Revisiting "What the Church has to Learn from Alcoholics Anonymous

What the Church has to Learn from Alcoholics Anonymous
by Sam Shoemaker
Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 by two struggling alcoholics who needed a spiritual
program to attain and sustain ongoing recovery. Out of the efforts of Bill W and Dr Bob, the
program known as Alcoholics Anonymous was developed based on living a lifestyle of twelve
steps. The principles of A.A.'s twelve steps were a direct outgrowth of the Oxford Group, based
at Calvary Episcopal Church in New York NY. The Reverend Samuel M. Shoemaker, Rector of
Calvary Church and spiritual leader of the Oxford Group, provided the early inspiration for the
spiritual aspects of twelve-step programs.
The following is from a speech given by Rev. Shoemaker at the twentieth anniversary convention
of A.A. in St. Louis, Missouri. In this timeless address, Rev. Shoemaker reflects on four points
that the Church must always remember in helping members to live into their own personal
Christian experience.
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong... I Corinthians 1:26
During the weekend of the Fourth of July last, I attended one of the most remarkable
conventions I ever expect to attend. It was a gathering in St. Louis of about five thousand
members of the movement called Alcoholics Anonymous. The occasion was the celebration
of their twentieth anniversary, and the turning over freely and voluntarily of the management
and destiny of that great movement by the founders and "old timers" to a board which
represents the fellowship as a whole.
As I lived and moved among these men and women for three days, I was moved as I have
seldom been moved in my life. It happens that I have watched the unfolding of this
movement with more than usual interest, for its real founder and guiding spirit, Bill-, found
his initial spiritual answer at Calvary Church in New York, when I was rector there, in 1935.
Having met two men unmistakable alcoholics, who had found release from their difficulty,
he was moved to seek out the same answer for himself. But he went further. Being of a
foraging and inquiring mind, he began to think there was some general law operating here,
which could be made to work, not in two men's lives only, but in two thousand or two
million. He set to work to find out what it was. He consulted psychiatrists, doctors, clergy,
and recovered alcoholics to discover what it was.
The First Alcoholics Anonymous Group
The first actual group was not in New York, but in Akron, Ohio. Bill was spending a
weekend there in a hotel. The crowd was moving towards the bar. He was lonely and felt
danger assailing him. He consulted the church directory in the hotel lobby, and found the
name of a local clergyman and his church. He called him on the telephone and said, "I am an
alcoholic down here at the hotel. The going is a little hard just now. Have you anybody you
think I might meet and talk to?" He gave him the name of a woman who belonged to one of
the great tire manufacturing families. He called her, she invited him out at once and said she
had a man she wanted to have meet him while he was on his way, she called Dr. Bob S- and
his wife, Anne. Dr. Bob said he'd give her five minutes. He stayed five hours and told Bill,
"You're the only man I've ever seen with the answer to alcoholism." They invited Bill over
from the hotel to stay at their house. And there was begun, twenty years ago, the first actual
Alcoholics Anonymous group.
The number of them now is beyond count. Some say there are 160,000 to 200,000 recovered
alcoholics, but nobody knows how many extend beyond this into the fringes of the unknown.
They say that each alcoholic holds within the orbit of his problem an average of fourteen
persons who are affected by it. This means that conservatively two and a half million
people's lives are different because of the existence of Alcoholics Anonymous. There is
hardly a city or town or even hamlet now where you cannot find a group, strong and wellknit,
or struggling in its infancy. Prof. Austin MacCormick, of Berkeley, California, former
Commissioner of Correction in the city of New York, who was also with us at the St. Louis
Convention said once in my hearing that AA may "prove to be one of the greatest
movements of all time." That was years ago. Subsequent facts support his prophecy.
On the Sunday morning of the convention, I was asked to talk to them, together with Fr.
Edward Dowling S.J., a wonderful Roman Catholic priest who has done notable service for
AA in interpreting it to his people, and Dr. Jim S., a most remarkable colored physician of
Washington, on the spiritual aspects of the AA program. They are very generous to nonalcoholics,
but I should have preferred that it be a bona fide alcoholic that did the speaking.
In the course of what I said to them, I remarked that I thought it had been wise for AA to
confine its activity to alcoholics. But, I added, "I think we may see an effect of AA on
medicine, on psychiatry, on correction, on the ever-present problem of human nature; and
not least on the Church. AA indirectly derived much of its inspiration from the Church. Now
perhaps the time has come for the church to be re-awakened and re-vitalized by those
insights and practices found in AA."
The Church ... Re-awakened and Re-vitalized
I think some of you may be a little horrified at this suggestion. I fear you will be saying to
yourself, "What have we, who have always been decent people, to learn from a lot of
reconstructed drunks?" And perhaps you may thereby reveal to yourself how very far you
are from the spirit of Christ and the Gospel, and how very much in need of precisely the kind
of check-up that may come to us from AA.
If I need a text for what I say to you, there is one ready to hand in I Corinthians 1:26, "...
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the
world to shame the strong." I need not remind you that there is a good deal of sarcasm in that
verse; because it must be evident that anything God can use is neither foolish nor weak, and
that if we consider ourselves wise and strong, we may need to go to school to those we have
called foolish and weak.
1. Recognition of Need
The first thing I think the Church needs to learn from AA is that nobody gets anywhere till
he recognizes a clearly-defined need. These people do not come to AA to get made a little
better. They do not come because the best people are doing it. They come because they are
desperate. They are not ladies and gentlemen looking for a religion, they are utterly
desperate men and women in search of redemption without what AA gives, death stares
them in the face. With what AA gives them, there is life and hope. There are not a dozen
ways, there are not two ways, there is one way; and they find it, or perish. AA's each and all
have a definite, desperate need. They have the need, and they are ready to tell somebody
what it is if they see the least chance that it can be met.
Is there anything as definite for you or me, who may happen not to be alcoholics? If there k,
I am sure that it lies in the realm of our conscious withholding of the truth about ourselves
from God and from one another, by pretending that we are already good Christians. Let me
here quote a member of AA who has written a most amazing book: his name is Jerome
Ellison, and the book is Report to the Creator. In this (p .210) he says,
The relief of being accepted can never be known by one who never thought himself
unaccepted. I hear of 'good Christian men and women' belonging to 'fine old church
families.' There were no good Christians in the first church, only sinners. Peter never let
himself or his hearers forget his betrayal in the hour the cock crew. James, stung by the
memory of his years of stubborn resistance, warned the church members: 'Confess your
faults to one another.' That was before there were fine old church families. Today, the last
place where one can be candid about one's faults is in church. In a bar, yes; in a church, no.
I know; I've tried both places.
Let that sting you and me just as it should, and make us miserable with our church
Pharisaism till we see it is just as definite and just as hideous as anybody's drunkenness can
ever be, and a great deal more really dangerous.
2. Redeemed in Life-Changing Fellowship
The second thing the Church needs to learn from AA is that men are redeemed in a life
changing fellowship. AA does not expect to let anybody who comes in stay as he is. They
know he is in need and must have help. They live for nothing else but to extend and keep
extending that help. Like the Church, they did not begin in glorious Gothic structures, but in
houses or caves in the earth, wherever they could get a foot-hold, meet people, and gather. It
never occurs to an AA that it is enough for him to sit down and polish his spiritual nails all
by himself, or dust off his soul all by himself, or spend a couple of minutes praying each day
all by himself. His soul gets kept in order by trying to help other people get their souls in
order with the help of God. At once a new person takes his place in this redeeming, lifechanging
fellowship. He may be changed today, and out working tomorrow - no long,
senseless delays about giving away what he has got. He's ready to give the little he has the
moment it comes to him. The fellowship that redeemed him will wither and die unless he
and others like him get in and keep that fellowship moving and growing by reaching others.
Recently I heard an AA say that he could stay away from his Veteran's meeting, his Legion,
or his Church, and nobody would notice it. But if he stayed away from his AA meeting, his
telephone would begin to ring the next day.
"A life-changing fellowship" sounds like a description of the Church. It is of the ideal
Church. But the actual? Not one in a hundred is like this. The laymen say this is the
minister's job, and the ministers say it is the evangelist's job, and everybody finds a
rationalized excuse for not doing what every Christian ought to be doing, i.e. bringing other
people into the redeeming, life-changing fellowship.
3. Definite Personal Dealing with People
The third thing the Church needs to learn from AA is the necessity for definite personal
dealing with people. AA's know all the stock excuses - they've used them themselves and
heard them a hundred times. All the blame put on someone else - my temperament is
different - I've tried it and it doesn't work for me - I'm not really so bad, I just slip a little
sometimes. They've heard them all, and know them for the rationalized pack of lies they are.
They constitute, taken together, the Gospel of Hell and Failure. I've heard them laboring with
one another, now patient as a mother, now savage as a prizefighter, now careful in
explanation, now pounding in a heavy personal challenge, but always knowing the desperate
need and the sure answer.
Are we in the Church like that? Have you ever been drastically dealt with by anybody? Have
you ever dared to be drastic in love with anybody? We are so official, so polite, so ready to
accept ourselves and each other at face value. I went for years before ever I met a man that
dared get at my real needs, create a situation in which I could be honest with him, and hold
me to a specific Christian commitment and decision. One can find kindness and even good
advice in the Church. That is not all men need. They need to be helped to face themselves as
they really are. The AA people see themselves just as they are. I think many of us in the
Church see ourselves as we should like to appear to others, not as we are before God. We
need drastic personal dealing and challenge. Who is ready and trained to give it to us? How
many of us have ever taken a "fearless moral inventory" of ourselves, and dared make the
depth of our need known to any other human being? This gets at the pride which is the
hindrance and sticking-point for so many of us, and which, for most of us in the Church, has
never even been recognized, let alone faced or dealt with.
4. Necessity for a Real Change of Heart
The fourth thing the Church needs to learn from AA is the necessity for a real change of
heart, a true conversion. As we come Sunday after Sunday, year after year, we are supposed
to be in a process of transformation. Are we? The AA's are. At each meeting there are people
seeking and in conscious need. Everybody is pulling for the people who speak, and looking
for more insight and help. They are pushed by their need. They are pulled by the inspiration
of others who are growing. They are a society of the "before and after," with a clear line
between the old life and the new. This is not the difference between sinfulness and
perfection, but it is the difference between accepted wrongdoing and the genuine beginning
of a new way of life.
How about us? Again, I quote Jerome Ellison, in his report to God (p .205): "...I began to see
that many of the parishioners did not really want to find You, because finding You would
change them from their habitual ways, and they did not want to endure the pain of change...
For our churchman-like crimes of bland, impenetrable pose, I offer shame..." I suppose that
the sheer visibility of the alcoholic problem creates a kind of enforced honesty; but surely if
we are exposed again and again to God, to Christ, to the Cross, there - should be a breaking
down of our pride and unwillingness to change. We should know by now that this
unwillingness, multiplied by thousands and tens of thousands, is what is the matter with the
Church, and what keeps it from being what God means it to be on earth. The change must
begin somewhere. We know it ought to begin in us.
One of the greatest things the Church should learn from AA is the need people have for an
exposure to living Christian experience. In thousands of places, alcoholics (and others) can
go and hear recovered alcoholics speak about their experiences and watch the process of new
life and outlook take place before their eyes. There you have it, the need and the answer to
the need, right before your eyes. They say that their public relations are based, not on
promotion, but on attraction. This attraction begins when you see people with problems like
your own, hear them speaking freely of the answers they are finding, and realize that such
honesty and such change is exactly what you need yourself.
No ordinary service of worship in the Church can possibly do this. We need to supplement
what we do now by the establishment of informal companies where people who are
spiritually seeking can see how faith takes hold in other lives, how the characteristically
Christian experience comes to them. Some churches are doing this, but not nearly enough of
them. One I know where on Sunday evenings laymen and women speak simply about what
has happened to them spiritually; it is drawing many more by attraction. This needs to be
multiplied by the tens of thousands, and the Church itself awakened.
As I looked out over that crowd of five thousand in Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, I said to
myself, "Would that the Church were like this - ordinary men and women with great
need who have found a great Answer, and do not hesitate to make it known wherever
they can - a trained army of enthusiastic, humble, human workers whose efforts make
life a different thing for other people!"
Let us ask God to forgive our blindness and laziness and complacency, and through these remade
people to learn our need for honesty, for conversion, for fellowship and for honest
witness!
Other Articles by Sam Shoemaker:
· "I Stand by the Door"
· "Twelve Steps to Power"
· "A 'Christian Program'"
The Reverend Samuel M. Shoemaker, founded Faith At Work while serving as Rector of
Calvary Church and spiritual leader of the Oxford Group for many years, provided the early
inspiration for the spiritual aspects of twelve-step programs.
Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 by two struggling alcoholics who needed a
spiritual program to attain and sustain ongoing recovery. Out of the efforts of Bill W and Dr
Bob, the program known as Alcoholics Anonymous was developed based on living a lifestyle
of twelve steps. The principles of A.A.'s twelve steps were a direct outgrowth of the Oxford
Group, based at Calvary Episcopal Church in New York NY.
Check out this link for Books on the Oxford Group, FAW founder Sam Shoemaker, 12-Step
Movement and more. http://www.dickb.com