Bill’s famous milestone message published in the March 1960 issue of the AA Grapevine is striking because it is not really an anniversary piece. It is a warning against complacency disguised as a celebration. What caught me most is how many of the dangers he names, money, power, personality, publicity, governance, fear, and distraction from our primary purpose, remain remarkably contemporary.
After Twenty-Five Years… and the Work Still Ahead
There is something almost haunting about reading Bill W.’s After Twenty-five Years more than six decades after he wrote it.
Bill wrote the article in 1960 as Alcoholics Anonymous prepared to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary. AA had grown from two alcoholics talking together in Akron into a worldwide Fellowship. There was plenty to celebrate.
And Bill celebrated it.
But he didn’t stop there.
He looked backward with gratitude, forward with hope, and inward with enough humility to recognize something every generation of AA needs to remember:
What got us here will not automatically keep us here.
AA had survived its first twenty-five years. That did not guarantee the next twenty-five. And our survival today does not guarantee AA’s effectiveness tomorrow.
That depends, at least in part, on us.
We Didn’t Invent This Thing
One of the most important things Bill does in this article is dismantle the mythology surrounding himself and Dr. Bob.
Looking back on AA’s astonishing growth, he writes:
“AA is truly God’s creation.”
He even says that he and Dr. Bob often regretted being called “cofounders” because the title could leave the impression that they had invented, designed, and spread Alcoholics Anonymous themselves.
They knew better.
Bill then traces the pieces backward. Dr. William Silkworth helped give us an understanding of alcoholism as a devastating illness of mind and body. William James helped Bill understand the transforming power of spiritual experience. Dr. Samuel Shoemaker and the Oxford Groups contributed much of the spiritual substance that eventually found expression in the Steps: inventory, restitution, surrender, prayer, meditation, and seeking God’s direction.
Ebby carried a message to Bill. And then Bill met Dr. Bob. Something happened there that none of the books, doctors, clergy, or spiritual movements had been able to produce by themselves.
Bill discovered what he calls the “missing link.” One alcoholic talking to another. More importantly, he discovered mutuality.
Bill didn’t simply realize that he could help Dr. Bob. He realized that he needed Dr. Bob just as much as Dr. Bob needed him.
That distinction matters.
The Chain Only Works If We Keep Adding Links
Bill describes a “chain reaction among alcoholics, one alcoholic talking to the next.” That may be one of the simplest descriptions of Alcoholics Anonymous ever written. Someone carried the message to someone who carried it to someone else.
And eventually somebody carried it to me.
That is humbling when I really think about it.
My sobriety exists because people I will never meet did not keep what they had been given to themselves. Someone went to a meeting when they were tired. Someone answered a telephone. Someone drove across town. Someone sponsored somebody difficult. Someone opened a meeting hall. Someone put money in a basket. Someone served as a GSR. Someone made coffee. Someone sat with a frightened newcomer and told the truth about what alcoholism had done to them.
Link after link after link.
Bill wrote:
“You, the members of AA, have continued to forge countless fresh links in the chain of recovery that now encircles the world.”
That chain did not end in 1960.
We are the links now.
And somewhere there is an alcoholic we haven’t met yet whose opportunity for recovery may depend upon whether we faithfully preserve and pass along what was given to us.
That changes the way I think about responsibility in AA.
They Were Afraid Too
One of my favorite parts of this article is Bill’s description of AA’s early fears. We sometimes romanticize early AA as though those people had everything figured out. They didn’t.
They were scared.
As AA grew, members worried that money, fame, and power would destroy the Fellowship. They feared public exploitation of the AA name. They worried about political and religious controversies. They feared that a service organization might become a government and that servants might become masters.
- They worried about publicity becoming promotion.
- They worried about accepting large donations.
- They worried about becoming involved in outside enterprises.
- They worried about professionalism.
- They worried about anonymity breaks.
Some of those fears, Bill admits, were ridiculous. Others were “abundantly justified.” Does any of this sound familiar?
Money.
Power.
Personalities.
Publicity.
Professionalism.
Governance.
Outside issues.
Anonymity.
The relationship between service bodies and the Fellowship they serve. Apparently we did not invent these arguments. That ought to give us both comfort and humility.
Prudence Replaced Fear
But here is the part I think matters most for AA today. Bill does not say AA eliminated every danger. He says:
“Genuine prudence replaced destructive fear.”
That is an extraordinary sentence. AA learned.
We made mistakes, argued, experimented, overreacted, corrected ourselves, and accumulated experience. And eventually that collective experience became our Twelve Traditions. The Traditions were not abstract organizational theories developed in a conference room. They were lessons purchased through experience, sometimes painful experience, about what helped AA survive and what threatened to tear it apart.
That distinction matters enormously. Traditions are not weapons for winning arguments. They are not technicalities we invoke when we want somebody else to stop doing something. They are accumulated spiritual experience.
They ask us to place unity above ego, principles above personalities, responsibility above control, self-support above dependence, attraction above promotion, and our primary purpose above the endless number of worthwhile things AA couldbecome involved in.
And perhaps most importantly, they remind us that AA belongs to no one.
- Not Bill.
- Not Dr. Bob.
- Not GSO.
- Not the General Service Conference.
- Not an Area.
- Not a District.
- Not a home group.
- Not the person with forty years.
- Not the person with forty days.
We are temporary custodians of something that was here before us and, God willing, will remain long after us.
The Alcoholic Who Hasn’t Arrived Yet
Early in the article, Bill turns his attention toward “all those sick ones still to come to AA.” That may be where this article becomes most relevant today. It is easy for those of us who have been around AA for years to begin thinking about the Fellowship primarily in terms of our experience of it.
- What kind of meetings do I like?
- What literature do I prefer?
- How did we do service twenty years ago?
- What changes make me uncomfortable?
But the future of AA cannot be evaluated only through the experience of those of us already sitting safely inside the rooms. There is another person whose interests must be considered.
The alcoholic who isn’t here yet.
- The twenty-two-year-old who has never heard of AA.
- The sixty-five-year-old drinking alone tonight.
- The person sitting in a hospital who has finally become willing.
- The person whose family is desperately searching online for help.
- The alcoholic who doesn’t look like the alcoholics who populated our meetings thirty years ago.
- The person who may encounter Alcoholics Anonymous through technology before ever walking through a physical door.
Will AA still be here for them?
More importantly, will they be able to find us? Will they recognize that they belong? And when they arrive, will they find the same spiritual substance that saved our lives?
Bill believed our responsibility toward those people was enormous:
“No care, no vigilance, no effort to preserve AA’s constant effectiveness and spiritual strength will ever be too great to hold us in full readiness for the day of their homecoming.”
Their homecoming.
What a beautiful way to describe someone finding Alcoholics Anonymous. They aren’t interrupting our meeting. They aren’t threatening our comfortable version of AA. They are coming home. And we have been entrusted with keeping the lights on.
Preservation Does Not Mean Preservation in Amber
There is a tension here worth acknowledging. When we hear words like preserve AA, it can be tempting to interpret them as never change anything. But that isn’t the history Bill describes. Early AA changed constantly because experience kept teaching it. They developed Traditions because they needed them. They created service structures because carrying the message required them. They learned how to interact with hospitals, professionals, families, the press, and the broader world. They figured out how to cross, as Bill puts it, barriers of “race and creed, of nationality and of language.”
So preservation cannot simply mean freezing AA at some preferred moment in its history.
We preserve principles. We adapt methods.
That requires discernment. Change everything and AA can lose its identity. Change nothing and AA can lose its ability to reach the alcoholic who still suffers. The Traditions help us navigate the space between those two dangers.
There Is No Victory Lap
What I find most remarkable about After Twenty-five Years is how Bill ends it.
After recounting twenty-five years of extraordinary growth, millions of lives touched, worldwide expansion, the emergence of the Traditions, the development of service, and the growth of Al-Anon, he refuses to take a victory lap. He warns against “complacency or self-congratulation.”
Then he acknowledges something even more important:
“We well know that our defects, as people and as a society, have been and still are very great.”
That sounds like AA.
Inventory never ends. Not for the alcoholic. Not for the group. Not for our service structures. Not for the Fellowship.
We can love Alcoholics Anonymous deeply and still examine ourselves honestly. In fact, perhaps loving AA requires us to do exactly that.
- Where have personalities begun overshadowing principles?
- Where has fear replaced prudence?
- Where has procedure become more important than purpose?
- Where have we confused authority with service?
- Where are we resisting necessary change simply because it makes us uncomfortable?
- And where are we embracing change without carefully considering what might be lost?
Those aren’t attacks on AA. They are AA questions. Inventory. Admission. Willingness. Correction. Growth. We already know how to do this.
We Are the Custodians Now
Bill Wilson wrote After Twenty-five Years to a Fellowship celebrating its first quarter-century. Today, his generation is gone. The people who personally knew the earliest members are disappearing. And increasingly, the responsibility belongs to us.
We didn’t create Alcoholics Anonymous. We don’t own it. We don’t get to redesign its spiritual foundation according to our preferences. But neither do we get to sit comfortably inside what others built and assume somebody else will carry it forward. We have been given custody of it for a little while.
That means carrying the message.
- Supporting our groups.
- Practicing the Traditions.
- Participating in service.
- Teaching AA history.
- Welcoming newcomers.
- Taking inventory.
- Remaining willing to change when experience demonstrates that change is necessary.
And continually asking whether the decisions we make today will help or hinder the alcoholic who comes looking for us tomorrow.
Bill looked at the first twenty-five years and exclaimed:
“Indeed, what hath God wrought?”
Maybe the more important question for us isn’t what God wrought then.
It is what God is asking of us now.
Because the chain is still being forged.
Someone carried the message to me.
Someone carried it to you.
And somewhere tonight, there is an alcoholic who doesn’t know it yet, but the next link in that chain is being forged for them.
Our job is not merely to preserve the AA we inherited. Our job is to faithfully pass it on, spiritually strong, united in purpose, humble enough to keep learning, and ready for the day of their homecoming.