(Most of the following was originally published on another public blog.  Due to the more restricted audience available on this site, I've taken the liberty of being a little more liberal with my personal opinion and bias)

General Information

My review of AA and the internet all restarted for me in the fall of '08 with a general survey I did of what the current state of AA was on the internet.  It had been a number of years since I'd really looked around much about what was online about and regarding AA.  While I was generally aware (I'd been on the net usually at least a few hours each week and that was increasing), I'd not really given it much thought until I started looking for general information about AA and the principles of AA.

I was shocked.

This article is an attempt to capture a small picture of where the Alcoholics Anonymous movement stands and where it is likely headed in the next few decades.  There is little question that AA growth peaked in the early nineties and has been flat to declining globally ever since.  Whether the factors driving that decline are external to AA or internal to AA is very difficult to determine. Let's see if we can tease out some tentative conclusions.

AA in the early nineties was reporting we had 2.2 million members worldwide in the group count records.  The same database on January 1, 2007 said the count was 1.989 million, or about 200,000 down from the peak years.  Using a national representative survey of the U.S., the NIAAA 1991-1992 National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey (NLAES),  found that in 1991-1992, 2.4 million individuals reported attending an A.A. meeting during the last year.  The number of AA groups nationally and globally has grown but the membership counts do not show the same pattern.  Admittedly, AA is not a statistical gathering organization and counting membership is frought with difficulties, but from the treetop level, AA has a negative growth rate.  While it may be useful in a home group or district to argue about AA "success" and "retention rates," from the macro level both are negative.

The number of people in the US each year who go through alcohol and drug treatment programs is estimated by government agencies at around one million.  As noted on this site's welcome page, a total of five million people in the US are estimated each year to attend some kind of support meeting for alcohol and illicit drug problems.  Around ninety percent of the treatment programs in the US are 12-Step based.  So, it is easy to estimate that, conservatively, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new people are getting some kind of introduction to AA each year.  AAWS sells around a million new Big Books every year, so that's at least one million people who are at least getting an introduction to the cover, if nothing more, of our "basic text."  Yet, we are not growing.  What begins to emerge here is a picture of tremendous churn.  Let's drill down a little further.

Yes.

Part of our preamble states that “Our primary purpose is to stay sober and to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.”

In the United States, the General Service Office estimates the number of AA groups at 55,244. I am certain there are very good groups functioning. However, I would hazard a guess that if you dropped in to random sample of groups, you would find a good percentage of groups that are barely recognizable as Alcoholics Anonymous. Certainly, if you were to ask people why they are there you would likely get a number of responses, some even might be the recitation of the primary purpose from the preamble. But how do we put that into practice?

One of the most appealing promises in the Big Book is that "more will be revealed."  Most students of the Big Book probably can come up with a few items for that list.  Sitting in a meeting in CA recently I heard the assurance that "you can make a doorknob your higher power."  It's anyone's right to do that in AA for certain, and I knew a member who had a gray squirrel for his higher power for five years.  But somehow it dawns on us that doorknobs and squirrels as higher powers is a retreat from AA's spiritual roots that is so bizarre as to raise the question of whether any newcomer could take us seriously.  Surely this is not what "more revealed" was supposed to mean.

I regularly hear members talking about "miracles" as if they were everyday occurrences for people who just don't drink and attend a few meetings a week.  I refer to them as members who have a "Domino Pizza God: I ask, he delivers, and adds some extra pepperoni because he thinks I'm special."  Nice god if you can get it, but I always wonder what the others in the rooms who don't have such a delivery service must think.  Bill W. tried in the Twelve and Twelve to urge us to keep the great mysteries mysterious, but we seem to have succeeded in some AA groups now into making those mysteries a handmaiden of narcissism.

In the way Alcoholics Anonymous always proceeds, we had conversations about what to name our site and the effort we're working on here.  Actually, initially it had been proposed as aarenewal.org and then, by a mistake, it was registered as aareform.org.  Both names now point to the same site but it did provide for an additional moment's reflection as to what we should name it.

Borrowing from one of the co-founders of the site:

Renewal may imply a back to basics theme; reform may imply a band of the disgruntled out to picket Riverside Drive. But if by renewal we mean taking the best of AA and applying what we and others who care about alcoholics have learned in 75 years, maybe it's best.

So, we called our site aareenwal.org.  We think AA has done wonders in the world of alcoholism.  Many of us feel we owe our very lives to this organization.

So, it's with no small amount of concern and care that we participate in conversations about whether we need to change anything about this fellowship and, if changes seem warranted, what the nature of those changes might be.