About Me -- A Non-Alcoholic Who was Pushed into Meetings

My name is Arthur Christopher Schaper, a resident of Torrance, CA -- and a recovered, redeemed New Creation in Christ Jesus!

For a long time, I have been saved. Billy Graham witnessed to me when I was thirteen years old. God bless Bill Graham!

Shortly after I believed that Jesus Christ is my Savior, that He died on the Cross for all my sins, I endured a great deal of trauma in my life.

My mother took my sister and me away from our father and put us up in an apartment in South East Torrance, where we lived for about nine months.

I had a hard time, then. I was saved, but I was not aware that I was a New Creation in Christ, that I had been made the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus! This neglected second-half of the gospel kept me, and many others whom I know, in great bondage.

I was brought up to live according to the Twelve Steps, a program which is for alcoholics, of which I am not one. My mother went to those meetings for sixteen years, but then she stopped going to the meetings after she noticed that the same people were showing up every day still sick, still angry, not drinking but certainly not living.

She left the meetings, but she did not leave the program. The program of Alcoholics Anonymous never left this woman, until the day that she died. Despite the looming hardships which were pressing in her life, in which she witnessed her life become slowly more and more unmanageable, she still pressed on and kept "working the program"

This is one of many indictments that I have with Alcoholics Anonymous, a program that has nothing to do with really living, and provides a bunch of temporary aids which do not give people the life that we all so desperately need! It's like a cult which teaches people that they cannot manage their own lives, so they must in one sense turn their will and life over to a higher power, but on the other hand they are pressed to run their lives by a sponsor and a group of people at least once a week. The illogic of this arrangement alone should be enough to dissuade people from joining.

My mother took AA from being in the program to overcome alcohol abuse to making it a way of life, which it is not, and never can be, and I do not care what the "Big Book" says.

AA is DOA, and there is no way out of it. I will never forget the refrain of one guy  -- Hal -- who would comment that people in AA do not have "drinking problems", they have "living problems."

I have to add that human beings do not have living problems, but we are dead in our trespasses, and rather we need Life, and that more abundantly. That's the way to get out of the emptiness and frustration of this life.

I believe that all things do work for good to those who love God, and who are called according to his purpose (Romans 8: 28). I believe that one of my many purposes on this earth is to get the word out about Alcoholics Anonymous, especially to believers who are trying to live the 12-Step program, when Christ has taken all the steps for us and brought us by His Blood and His Spirit to sit in heavenly places with him.

There is no adding one thing to the Finished Work of Jesus! He did not shout "It is Finished!" just to fill the air, just to give the horrified bystanders a sense of completion. The work is done, we do not have to spend any more time looking over our shoulders or worry that our sins will find us out, or wonder whether God will come through for us or not. He is the Life of men, for those who are willing to believe on Him, and all that He has asked, time and again, is that men and women would trust Him, take the Word at His Word, and let Him love through us!

Bill W. is a fraud, AA is foolishness, and the Big Book is one byline of blasphemy after another.