Fellowship is in Christ, not in AA

We have shown how we got out from under. You say, "Yes, I'm willing. But am I to be consigned to a life where I shall be stupid, boring and glum, like some righteous people I see? I know I must get along without liquor, but how can I? Have you a sufficient substitute?"

 

Yes, there is a substitute and it is vastly more than that. It is a fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. There you will find release from care, boredom and worry. Your imagination will be fired. Life will mean something at last. The most satisfactory years of your existence lie ahead. Thus we find the fellowship, and so will you.

 

"How is that to come about?" you ask. "Where am I to find these people?"

 

You are going to meet these new friends in your own community. Near you, alcoholics are dying helplessly like people in a sinking ship. If you live in a large place, there are hundreds. High and low, rich and poor, these are future fellows of Alcoholics Anonymous. Among them you will make lifelong friends. (AA, pg 152) 

This glowing appraisal of AA is one of the biggest scams, one of the biggest frauds presented in the "Big Book."

"The fellowship of AA" is just a group of empty people much of the time who talk about the problems in their lives which have not changed. Just because someone stops drinking does not mean that everything else gets taken care of. Much of the time, the members in AA spend their time going over the past, how much they hurt themselves and others, yet many of them find that the living problems that they were trying to run from still haunt them.

Then there are the entitled few who have stayed sober for decades, many of whom have purchased mugs and have set themselves up for the long-haul in the halls of AA.

The number one need that most people have it -- acceptance. You cannot find acceptance in a room with people who are craving acceptance of their own, just as two lonely people when they marry do not solve their "loneliness" problem, but in fact make it worse.

In AA, the leaders of the program promise a fellowship. In a number of meetings, what I witnessed was a bunch of adult-children who still live as if the world revolves around them. What value can one find in sitting with people who have the same problems yet engage in the same failed solutions of "share and care" which is really "share and despair"?

Real fellowship is found in Christ, and entrance into this fellowship has nothing to do with us:

"7But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." (1 John 1: 7)

Jesus is the light of the world (John 8: 12), and in the same chapter of First John, the beloved apostle identifies that God is Light (1 John 1:5). Fellowship, therefore, has nothing to do with meetings, eating, drinking, church services, or even meeting in the same place. It's all about walking in the light, in the person of Jesus, who through His Holy Spirit has joined us to His one body.

In this light, we are cleansed from all sin. To know that in Him you face no condemnation (Romans 8: 1), to know that we have the same righteousness as God Himself through His Son (2 Corinthians 5: 21), that we have received His Spirit of Sonship (Romans 8: 15), and that we are sons of God (1 John 3: 1)

This is acceptance eternal and unshakable, a standing which can never be taken or compromised in our lives! This is the fellowship which every human being longs for, the acceptance which makes us kings and priests (1 Peter 2: 9).

Established in His righteousness, no weapon formed again a man can prosper (Isaiah 54:17), including the scorn and shame of human rejection and pain. The same pain which inevitably awaits a member of AA trying to find the love and peace which he could not find in the bottle, and will never find in a "fellowship" of like-minded men and women who have given up one thing, but cannot find the best.