The Church Gave AA Its 12 Steps - Now It Needs Them Back

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If you grew up in church, you probably learned to associate the 12 steps with smoky meeting rooms, Styrofoam coffee cups, and a spirituality vague enough to pray to a doorknob. That was where Love Life Sober podcast host Christy Osborne found herself before she finally cracked open John Ortberg's book Steps after the fifth or sixth person told her she had to.

What she found inside reframed everything.

"When I dug into your book," Christy told John on a recent episode of the podcast, "I realized I had been going through these steps, I just didn't know it. I went through them probably backwards and upside down."

It turns out that's exactly the point. The 12 steps were never as secular as most Christians have been led to believe.

Where the 12 Steps Came From

About a hundred years ago, a ministry called the Oxford Group was doing something radical: trying to make discipleship to Jesus accessible and real for ordinary people. They took seriously practices like surrender, self-examination, confession to another person, and daily reliance on God. Then a desperate alcoholic named Bill W, who had been hospitalized three times, lost jobs, lost money, and broken promises written in his family Bible, got a knock on the door from a sober friend who invited him to one of their meetings.

"He discovered," John explains, "that as an indirect benefit, he was given the power to live a sober life."

Over the next four years, about 100 people entered into this Oxford Group way of discipleship and were freed from addiction. They eventually wrote it all down, and what became Alcoholics Anonymous was born.

"AA got the 12 steps from the church," John says simply. "And now the church needs them back."

Desperation: the Gift Nobody Asks For

In their conversation, John describes the concept of "the God gift of desperation," the idea that Step One only really works when it isn't abstract. When you feel in your bones that on your own, you are beat.

"When you do a cost-benefit analysis," he says, "[you] could enter into this other way of life and stop drinking, or [you] could keep running the experiment and see that maybe you’ll never end up on Skid Row. Is there a real big upside to continuing to drink if you're not sure?"

He also points out that the second step doesn't promise God will restore us to sobriety. It promises God will restore us to sanity. "The insanity," he explains, "comes in when there's an alcoholic who is sober, and in that sober state says, 'No, I'm going to take another drink.' That's the insanity."

Using God vs. Surrendering to God

So many people ask God to take away the desire to drink. They ask sincerely. They mean it. And when nothing changes, they feel abandoned.

John's response is gentle but unflinching. He invites us to sit with a single question: Am I living in a surrendered state before God, or has my drinking caused a few inconveniences, and I'm trying to use God to take away the desire so I don't actually have to rearrange my life around steps I don't want to take?

God, John explains, is not a force you can use to get the outcome you want. He is a person to be in a relationship with.

As John writes in Steps: "When it comes to the spiritual life, conditional surrender is a contradiction in terms. Surrender that demands God grant us some outcome that we want is negotiation." Genuinely turning your life and will over to him includes trusting that he is smarter than you and has purposes you don't understand.

Why Willpower Was Never the Answer

John and Christy spend time in the episode unpacking something that nearly every person who has tried to "just stop" already knows in their gut: willpower doesn't work. Not for this.

"We way overestimate what we can do by willpower," John says. The better question isn't how hard can I try today? — it's how do I need to rearrange my life so that the flow of thoughts, desires, and perceptions inside me actually become changed?

That's where the 12 steps do their quiet, unglamorous, transformative work. They are, at their core, a process for the reformation of habit — habit at the neurological level, the level where real change actually lives.

Step 11, seeking to improve conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation, is where it all comes together. "The greatest freedom in human life," John quotes Dallas Willard, "is the ability to decide where I will place my mind."

The 12-Inch Journey

“The longest journey in the world is the 12 inches from your head to your heart,” John writes. 

Most of us believe, somewhere in our minds, that God loves us. We've heard it in church, read it on coffee mugs, nodded along to the sermon. But when John asks people, "When you come to God's mind, what do you think his immediate response is?" the number one answer he hears back is: disappointment.

"Part of the journey to surrender," John says, "is coming to believe not just in my head but in my heart that God genuinely loves and cares about and watches over and is working for the good of me."

That journey - from theological knowledge to embodied trust - may be the whole ballgame.

Listen to The Whole Conversation:

If you've been praying for God to take the desire away, wondering whether the steps are really "for you," or just trying to understand what surrender actually looks like in real life, this episode is for you. Listen to the full conversation with John Ortberg on the Love Life Sober podcast, and if his work resonates, grab a copy of Steps. Your community will thank you for it.

This article was created with the help of AI to share an episode of one of our fantastic podcasts, Love Life Sober. It was carefully reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy, clarity, and quality.

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