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Is "meeting makers make it" in the Big Book?

In short:

  • No. The saying isn't in the Big Book or anywhere else in our sources.
  • The 1939 program text talks about A.A. meetings in only a few places. Bill says "We meet frequently so that newcomers may find the fellowship" (pp. 15–16), and Chapter 11 describes the Akron weekly meeting, whose "prime object" was a place where new people could bring their problems (pp. 159–160), and where many a newcomer "capitulated entirely" on hearing a story like his own (p. 160).
  • What the program text says protects sobriety most is something else: "nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics" (p. 89).

What the search found

All our sources were searched for "meeting maker(s)," "make it" and "meeting," with page breaks joined. The saying isn't there. In the program text (pp. 1–164), the word "meeting" for an A.A. gathering appears only in Chapter 11 (pp. 159, 162). The other use in the program, "avoid meeting a man through his family" (p. 91), is about something else. Bill's "We meet frequently" (p. 15) uses the verb.

What the program text says about meetings

  • Why they meet. Bill W., writing of the fellowship in "one western city and its environs" (p. 15): "We meet frequently so that newcomers may find the fellowship they seek." (pp. 15–16).
  • How the first meeting started. In Akron, besides casual evenings in members' homes, "it became customary to set apart one night a week for a meeting" (p. 159). "Aside from fellowship and sociability, the prime object was to provide a time and place where new people might bring their problems." (p. 160).
  • What happened there. Many a man still dazed from the hospital "has stepped over the threshold of that home into freedom" (p. 160). Already impressed by the members who had visited him in the hospital, he "capitulated entirely" when, in an upper room of the house, he heard a man tell a story that closely matched his own (p. 160). By 1939 the house was drawing sixty or eighty visitors a week (p. 161). The chapter gives the meeting real weight in a newcomer's turning point, alongside the hospital visits that came before it.
  • More than meetings. The same chapter: "But life among Alcoholics Anonymous is more than attending gatherings and visiting hospitals." (p. 161). It goes on to cleaning up old scrapes, settling family differences, lending money and finding jobs for each other (p. 161).
  • Travellers. "Those of us who travel drop in as often as we can." (p. 162). The book gives two reasons: it lets them lend a hand, and it helps them avoid "certain alluring distractions of the road" (p. 162). That is the one place the program text links going to A.A. gatherings with a member's own protection, and it puts lending a hand first.

Chapter 7, "Working With Others," which tells a member how to help a newcomer, doesn't mention meetings at all. It tells the member to tell the newcomer about the Fellowship and lend him the book on the first visit (p. 94). See: Does the Big Book say "90 meetings in 90 days"?

What the program text says keeps a member sober

The program text is direct about this, and it isn't attendance:

  • Chapter 7 opens by saying practical experience shows that "nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics" (p. 89).
  • Bill: when all other measures failed, "work with another alcoholic would save the day" (p. 15).
  • And beneath that, a spiritual condition kept up daily: "What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition." (p. 85).

An early warning about missing meetings

"The Back-Slider," a story printed in the 1939 first edition and dropped later, describes a man two years sober who decided it wouldn't hurt if he "carried on and missed a meeting or two" (Experience, Strength and Hope, 2003). Then "I began to neglect my daily communication with God" (Experience, Strength and Hope, 2003), and from there it was a short step to drinking. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980) has an early Akron member, J. D., remember Dr. Bob saying one night that they should go and see a man who "had missed a meeting or two, and was just about ripe for a slip" (Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, 1980).

So the early sources do treat skipping meetings as one sign of drifting away. In the 1939 story it comes alongside dropping daily prayer and deciding he could stand on his own, and the story's answer is getting back to God and the fellowship. Neither source says that going to meetings is what keeps a person sober.

What this means

Meetings are in the early program as a place for newcomers to find fellowship and bring their problems, and Chapter 11 shows newcomers finding their answer there (p. 160). The saying makes attendance the thing that gets a person through. The 1939 text gives that place to working with other alcoholics and to a daily spiritual life, and it says A.A. life is "more than attending gatherings" (p. 161).

Read it yourself

Sources

Source Pages Date
All our sources (searched) — various
Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapters 1, 6, 7, 11 15–16, 85, 89–94, 159–162 1939
"The Back-Slider" (Experience, Strength and Hope) — printed in the first edition, 1939; collected 2003
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers — 1980 (post-1950)

Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. Quotations are brief and cited; the Big Book, Experience, Strength and Hope and Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers are © A.A. World Services, Inc.

These pages answer questions about A.A. from A.A.'s own published literature, read in full, with every quote checked word for word against the page it cites. Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. What we read, and when each source was written.