Writer Philip Yancey noted that when he first attended an AA meeting in solidarity with a friend, he was overwhelmed by finding what felt like a New Testament church. Millionaires and celebrities mixed freely with unemployed dropouts and needle-marked gang members. Radical honesty, welcome, and dependency seemed to rule the day.
Over the years, this observation has been made by too many Christian writers and preachers to count. One book even has this question as a title: Why Can’t the Church Be More like an AA Meeting? The short answer is that it can, as long as the people who attend it are willing to be more like alcoholics. Too desperate to hide, too humbled to judge; too weak to solo, too needy to skip.
An early letter from cofounder Bill W. to AA members described how people recovering from addiction can never “forget that only through suffering did they find enough humility to enter the portals of that New World. How privileged we are to understand so well the divine paradox that strength rises from weakness, that humiliation goes before resurrection: that pain is not only the price but the very touchstone of spiritual rebirth.”
This rebirth into sobriety and usefulness came through following spiritual practices eventually known as the Twelve Steps: admitting powerlessness, surrendering the will, ruthless self-examination and confession, making amends, living a life of spiritual dependence and service. Mostly they came from a fellowship called the Oxford Group that was trying to rediscover a way to follow Jesus in contemporary life. When Bill W. wrote them in a burst of inspiration, his first thought was that they mirrored the number of Jesus’ disciples.
AA got the Twelve Steps from the church. And now the church needs them back. Actually, all humanity needs them.
Dallas Willard once wrote,

   It is one of the all-time greatest ironies of human history that the founding insights and practices of the most successful “recovery“ program ever known––insights and practices almost 100 percent borrowed from bright spots in the Christian movement, if not outright gifts of God––are not routinely taught and practiced by churches. What possible justification or explanation could there be for this fact?

Hence this book. Its purpose is to help you practice the Twelve Steps as a program for life. It is written for anyone hungry for more, whether you have an identified addiction or not. It is not a “recovery” book. It’s written to help anyone enter into an actionable, non-legalistic, spiritual way of life that—oh, by the way—has had the empirically verified side effect of freeing millions of people from addictions when random “spirituality” could not.
It’s intended to be a guide to action so that you can practice these steps. Wise people say the Twelve Steps are numbered because they’re meant to be taken in order. It’s only when we see our powerlessness that we’re ready to surrender to God. It’s only after we’ve taken inventory that we can confess to another or make amends to those we’ve hurt. This is not a smorgasbord. No substitutions, no skipping around, no cutting in line. If we find ourselves not liking a step, there’s a good chance it’s because we really need it. So we humble ourselves. One step at a time.
I didn’t write this book because I’m an expert. I wrote it because I’m desperate. When I first began attending twelve-step groups, I didn’t think I had any addictions. Now I think their name is Legion.
When I first began to study the Twelve Steps years ago, a longtime AA-er told me that it would not be long before I would be jealous that I was not an alcoholic. He was right. The low-level motivation of people who lack an identified addiction is why a priest and longtime friend of AA named Father Dowling wrote an article—the last before he died––called “A.A. Steps for the Underprivileged Non-A.A.”
Harvard historian Ernest Kurtz wrote the definitive history of AA. He called his book Not-God because the basic problem addicted people have is that they think they’re God.
This would also be the basic problem non-addicted people have, if there were such a thing. The truth is that we are all overly attached to something—starting with our egos—that we are powerless to control. We all need to be freed. Apparently the word attachment itself comes from a French word for holding something fast with nails or stakes, like the hands of a condemned man being nailed to a cross. Everybody gets crucified by something.[10]
One of many mottoes in AA is “Keep it simple,” some of the last words spoken by one cofounder to the other. The Twelve Steps are sometimes described as a simple program for complicated people. In light of that, this book is organized into short chapters that describe different facets for each step—the first three chapters for Step 1, the next three for Step 2, and so on. At the start of each step I’ve also included a prayer to use as you read that step to prepare you to put it into practice. My hope is for this to be a handbook that will help you do the steps rather than just read about them. You may well want to find a friend to talk with about this journey.

John Ortberg and John Mark Comer, Steps: A Guide to Transforming Your Life When Willpower Isn’t Enough (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Refresh, 2025), 6–8.