Rev. Sam Shoemaker Pamphlet http://www.westbalto.a-1associates.com/LETTERS ETC/WhatChurches.
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The following is offered for your study only because it was written and
presented by Samuel M. Shoemaker, a minister of the Gospel, a world-
recognized Christian intellectual and an early friend of Bill W. and Dr. Bob.
If you find it helpful, the next time somebody wants to change the program
or its' purpose to further their ends, fell free to quote Dr. Shoemaker from
the following or Bill W. who said "Sometimes the good is the enemy of the
best."
"... God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak
in the world to shame the strong . . ." I Corinthians 1:26
During the week-end of the Fourth of July last, I attended one of the most remarkable
conventions I ever expect to attend. It was a gathering in 8t. Louis of about five
thousand members of the movement called Alcoholics Anonymous. The occasion was
the celebration of their twentieth anniversary, and the turning over freely and voluntarily
of the management and destiny of that great movement by the founders and
'old-timers' to a board which represents the fellowship as a whole.
As I lived and moved among these men and women for three days, I was moved as I
have seldom been moved in my life. It happens that I have watched the unfolding of
this movement with more than usual interest, for its real founder and guiding spirit, Bill
W., found his initial spiritual answer at Calvary Church in New York, when I was rector
there, in 1935. Having met two men, unmistakable alcoholics, who had found release
from their difficulty, he was moved to seek out the same answer for himself. But he
went further. Being of a foraging and inquiring mind, he began to think there was some
general law operating here, which could be made to work, not in two men's lives only,
but in two thousand or two million. He set to work to find out what it was. He consulted
psychiatrists, doctors, clergy and recovered alcoholics to discover what it was.
The first actual group was not in New York, but in Akron, Ohio. Bill was spending a
week-end there in a hotel. The crowd was moving towards the bar. He was lonely and
felt danger assailing him. He consulted the church-directory in the hotel lobby, and
found the name of a local clergyman and his church. He called him on the telephone and
said, "I am an alcoholic down here at the hotel. The going is a little hard just now. Have
you anybody you think I might meet and talk to?" He gave him the name of a woman
who belonged to one of the great tire-manufacturing families. He called her, she invited
him out at once and said she had a man she wanted to have meet him. While he was on
his way, she called Dr. Bob S. and his wife, Anne. Dr. Bob said he'd give her five
minutes. He stayed five hours and told Bill, "You're the only man I’ve ever seen with the
answer to alcoholism." They invited Bill over from the hotel to stay at their house. And
there was begun, twenty years ago, the first actual Alcoholics Anonymous group.
The number of them now is beyond count. Some say there are 160,000 to 200,000
recovered alcoholics, but nobody knows how many extend beyond this into the fringes
of the unknown. They say that each alcoholic holds within the orbit of his problem an
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average of fourteen persons who are affected by it. This means that conservatively two
and a half million people's lives are different because of the existence of Alcoholics
Anonymous. There is hardly a city or town or even hamlet now where you cannot find a
group, strong and well-knit, or struggling in its infancy. Prof. Austin McCormick, of
Berkeley, California, former Commissioner of Correction in the city of New York, who
was also with us at the St. Louis Convention, said once in my hearing that AA may
"prove to be one of the greatest movements of all time." That was years ago.
Subsequently facts support his prophecy.
On the Sunday morning of the convention, I was asked to talk to them, together with
Fr. Edward Dowling S. J., a wonderful Roman Catholic priest who has done notable
service for AA in interpreting it to his people, and Dr. Jim S., a most remarkable colored
physician of Washington, on the spiritual aspects of the AA program. They are very
generous to non-alcoholics, but I should have preferred that it be a bona fide alcoholic
that did the speaking.
In the course of what I said to them, I remarked that I thought it had been wise for AA
to confine its activity to alcoholics. But, I added, "I think we may see an effect of AA on
medicine, on psychiatry, on correction, on the ever-present problem of human nature;
and not least on the Church. AA indirectly derived much of its inspiration from the
Church. Now perhaps the time has come for the Church to be re-awakened and
re-vitalized by those insights and practices found in AA."
I think some of you may be a little horrified at this suggestion. I fear you will be saying
to yourself, "What have we, who have always been decent people, to learn from a lot of
reconstructed drunks?" And perhaps you may thereby reveal to yourself how very far
you are from the spirit of Christ and the Gospel, and how very much in need of precisely
the kind of check-up that may come to us from AA. If I need a text for what I say to
you, there is one ready to hand in I Corinthians 1:26, "... God chose what is foolish in
the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the
strong." I need not remind you that there is a good deal of sarcasm in that verse;
because it must be evident that anything God can use is neither foolish nor weak, and
that if we consider ourselves wise and strong, we may need to go to school to those we
have called foolish and weak.
The first thing I think the Church needs to learn from AA is that nobody gets anywhere
till he re cognizes a clearly-defined need. These people do not come to AA to get made
a little better. They do not come because the best people are doing it. They come
because they are desperate. They are not ladies and gentlemen looking for a religion,
they are utterly desperate men and women in search of redemption. Without what AA
gives, death stares them in the face. With what AA gives them, there is life and hope.
There are not a dozen ways, there are not two ways, there is one way; and they find it,
or perish. AA's each and all have a definite, desperate need. They have the need, and
they are ready to tell somebody what it is if they see the least chance that it can be
met.
Is there anything as definite for you or me, who may happen not to be alcoholics? If
there is, I am sure that it lies in the realm of our conscious withholding of the truth
about ourselves from God and from one another, by pretending that we are already
good Christians. Let me here quote a member of AA who has written a most amazing
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book: his name is Jerome Ellison, and the book is "Report to the Creator." In this (p.
210) he says, "The relief of being accepted can never be known by one who never
thought himself unaccepted. I hear of 'good Christian men and women' belonging to
'fine old church families.' There were no good Christians in the first church, only
sinners. Peter never let himself or his hearers forget his betrayal in the hour the cock
crow. James, stung by the memory of his years of stubborn resistance, warned the
church members: 'Confess your faults to one another.' That was before there were fine
old church families. Today the last place where one can be candid about one's faults is
in church. In a bar, yes, in a church, no. I know; I've tried both places." Let that sting
you and me just as it should, and make us miserable with our church Pharisaism till we
see it is just as definite and just as hideous as anybody's drunkenness can ever be, and
a great deal more really dangerous.
The second thing the Church needs to learn from AA is that men are redeemed in a
life-changing fellowship. AA does not expect to let anybody who comes in stay as he is.
They know he is in need and must have help. They live for nothing else but to extend
and keep extending that help. Like the Church, they did not begin in glorious Gothic
structures, but in houses or caves in the earth,--wherever they could get a foot-hold,
meet people, and gather. It never occurs to an AA that it is enough for him to sit down
and polish his spiritual nails all by himself, or dust off his soul all by himself, or spend a
couple of minutes praying each day all by himself. His soul gets kept in order by trying
to help other people get their souls in order, with the help of God. At once a new person
takes his place in this redeeming, life-changing fellowship. He may be changed today,
and out working tomorrow--no long, senseless delays about giving away what he has
got. He's ready to give the little he has the moment it comes to him. The fellowship that
redeemed him will wither and die unless he and others like him get in and keep that
fellowship moving and growing by reaching others. Recently I heard an AA say that he
could stay away from his Veteran's meeting, his Legion, or his Church, and nobody
would notice it. But if he stayed away from his AA meeting, his telephone would begin
to ring the next day!
A. life-changing fellowship" sounds like a description of the Church. It is of the ideal
Church. But the actual. Not one in a hundred is like this. The layman say this is the
minister's job, and the ministers say it is the evangelist's job, and body finds a
rationalized excuse for not doing what every Christian ought to be doing, i.e. bringing
other people into the redeeming, life-changing fellowship.
The third thing the Church needs to learn from AA is the necessity for definite personal
dealing with people. A.A.'s know all the stock excuses--- they've used them themselves
and heard them a hundred times. All the blame put on someone else --my
temperament; is different-- I've tried it and it doesn't work for me--I'm not really so
bad, I just slip a little sometimes. They've heard them all, and know them for the
rationalized pack of lies they are. They constitute, taken together, the .Gospel of Hell
and Failure. I've heard them laboring with one another, .now patient as a mother, now
savage as a prize-fighter, now careful in explanation, now pounding m a heavy personal
challenge, but always knowing the desperate need and the sure answer..
Are we in the Church like that ? Have you ever been drastically dealt with by anybody?
Have you ever dared to be drastic in love with anybody ? We are so official, so polite, so
ready to accept ourselves and each other at face value. e. I went for years before ever I
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met a man that dared get at my real needs, create a situation in which I could be
honest with him, and hold me to a specific Christian commitment and decision. One can
find kindness and even good advice in the Church. That is not all men need. They need
to be helped to face themselves as they really are. The AA people see themselves just
as they are. I think many of us in the Church see ourselves as we should like to appear
to others, not as we are before God. We need drastic personal dealing and challenge.
Who is ready and trained to give it to us? How many of us have ever taken a 'fearless
moral inventory' of ourselves, and dared make the depth of our need known to any
other human being? This gets at the pride which is the hindrance and sticking-point for
so many of us, and which, for most of us in the Church, has never even been
recognized, let alone faced or dealt with.
The fourth thing the Church needs to learn from A. A. is the necessity for a real change
of heart, a true conversion. As we come Sunday after Sunday, year after year, we are
supposed to be in a process of transformation. Are we? The AA's are. At each meeting
there are people seeking and in conscious need. Everybody m pulling for the people
who speak, and looking for more insight and help. They are pushed by their need. They
are pulled by the inspiration of others who are growing. They are a society of the
"before and after" with a clear line between the old life and the new. This is not the
difference between sinfulness and perfection, it is the difference between accepted
wrong- doing and the genuine beginning of a new way of life.
How about us? Again I quote Jerome Ellison, in his report to God (page 205) :"... I
began to see that many of the parishioners did not really want to find You, because
finding You would change them from their habitual ways, and they did not endure the
pain of change . . . For our churchman-like crimes of bland, impenetrable pose, I offer
shame..." I suppose that the sheer visibility of the alcoholic problem creates a kind of
enforced, honesty; but surely if we are exposed again and again to God, to Christ, to
the Cross, there should be a breaking down of our pride and unwillingness to change.
We should know by now that this unwillingness multiplied by thousands and tens of
thousands, is what is the matter with the Church, and what keeps it from being what
God means it to be on earth. The change must begin somewhere. We know it ought to
begin in us.
One of the greatest things the Church should learn from AA is the need people have for
an exposure to living Christian experience. In thousands of places, alcoholics (and
others) can go and hear recovered alcoholics speak about their experiences and watch
the process of new life and take place before their eyes. There you have it, the need
and the answer to the need, right before your eyes. They say that their public relations
are based, not on promotion, but on attraction. This attraction begins when you see
people with problems like your own, hear them speaking freely of the answers they are
finding, and realize that such honesty and such change is exactly what you need
yourself.
No ordinary service of worship in the Church can possibly do this. We need to
supplement what we do now by the establishment of informal companies where people
who are spiritually seeking can see how faith takes hold in other lives, how the
characteristically Christian experience comes to them. Some churches are doing this,
but not nearly enough of them. One I know where on Sunday evenings laymen and
women speak simply about what has happened to them spiritually: it is drawing many
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more by attraction. This needs to be multiplied by the tens of thousands, and the
Church itself awakened.
As I looked out over that crowd of five thousand in Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, I said to
myself, "Would that the Church were like this----ordinary men and women with great
need who have found a great Answer, and do not hesitate to make it known wherever
they can--a trained army of enthusiastic, humble, human workers whose efforts make
life a different thing for other people!"
Let us ask God to forgive our blindness and laziness and complacency, and through
these re-made people to learn our need for honesty, for conversion, for fellowship and
for honest witness!
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