2. Our area probably has 10% to 15% of meetings engaged with area general service (sending a GSR). The meetings have the right not to participate. Is this a problem to be addressed or a feature to be accepted? If it's a problem, do you have suggestions for us?
This is a universal question. It is certainly a feature to be accepted, because denying reality never forms a solid foundation for construction. But that does not mean that an ideal cannot be formulated and worked towards, even though the ideal will never be reached in full.
The area or district (in Great Britain: region or intergroup) must do its job:
This is a universal question. It is certainly a feature to be accepted, because denying reality never forms a solid foundation for construction. But that does not mean that an ideal cannot be formulated and worked towards, even though the ideal will never be reached in full.
The area or district (in Great Britain: region or intergroup) must do its job:
- To visit groups to provide information about the existence, activities, and schedules of the area and district
- To provide contacts to make themselves available to answer questions
- To make area and district as attractive as possible (meetings at convenient times and locations, as long as necessary but as short as possible, good refreshments provided, sharing the joys of service) (Tradition XI)
- To provide proper induction to GSRs and other serving officers, both through service sponsorship and through the provision of welcome packs to GSRs and other serving officers, setting out everything that the service entails (Concept XI)
- To invite but not to pressurise or compel in any way (Tradition XI)
On a different level, the reason why groups don't participate is because their members have not had spiritual awakenings through the application of the AA programme, which always entails a realisation of the great responsibility we as AA members have for the inward-facing and outward-facing work of the fellowship and a cheerful and eager shouldering of the burden.
The Big Book says that, if we are to find God, the desire must come from within the individual.
Any attempt to solve this problem from the outside will fail, because people who are asleep cannot respond to invitations that require them to be awake to hear them and respond to them appropriately. If they are asleep, the invitation will appear to be part of the nightmare and will be rejected.
Our collective job as AA members who have had a spiritual awakening is to make sure that no AA meeting takes place in the city we live in without at least one member making an adequate presentation of the nature of alcoholism and the programme of recovery, in a manner that is genuinely inviting and completely free of manipulation, coercion, superciliousness, haughtiness, vanity, or grievance.
That's a tall order. We do need our strong home groups, in order to tether us to the solution and to keep us safe within the group of like-minded people, so we do not fall victim to the 'temptations of the road'. However, remaining cloistered inside our strong home groups, ignorant of, indifferent to, and sometimes even contemptuous of other groups where there is darkness, unhappiness, hopelessness, rudderlessness, and suffering, is no solution either: the folly of the lone ranger is equal to the folly of the spiritual ivory tower, pouring boiling pitch from the turrets and wondering why no one wants to join us.
Go to ID meetings, identify with the people there, put yourself in their shoes, and ask how you would like to be approached if you were in their shoes, and then ask God to guide every word, whilst you look on. Befriend them. Listen to them. And if they ask for help, provide it.
AA fellowships do not change from the bottom up (i.e from the bottom of the upside-down triangle); they change from the top down (i.e. from the top of the upside-down triangle: from inside the groups themselves), by previously hopeless people showing currently hopeless people how they themselves were given help.