The Founders Of The Addiction Recovery Culture Believed That What They Had Started Would One Day Save Our Troubled World

Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous believed that the community of mutual support that he and AA co-founder, Dr. Robert Smith had begun in 1935, would one day save our troubled world. In a speech he gave at the second Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Conference held at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1955, Bill said:

Bill was quite aware that AA needed to focus on helping alcoholics and not allow pride and grandiosity derail it from its primary purpose. Bill’s wife, Lois, affirmed this sense of the world-changing potential of the movement that might come to fruition when the principles upon which it was based became familiar to more and more people. At the AA World Services Conference held at Montreal in 1985 Lois declared:

I believe, as Bill did, that if he could find a way to give others what he had, he would begin something that would change the world Bill and I always believed that, as more and more people embrace our way of life and reach out in love to others, the principles on which our fellowship is based, will one day save our troubled world.

Frank Buchman's Vision

Frank Buchman likewise believed that what he had passed down to AA, his way of gathering as a first-century Christian Fellowship—the Oxford Group—would one day save our troubled world. In a talk he gave a few months before his passing in 1961 he said:

Bill Wilson

Lois Wilson

I want all to feel they have a share as they partake of the priceless boon which has come to them and to me through the Oxford Group They can best perpetuate this gift by carrying forward a philosophy that is adequate for a world crisis and that will, at last, bring the nations to the long-looked-for Golden Age ushered in by the greatest revolution of all time whereby the Cross of Christ shall transform the world