Before AA…
Before The Twelve Steps…
Soul Surgery defined personal work, was the foundation of sponsorship and step work, and bridged the Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous. The practical evangelical method covers:

- Confidence, gained through trust and discretion
- Confession of moral failings in specific, named acts
- Conviction through compassion for harm caused
- Conversion, through a complete surrender of one’s will to God
- Conservation through immediately passing the same message to another person

The instructions for “personal work” became the blueprint for what recovery now knows as sponsorship, the confidential, non-hierarchical, one-on-one process wherein an experienced member guides a newcomer through a painful but liberating process. The sponsor walks beside the newcomer not as a therapist or priest, but as a fellow sufferer who has already traversed the same valley.
We do not grow spiritually in isolation or through passive belief, but only in the active, costly, and redemptive act of helping another human being walk the same difficult, healing path that we ourselves have been given the grace to travel.
When Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous, they drew on the spiritual disciplines they found in Oxford Group meetings to develop The Twelve Steps. This book “can be read as an essay on Twelfth-Step work,” and was circulated among early A.A. groups as a de facto supplement to the Big Book. Influences include an insistence on rigorous moral inventory (Step 4), a call for unflinching confession to another human (Step 5), a demand for restitution (Step 9), and an emphasis on carrying the message to others (Step 12).

Includes Henry Drummond’s essay Spiritual Diagnosis, which was included as a preface to later editions of the book and directly influenced Walter’s theory and practice.