The Discipleship House works with the men to give them a solid foundation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As the men work with their sponsors guiding them through the twelve steps we take the information and correlate it with the Holy Scripture so they have a knowledge of where the founders of the twelve steps got their information from.
Three A.A. old-timers and their wives tell precisely what they learned from their sponsor, Clarence H. Snyder, who was sponsored by A.A. co-founder Dr. Bob Smith. Clarence later became the member of Alcoholics Anonymous with the most years of sobriety.
These authors have taken hundreds through the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, faithfully following the basic ideas passed to them by Clarence.
These Old-timers have carried on the spiritual retreats for AAs and their families that Snyder founded in the 1960ís. And, in those retreats, they have presented the spiritual history of pioneer A.A., the materials AAs borrowed from the Bible and the Oxford Group, and have taught participants how to take the Twelve Steps in an afternoon. Since 1980, they have led retreats in Florida and Wisconsin, and helped start more in the United States, England, Scotland, and Australia. And their ideas have also been presented in what was formerly called the USSR.
They have shown, and here demonstrate for you, how people can with certainty ìcome to believeî what the Creator can and will do in curing alcoholics and their families of alcoholismís ìcurse.î
It is well known that the twelve-step program developed by Alcoholics Anonymous has become the model for many other popular, lay-managed programs of treatment targeted at people with addictions, compulsions, or dependencies. These conditions include nicotine abuse, narcotics and cocaine abuse, compulsive eating and gambling. Alcoholics Anonymous estimate there are now more than 87,000 A.A. groups in 136 countries world-wide, representing 1.8 million members! Including memberships in other twelve-step programs, it can be estimated safely that millions of individuals around the world attend twelve-step meetings every week.
Alcoholics Anonymous began on June 10, 1935, co-founded by William Griffith Wilson (Bill W.) and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith (Dr. Bob). Wilson conceived the idea of Alcoholics Anonymous while he was hospitalized for excessive drinking in December 1934. During his hospital stay, Wilson had a spiritual experience that removed his desire to drink. In the following months, he tried to persuade other alcoholics to stop drinking just as he had. Wilson found his first "convert" in Smith, who was willing to follow Wilson’s method to find freedom from alcoholism. Four years later, Wilson and Smith published the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, which contains the Twelve Steps and a spiritually based program of recovery from alcoholism.