despite its freedom from institutional ties, the movement was distinctly ecclesiastical and looked to the church as its authority.

The Oxford Group's teachings rested on the following 6 basic assumptions:

Human beings are sinners. Human beings can be changed. Confession is a prerequisite to change. The changed soul has direct access to God. The age of miracles has returned. Those who have been changed are to change others.

The following characteristics of the Oxford Group were adapted to meet the specific needs of the A.A. program:

informal home-like settings for meetings, intended to highlight the pleasures of spiritual fellowship an expectation that members would remain in their own churches, turning to A.A., not for theological interpretations, but for support in living a moral life. a focus on gradually realizing a "changed life" by passing through "stages," a concept that presented sobriety as something positive rather than merely the absence of alcohol or drunkenness the policy that A.A.'s workers, esp., its founders, should never be paid an emphasis on helping others in order to change one's own life.

In addition, Wilson incorporated into A.A.'s philosophy the Oxford Groups five procedures:

Giving in to God. Listening to God's directions. Checking guidance. Restitution. Sharing, both confession and witness.

The Evolution of the 12 Steps: While trying to attract more followers to sobriety from 1935-37, Smith and Wilson worked with drunks in Shoemaker's Calvary Rescue Mission. Bill actually asked Sam to write the Twelve Steps. Although Shoemaker declined, Bill did send him a copy of the manuscript for the Big Book before it was published in 1939. "It was from Sam Shoemaker that we absorbed most of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, steps that express the heart of A.A.'s way of life, " Wilson later recalled. "The early A.A. got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgement of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Group and directly from Sam Shoemaker… and from nowhere else."

In 1937, Wilson set forth six steps of a spiritual recovery program…they had learned from Sam Shoemaker and the Oxford Group. They were:

We admitted that we were licked, that we were powerless over alcohol. We made an inventory of our defects or sins. We confessed or shared our shortcomings with another person in confidence. We made restitution to all those we had harmed by our drinking We tried to help other alcoholics, with no thought of reward in money or prestige. We prayed to whatever God we thought there was for power to practice these precepts.

In 1938, Wilson revised and expanded these six steps, making them more explicit in order to eliminate any possible loopholes perceived by the rationalizing alcoholic. Also, in what Wilson called "concessions to those of little or no faith," God was described as a "power greater than ourselves" and "God as we understood Him…This was the great contribution of our atheists and agnostics. They had widened our gateway so that all who suffer might pass through, regardless of their belief or lack of belief."

"God was certainly there in our Steps," Wilson continued, "but He was now expressed in terms that anybody - anybody at all - could accept and try."

Consequently, A.A. members talk about spirituality, not religion; sobriety, not salvation; wrongdoing, not sin; admitting, not confession; strength and hope, not resurrection; carrying the message, not sharing the faith. However, the absence of direct Christian references within A. A., does not take away from the program's Christian basis.

Dr. Charles Knippel, a noted scholar on Christianity's influence on A.A., wrote: "In making use of the twelve-step programs and in encouraging others to use them, the Christian will view the Steps within the Christian context and give the Steps Christian meaning. In addressing himself to non-Christian members of twelve-step groups, the Christian will seek, by way of caring and sharing relationships, to bring such twelve-step practitioners to a Christian understanding of the Steps that will provide rich spiritual benefits and a more abundant experience of recovery."

"Like Sam Shoemaker, today's church leader will view Alcoholics Anonymous as a 'tutor' to bring people to Christ and His church and thus respond with a winsome Christian witness and welcome. The examination of Sam Shoemaker's theological influences on William Wilson's formulation and interpretations of the twelve-step spiritual program of recovery yields rich and life-enhancing insights for the practice of Christianity."

In 1928 in a paper entitled: "A First-Century Christian Fellowship," Sam Shoemaker wrote these words: "First (is) the importance of the individual in religious work. This movement believes the individual intensely matters; that more is likely to happen between two people guidedly talking together than as a result of the average sermon, provided one of those people has had a genuine experience."

In this season of Easter, these words have a profound resonance and relevance.

Copyright © 2007 St. Augustine by-the-Sea