Bind Itself to No One

The last sentence of Tradition Six's Long Form is the shortest, and it usually gets broken with a signature. The Big Book (p. 564): "An A.A. group can bind itself to no one." To bind is to tie, or to put yourself under an obligation someone can hold you to. No one means no one: not the facility, the court, the funder, or the kind people who mean well. Read it as a rule about promises. A group may carry the message into a hospital or a jail as a guest. It may not promise anyone a meeting as part of their program, a weekly slot their clients are counted at, an attendance record it will keep for them, or a chair it will fill on their schedule. The moment a group owes a meeting to someone, that someone can call in the debt. Today the binding comes as paperwork: an agreement to provide an A.A. meeting for a program's clients, a form signed to keep a room, a promise to report who came. None of them looks like giving up the group's freedom. Each one is. A group bound to no one can say no tomorrow without asking leave. Test it tonight: ask whether your group has signed, promised or agreed to anything with anyone outside it, and what they could demand because of it.