2025 General Service Conference Was Your Voice Heard

By Judy F.

In the April 2024 volume of the Gratitude Gazette I wrote an article on the 2024 General Service Conference that was being held in New York the week of April 13th, 2024. At the 2024 Conference the final vote was delivered on moving forward with the Plain Language Big Book. It has since been released and is currently in its second printing.

At the end of April 2025 our new delegate will be participating in the 2025 General Service Conference in New York. The conference theme this year is Working Together, Increasing Trust and some of the workshop topics are: Delegating: It is ok to ask for help; Closing the Gap: How do we make the voice of every group count; Our Financial Responsibility in Carrying the Message.

For me, some of the hot topics to be discussed, reviewed and some even voted on will be: 

• Consider request that the Twelve Concepts for World Service and essays on the Twelve Concepts for World Service be included in the current publication, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. (PAI 23)
• Review draft of revisions to the pamphlet “Questions and Answers on Sponsorship
• Consider request to update the book Living Sober. PAI PAIs 34, 64, 106, 90, 92, 121,122) Review progress report of the Fifth Edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous
• Consider request that a Super Majority of voting members be required to change or amend Founders Literature. (PAI 36, 93, 96)
• Consider a request to expand Article Three in the Conference Charter to protect the Co-Founders’ writings. (PAIs 81,15, 26 and 109)

I am very interested in the outcome of expanding Article Three in the Conference Charter, as this would further protect the Co-Founders’ writings, especially the first 164 pages of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the proposals is requesting a “super-majority” or ¾ approval from the full General Service Conference before any contextual changes are made. This would also include the Doctor’s Opinion, Dr. Bob’s Nightmare and AA Number Three stories, Appendix II Spiritual Experience, Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions, As Bill Sees It, AA Comes of Age, Our Great Responsibility, and the Twelve Concepts essays. There are three other proposals on the same topic, all protecting the Co-Founders’ writings. If pamphlets and new literature need to be written to be more inclusive of our diverse fellowship, so be it, but the Co-Founder’s writings should remain untouched.

If you are thinking, here she goes again on this damn conference, I’m glad I at least caught your attention, even if it’s a negative response.  Bill was so sure that setting up AA World Service/General Service was necessary to the future unity and growth of AA, he stated that it was a necessity “even to our survival as a fellowship.”

For those of you who have ignored your group’s GSR reports on this upcoming conference as well as their requests for feedback on opinion polls made available for some of the agenda items to be brought before the conference please don’t be surprised when it’s announced General Service will be making changes to the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions by including the Twelve Concepts; don’t be surprised if a 2nd Edition of Living Sober  is made available or that changes have been made to the first 164 pages of the Big Book Alcoholics Anonymous. This is the sort of information your group GSR is trying to bring back from yet another district meeting or another area assembly. This is the sort of information that no one wants to hear about in those “boring GSR reports.”  Yet the fellowship was the first to complain about the Plain Language Big Book when it was released. Yelling “how come I never heard anything about this?”  I know of at least 5 GSRs that attempted to give reports at their respective meetings that the final voting on moving forward with the Plain Language Big Book would probably take place at the 2024 General Service Conference. Hence its release in November of 2024.

I want you all to consider this statement: 10% of the fellowship of AA do 90% of the work. If this is true, then consider the fact that it is only 10% of the AA fellowship that is bringing their conscience to the Area Assembly to inform our Delegate how we wish him or her to vote on agenda items at the conference. If this is true, then it’s approximately 10% of the entire fellowship that’s opinion is heard.

To make my point, there are over 360 meetings (122 groups, which 39 are active) in our District of the General Service and approximately 1,000 groups in Area 93. We currently have 26 active GSRs for District 7 and at the last Area Pre-Conference Assembly there were approximately 150 area participants (including some alternates) from Area 93, again around that 10%. 

In a “Message From Bill” printed in the May 1964 edition of the Grapevine he wrote – “As we strive to devise better ways of carrying the AA message to those who still suffer, I hope that we will also try to create a wider understanding of the operation and needs of AA’s world services – that all-important cluster of activities which enables our fellowship to function as a whole. Because these far-flung services reach into every quarter of the world, their direct influence for good is too often unseen, and therefore unknown.” 

Bill had high expectations of the fellowship. He was “entirely confident that we would eagerly shoulder and discharge well this most high responsibility to our Third Legacy.”  Have we met this responsibility?  Will your voice be heard at the 2025 General Conference? If you don’t care if it’s heard then don’t be the one to complain when changes come down that affect the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous or the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions or God forbid some of the original writings of our Co-Founders. It was your decision not to have a voice…