Carry This Message
By, Joe McQ of Joe and Charlie.
Once in a while we need to a critical look at things, even the things we think are worthy and working well. Otherwise we may look up and find them gone.
Even A.A. as it has grown, has lost some of its message. We need to return to our message, to our roots.
Because of our tradition of anonymity, the only way the message can be carried is through the "Big Book," through meetings, and through sponsorship. There is no other way the suffering alcoholic is going to receive our message. The Big Book has never been changed, so it's authentic. But meetings have changed, and sponsorship has also changed and may have lost some of its effectiveness.
A.A. is not growing as fast as it once did, and there's a lot of conjecture as to why this is true. I think it might be because we have less A.A. in our meetings. I hear people say we need to carry the message to the treatment center, but i think we need to be sure to carry it to the meetings.
For the first twenty-five or thirty years, up until the 1960s, the message we heard in meetings was the same. There were about 150,000 people in the program. Groups still relied on the Big Book and the A.A. message. With the growth of the treatment center movement in the late sixties and early seventies, one of the biggest helps and hindrances to A.A. came along.