Concept I

“Final responsibility and ultimate authority for A.A. world services should always reside in the collective conscience of our whole fellowship.”

I finally found a copy of “The Twelve Concepts for World Service” illustrated pamphlet. The pamphlet is meant to be an introduction to the Twelve Concepts.

I’ll try to relate the reason The Concepts were drawn up from the pamphlet.

“As A.A. grew up, it began with the groups – first only a few, then hundreds and then thousands. Very early an Alcoholic Foundation, later renamed The General Service Board, was formed to be responsible for our affairs. And with Dr. Bob’s death and Bill’s facing up to his own mortality. a General Service Conference assumed the leadership which had fallen to the co-founders. Meanwhile, a tiny publishing operation and service office had grown in size and importance to the Fellowship, and a monthly journal, the A.A. Grapevine, was being published.

Which of these entities was supposed to do what? Little wonder there was confusion! What was their relationship? Who was in charge? What were their responsibilities – and what were their rights? Bill W. himself sometimes took part in the pulling and hauling that took place, and so he saw the need to ‘reduce to writing’ his concepts of the ‘why’ of the whole structure, the lessons to be drawn from experience, the relationships and, above all, the spiritual principles.”

The basics of the First Concept are that the General Service Board was designed to do what the groups could not do, which was to have uniform literature, uniform public information about A.A. groups getting started, share the experience of established groups, handle pleas for help, publish a national magazine, and carry the message in other languages and in other countries. These would all require policy leadership that Dr. Bob questioned once he discovered he had become fatally ill.

Bill felt the answer to where the policy leadership would come was from the groups themselves, from a collective conscience. That offered another question – how could the autonomous, widely scattered groups, exercise such a responsibility? This effectively laid the groundwork for the Concepts.