WEEK 24 - AA Service Committees and the 12 Concepts
[To the reader. You will need a copy of the book called "The AA Service Manual and 12 Concepts for
World Service, by Bill W" to hold up and show the group. You should also have photocopied sheets to
handout which have all 12 concepts listed, because there are no scrolls with the concepts on. Alternatively,
the group may like to think about having them permanently blown up and displayed like the steps and traditions.]
AA does not just consist of AA groups. There are different classifications of AA meeting, which
are referred to in tradition 9: they are service committees and service boards. In Great Britain these are
Intergroup, Region, Conference and the General Service Board. In the USA and Canada where the
structure follows that in the AA
World Service Manual [Hold it up], they also have committees called
District and Area.
It is very important for us to consider how these work because, for reasons we shall explain in a
moment, many of us would not be sober without the work they do. However, for those whose AA
experience is only at group level, which will be most of those who are less than two years sober, it is
likely that you will find a lot of this talk a bit baffling. If this is so, we ask for your patience. We hope
that if you keep coming back, like many aspects of the programme, once you get some experience of
service, what we say now will begin to make sense.
Service committees and service boards do the jobs that the groups cannot do for themselves and that
require cooperation between them. Let's each of us just think for a moment about how we found our first
AA meeting: perhaps we saw a poster in a doctor's waiting room and contacted the AA telephone office,
which in turn directed us to a meeting; or perhaps we saw details of a group on the internet. And, once we
are in AA we find meetings by using the AA group directory. All of these services are provided by the joint
efforts of AA members through various service committees.
Some service committees, such as Intergroup, cover small local areas. Intergroup is usually our
first contact with the service structure. Other committees or boards cover the whole country - the
General Service Board, for example, is responsible for our all-over public relations.
A special part of the work of service committees is the debate of how services to the groups can be
improved. This debate is 'general service' work. The biggest general-service committee, which does only
general-service work, has representatives from all over the country and meets once a year. It is called the
General Service Conference. The annual General Service Conference develops guidelines for service for
the country. The General Service Board is a sub-committee of the General Service Conference and puts
conference's decisions into action during the course of the year.
The debate of general-service matters can be hard work, for disagreements can degenerate into
clashes of personalities. Sometimes, rather than experience this, people will brand it 'political' and resort to
stifling debate and pushing decisions through without full consideration. This is not a good way forward
because it means that the decisions made are not always the best for AA.
The 12 Concepts are a special set of principles that, if applied properly, will enable these service
committees to reach the very best decisions and without discord. But the Concepts can only work if there is
a general understanding of them and common assent to the principles that underlie them. Unfortunately,
where the Concepts are not used routinely, as for example in Great Britain, debate often automatically
means discord, and we don't always get the best decisions made by these committees on our behalf.
The 12 Concepts appear in Appendix VII in the back of the Big Book and are discussed in detail in a
book called 'The AA Service Manual and the 12 Concepts for World Service, by Bill W' [Hold it up]. There
are 36 principles given to us for our personal and AA lives. There are 12 Steps for our personal lives, 12
Traditions for the groups, and 12 Concepts for the AA service committees. A point worth stressing here is
that if we are working the Steps fully, there is no need to use either the Traditions or the Concepts in our
personal lives. Any such discussion is damaging, first of all because it gives the wrong impression that the
Steps are insufficient for personal recovery, and second because it distracts our attention from the true
purpose of the Traditions and the Concepts. In Appendix VII, the Big Book describes it as follows: 'AA's
Twelve Steps are principles for personal recovery. The Twelve Traditions ensure the unity of the Fellowship. Written by the co-founder Bill W in 1962, the Twelve Concepts for World Service provide a
group of related principles to help ensure that various elements of AA's service structure remain responsive
and responsible to those they serve.'
When a service committee makes a decision, this combined conscience of its officers and the
representatives of all the participating groups is called the 'collective' conscience of the committee. The
collective conscience is defined in the first Concept.
The collective conscience should be distinguished from a group conscience: whereas a group makes
decisions through the group conscience, a service committee makes decisions through the collective
conscience of its service officers and of all the groups it serves.
A group conscience works best through consensus. In the strongest groups, debate is minimal and the
members choose to follow the lead of the oldtimers and unite behind them. We discussed this in connection
with Tradition 2. In contrast, in the collective conscience of a service committee, each group representative
must speak up on behalf of the group that he or she represents. Therefore debate is desirable and differences
of opinion must be aired. It is to facilitate this debate that the Concepts were especially written by Bill W.
Tradition 9 tells us very clearly, that all these service committees ought to be directly
responsible to those they serve - the groups! We often hear mention of the inverted triangle of
authority with the groups at the top and the Board at the tip underneath. Tradition 9 is the tradition
that, if applied properly, inverts the triangle for us. In the US this is emphasised in some service
committees by the reading of a different preamble that states: 'Our primary purpose is service.' What
they mean here is that they exist to serve the groups.
Each group ought to participate in service committees through their elected representative. The
groups' representatives at general-service committees are called General Service
Representatives, or
GSRs. Unfortunately, like the Concepts, Tradition 9 is not always applied properly. For example, in
Great Britain a general-service committee called Region does not always allow full GSR
participation. Some would say that the fellowship in Great Britain suffers as a result. For it is only
when Tradition 9 is observed and the Concepts fully applied that a loving Higher Power is
participating fully in the decision-making process.
Whatever the cause, it is certainly a fact that the size of the AA population in Great Britain is a
much smaller proportion of the general population than in countries such as the US or Ireland.
If we have given a bleak picture of the service structure in AA we didn't mean to. The fact that
each of us is sitting here today demonstrates that they are doing some good. The question really is
how many more could have been saved? Also, while very few would ever call service at Intergroup
fun, most would say it is beneficial, if only for the lessons in patience and tolerance that they learn.
That concludes the talk for this week and now I am delighted to hand over to [Name]
who
will share in a general way, what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now.