Suggestive Only

Before any Tradition was written, the first A.A. book had already left each new group to run itself. In 1939 there were only a few centres, and the Big Book described what was spreading out from them (p. 162): "Little clusters of twos and threes and fives of us have sprung up in other communities". Nobody was sent to manage them. The book spoke to the reader who might start the next one alone, and handed him no rulebook. About itself it said (p. 164): "Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize we know only a little." The people who wrote the book did not claim the right to run what it started. Each new group worked out its own meeting night, its own room and its own ways. Seven years later the Long Form wrote down what those clusters had been doing all along (Big Book, p. 563): "With respect to its own affairs, each A.A. group should be responsible to no other authority than its own conscience." Today a new meeting is often handed a script before its first night: the facility's format, the program's rules, a card to read that nobody voted on. Test it tonight: ask who wrote the rules your meeting reads out, and whether your group ever voted to adopt them.