The SA conference in San Diego gave me a strong sense of fellowship and a great hope for our future in recovery and growth. Something that struck me, however, was an experience which brought some questions to mind regarding our commitment to the Twelve Steps as an ongoing foundation for recovery.
In but a few weeks it will be ten years from the time Box 300 was first opened (June of 1981) and that first wave of desperate letters started pouring in asking for help. When the Chicago conference rolls around in July, it will have been ten years from the historic meeting in our garage where SAs from over the U.S. joined together for the first time and came to one mind and spirit in formulating the principles of our SA Program.
The autonomy of individual SA groups (Tradition Four) does not extend to matters affecting the fellowship as a whole. Nothing is more basic to the SA fellowship as a whole than what has come to be known as the SA sobriety imperative. The sobriety imperative is the thing which makes SA unique among several 12 Step programs dealing with sexual addiction.
The International Group Conscience Committee selections are now complete. We are happy to announce the results to the Fellowship at this time.
In the last issue of Essay, we published requests for feedback from groups that are experiencing problems or have questions about the way in which meetings should be run. R.B. in Wichita Falls wrote asking how other groups address the problem of a high rate of dropouts, and J.B. in Chicago wrote asking how other groups manage to give everyone enough time to speak.
Since it was announced at the Los Angeles convention last December, Roy and the Central Office have been using the International Group Conscience Committee in an ad hoc temporary advisory capacity in day-to-day matters involving Central Office or SA as a whole. This is the only active representative body SA has at present, and it has been working extremely well. Following are some recent decisions made:
Dear Fellow SAs, I thought it might be helpful to let you know what our group from West L.A. is doing in response to the financial challenge facing our Central Office. We know that SA as a whole is working on ways to meet this challenge, and whatever recommendations are adopted, we here will seek to support them. However, we feel that whatever we can do in the meantime will be helpful.
Salt Lake City groups report they have hit upon a way to help support the 12th Step work of the SA Central Office. They pass the basket around a second time for loose change only—no bills—and send that to Central Office. They were surprised at what this amounted to after just one month.
From the beginning, I have followed the principle of “least possible organization” (Ninth Tradition long form) when it comes to organizational structure at the national level, which is the principle most groups follow at the group level. That’s the principle that worked so well in AA. As AA developed in Akron and NYC, then started to spread, it had no organizational structure whatever. It was a spiritual entity that grew from the inside out.
Under Traditions One and Three, each SA group has the right and responsibility to bring up issues that bear on membership, group unity, and meeting quality. The following are merely suggested for debate and feedback, supporting the idea that if we don’t look out for our unity — both group and SA as a whole — who will?
