Quote:
138
Two Roads for the Old-timer
The founders of many groups ultimately divide into two classes known in A.A. slang as "elder statesmen" and "bleeding deacons."
The elder statesmen sees the wisdom of the group's decision to run itself and holds no resentment over his reduced status. His judgment, fortified by considerable experience, is sound; he is willing to sit quietly on the side lines patiently awaiting developments.
The bleeding deacon is just as surely convinced that the group cannot get along without him. He constantly connives for re-election to office and continues to be consumed with self-pity. Nearly every old-timer in our Society has gone through this process in some degree. Happily, most of them survive and live to become elder statesmen. They become the real and permanent leadership of A.A.
TWELVE AND TWELVE, P. 135
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Had a bleeding deacon with 50 years in recovery, try to shut down our group. We had a lot of newcomers and we bought more meetings lists than all the other groups combined. I had to go to General Service and tell them about the group. Everyone called it JoAnne's group, instead of Freedom of Recovery. They thought I had it in my home. I didn't even live in the same building. The meeting was started because Hamilton Housing came to me when I was 3 years sober and asked me what they could do about the drug and alcohol problems in their buildings. I said nothing unless you want to make space for a meeting, so they have a place to go when they decided they needed help. We got visitors from town and the Service people referred them to us because we were close to downtown. We had people from Florida, Alaska, Michigan, New York, California, etc. We had a one bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor of the building next door to where I lived. In the living room we had a table set up for our discussion group, the kitchen was good for coffee and a table for those who wanted to talk at, and in the bedroom, we had one on ones. We has a balcony for a smoking parlour. We had 7 meetings in 6 days of the week and I opened and closed them for 7 years, with the help of other members. I turned the meetings over to a long-timer and a woman who had come to the group and had one year of sobriety, so I could go back to school. This resulted with me getting some computer savvy, so I could come on line and post here and other sites.