Bill Wilson and Rev. Sam Shoemaker: 12-Step Pioneers

 

-an article published in the Light Magazine “Healing Pioneers” Series

By Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

 

From 1917 until 1919, Sam Shoemaker served as a YMCA missionary in China. In January 1918, Sam met a fellow missionary to China, Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford Group where he experienced a profound spiritual renewal through the "Four Absolutes" of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Absolute Purity means to find some all-consuming and high faith and purpose which takes up and uses one’s energies. Sam always said that ‘we should believe the incredible and tackle the impossible.”  He memorably noted that“…everyone has a problem, is a problem, or lives with a problem.”   

Billy Graham called Sam “a giant among men… I doubt that any man in our generation had a greater impact on the Christian world than did Sam Shoemaker.” Billy Graham saw Sam as the single, most dynamic preacher of his day

 Ordained as an Anglican/Episcopal pastor in 1921, he served as Rector of Calvary Church, New York, from 1925 to 1952. 

As Bill W tells it in AA Comes of Age, he went in December 1934 with his friend Ebby to Dr. Sam’s Calvary Church Mission:

There were some hymns and prayers.  Then Tex, the leader, exhorted us.  Only Jesus could save, he said.  Somehow this statement did not jar me.  Certain men got up and gave testimonials.  Numb as I was, I felt interest and excitement rising.  Then came the call.  Some men were starting forward to the rail.  Unaccountably impelled, I started too…I knelt among the shaking penitents. Maybe then and there, for the first time, I was penitent too.  Something touched me.  I guess it was more than that.  I was hit.  I felt a wild impulse to talk. Jumping to my feet, I began…Ebby, who at first had been embarrassed to death, told me with relief that I had done all right and had ‘given my life to God.’

Bill and his wife Lois started attending Oxford Group meetings at Calvary House with Sam Shoemaker. Sam became one of Bill’s closest personal friends, even hosting the first AA meetings in his Calvary Church Hall. Both Sam and Bill had a wonderful sense of self-deprecating humour that drew the non-religious to God.  Sam often said: “I never feel quite as much at home as I feel at an AA meeting.” A woman said to him:  “Sam, you may not be an alcoholic but you certainly do talk like one of them.” AA now has over two million members worldwide, with more than 123,000 groups in about 180 countries.  So many have gotten their lives back.

Where did AA’s amazing 12 Steps come from?  They were written by Bill W.  Thinking of the twelve apostles, he decided that the society should have twelve steps. Dr. Sam, as he was known affectionately in AA circles, had a profound impact on Bill W’s spiritual awakening.  The divorce of Bill’s parents when Bill was aged 10 was a shock that he never forgot.  He says he remained depressed for almost a year following his parents’ divorce.  He ended up staying with his grandparents after his mom left for Boston to attend Osteopathic School. Bill’s pain was heightened by the fact that he did not see his father again for nine years.

 

Bill W said that ‘It was from Sam that co-founder Dr. Bob and I in the beginning absorbed most of the principles that were afterwards embodied in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Steps that express the heart of AA’s way of life.’  Bill W went on to say that Dr. Sam ‘gave us the concrete knowledge of about what we could do about (alcoholism)’ and that Dr. Sam ‘passed on the spiritual keys by which we were liberated’.  Dr Sam, according to Bill W, ‘has been the connecting link.’

Before AA, they would just put people in sanitariums because they didn’t know what to do with them.  AA showed how alcoholism is a disease with a spiritual solution.  Even though Dr. Sam was not an alcoholic, he had unusual insights into the human condition that drew alcoholics to him.  Reminiscing about the first time that he met Dr. Sam, Bill W said: ‘I can still see him standing there before the lectern.  His utter honesty, his tremendous forthrightness, struck me deep.  I shall never forget it.’  Dr. Sam according to Bill W,

always called a spade a spade, and his blazing eagerness, earnestness, and crystal clarity drove home his message point by point…Here was a man quite as willing to talk about his own sins as about anybody else’s.

 

The author of twenty-eight books, Dr. Sam was named as one of the ten greatest preachers in North America. Sam founded several movements, including Faith at Work in 1926 and the Pittsburgh Experiment in 1955, which integrated business and faith. His wife Helen, who wrote Sam’s biography I Stand at the Door,  birthed the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer in 1958.  He challenged all of the failings of humanity with fierceness, wit and relevancy.  But Dr. Sam was never pessimistic or despairing. Like Bill W, Sam never gave up on people.

There are now dozens of recovery groups who apply the 12 Steps to all kinds of addictions and challenges, including overeating, narcotics, sexual brokenness, emotional dysfunctions, and gambling dependencies.  Lois, Bill Wilson’ wife, birthed Alanon, which focuses on the families and spouses of alcoholics. There is even a specifically Christ-centered expression based on the beatitudes called ‘Celebrate Recovery’ that over five million people have already participated in over 35,000 host churches.

Since 1982, I (Ed) have done hundreds of Fifth Steps where people have come into great freedom from alcoholism and drugs.  Many have encountered the Holy Spirit as their higher power. When we admit that we have wronged others and then make restitution, miracles can happen.  Families are often restored after years of rejection. 

Many 12 Step groups around the world pray both the Serenity Prayer and the Lord’s prayer.  Both prayers are about ‘letting Go and letting God’.  According to Bill W, breakthroughs happen when “…we can surrender and truly feel, ‘Thy will, not mine, be done’”.  It is so hard to let go.  Yet as we work the twelve steps, as we admit our powerlessness, as we turn our lives and will over to the care of God, as we seek only for the knowledge of God’s will, then miracles can happen.

 

As Dr. Sam said to the 20th Anniversary AA Convention,

Prayer is not trying to get God to change His will. It is trying to find out what His will is, to align ourselves or realign ourselves with His purpose for the world and for us.  When we let willfulness cool out of us, God can get His will across to us as far as we need to see ahead of us.  Dante said, ‘In His will is our peace’.

 

Dr. Sam concluded his address to the 20th Anniversary AA Convention by saying:

I thank God that the church has so widely associated itself with AA, because I think AA people need the church for personal stabilization and growth, but also because I think that the church needs AA as a continuous spur to greater aliveness and expectation and power.

 

 “Perhaps the time has come”, said Dr. Sam, “for the church to be reawakened and revitalized by the insights and practices found in AA.”

 

Our prayer for those reading this article is that as with Bill Wilson and Sam Shoemaker, God may make each of us a channel of his peace, his serenity and his sobriety.

 

John & Paula Sandford: Healing the Family

-an article for the Light Magazine ‘Healing Pioneers’ series

Many people are fascinated with science fiction, the battlefield worlds of Star Wars and Star Trek.  John and Paula Sandford, as healing theologians, knew that the great arena of battle is inner space, rather than outer space.[1]  With their Elijah House ministry, their passion was to evangelize the unbelieving areas of the believer’s heart.[2]    They felt called to "restore the hearts of children to the fathers and the hearts of fathers to the children". (Malachi 4: 6)[3]

The Sandfords discovered through thousands of hours of Christian prayer counselling[4] that inner healing of the heart makes us more human:

The tragedy of our culture is that men and women are becoming progressively less human.[5]

Restoration of the inner person comes not through trying to correct our behaviour, but rather through death and restoration[6]:

Sins need forgiveness.  But our sin nature can only be dealt with by our own death on the cross.  Forgiveness is done for us totally by Jesus. Death on the cross requires our participation…[7]

Even though death, resurrection and forgiveness already happen when a person receives Jesus, we are slow to accept the new reality. John said that we are spiritual midwives attending at the birth of people.[8] Sanctification is daily death and resurrection in Christ. Restoring the Christian family happens as we apply the Lordship of Jesus to every area of our lives.[9] Everyone needs inner healing in order to mature in the Christian life, transforming our hearts.

Like Leanne Payne and Francis MacNutt[10], John and Paula were mentored by the grandmother of modern healing, Agnes Sanford.[11]  She saw inner healing as nothing other than the confessional, the revealing and confession of long-forgotten sins (James 5:16).[12]  Paula and I, said John, have heard more confessions than most priests.[13]

John first met Agnes Sanford in 1961 in Springfield, Missouri, where she prayed for the healing of his back by asking the Lord to enable him to forgive his mother.  His childhood relationship with his mother had been very difficult.[14] In John’s subsequent dream, five-foot-four Agnes Sanford tackled to the ground the six-foot-tall weightlifter John Sandford before racing with him through a skyscraper turning on lights. John commented: “Ever since then, the Lord has been turning on lights in my ‘tower of knowledge.’”[15]

In 1963, John joined Agnes as a teacher in many inner healing seminars conducted by her School of Pastoral Care.[16] 

After the death of her husband, Agnes Sanford came to John and Paula, needing love to come out of her walls of depression and to live again.  It was a great privilege to prayerfully release her from her depression.[17]

Four key areas where John and Paula made key contributions were in the area of the heart of stone, inner vows[18], bitter root judgments, and performance orientation[19].  These four areas have been key to the Sandford’s success in restoring marriages and reversing ‘silent divorce.’  John and Paula’s vulnerability about their marriage challenges gave courage for many other couples to be transparent in seeking healing.

John and Paula often opened up inner healing by asking three questions[20]:

1)        What was your father like?

2)        What was your mother like?

3)        Did they give you affection?

Because Paula’s mom struggled with anger, so did Paula in the early days of raising her children. Through deep inner healing, Paula became very sweet, even when she later had Alzheimer’s.  Her son Mark said:

Whenever my wife Maureen and I visited her, memories of the angry mother of my distant childhood faded in the warm glow of gentle hugs and kisses and “I love you” and “I'm so proud of you.” We never detected a hint of anger toward us.[21]

Both John and Paula Sandford were wounded by their fathers being workaholics whom they only saw on weekend.  This left them with bitter root judgments that their spouses would not be available for them.  As Hebrews 12:15 puts it, “see to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.”  Bitterness defiles everything.[22]  John said:

What is in us either blesses or defiles others.   There are specific ways that bitter roots defile. Our bitter root judgements can draw out the worst behaviour in people.[23]

Forgiveness by John and Paula of their fathers brought great healing to their marriage. John found it easier to be present to Paula when she no longer saw him through the eyes of her absent father.

For the first eighteen years of their marriage, Paula could not keep the house tidy.  Everything was messy. When John repented of his bitter root judgement about his mom being messy, Paula could keep the house tidy, with her children actually helping her.[24]

Marriage, said the Sandfords, is a twenty-four-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year, exercise in the art of forgiveness.[25]  The ability to completely forgive is perhaps the most needful skill requiring restoration in family life today.[26] Forgiveness is vital in inner healing.  When we forgive our spouse, our hearts are more tender as the roots of bitterness are removed.  This makes it easier to be kind and generous to our spouse.  No more silent treatment, putdowns, or screaming. How does your family handle conflict? 

Because John’s mother was not safe to be around, he made an inner vow not to be open to a woman. Through breaking this inner vow, God radically restored intimacy within his marriage.

John’s father suffered from procrastination, never finishing things. Part of John’s heart of stone was that he was locked into his inner vow that unlike his dad, he would finish things. This caused him to not be available to his wife Paula because he would not stop until he had finished whatever project that he was already doing, whether ministry or sports.  This hooked into Paula’s inner vow that her husband would not interrupt things to be available to her.  Breaking this inner vow allowed John to be present to Paula in a life-giving way.[27]

The greatest difficulty concerning forgiveness, said the Sandfords, is that most often we do not know we still cherish resentment, or have lied to ourselves.[28] People almost inevitably think they have forgiven when they haven’t.[29] Until we lay the ax to the bitter root of unforgiveness, there is no rest.[30]  The Sandfords held that

Bitter-root judgments are the most common, most basic sins in all marital relationships –perhaps in all of life. 

Because of bitter root judgments, we continually look for a fight to happen with our spouse.  Seldom are marital fights ‘clean’, (i.e. actually concerning what they seem to be about.) Marriage is fraught with surprises.

The best way to destroy a marriage, said the Sandfords, is to be sure to win every argument.[31]  They taught extensively about biblical listening: 

Real listening is the most difficult art in the world precisely because it calls for the most complete and constant death of self.[32]

True inner healing breaks the curse of self-centeredness, releasing us to a life of service. The single root cause of failure, said the Sandfords, in every marriage is selfishness.[33] 

When a person has a heart of stone, especially clergy and caregivers, they are incapable of divulging their inner being to another.[34]  Receiving is always riskier than giving.[35] The heart of stone, said John, is an automatic hiding place with us, a hard place inside of us that resists trusting brothers and sisters.  Love is a fire that will melt whatever remains of the heart of stone.[36]

Performance orientation, as described in Galatians 3: 1-5, leaves us stuck on an endless treadmill of trying harder to be good enough. We so easily believe the lie that we will never be loved unless we do things perfectly. John Sandford commented: “God doesn’t want us to try. He wants us to ‘die’ so that He can do it through us.”[37]

All of us can learn from the wisdom of John and Paula Sandford which is available in many books and also on YouTube.  Would you like God to give you a heart of flesh? Would you like to break any inner vows off your life? Would you like to be released from any bitter root judgments?  Would you like to be set free from performance orientation? Jesus is waiting to set us free.

 

---

[1] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, (Victory House, Inc., Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1986), 21 The great arena of battle is inner space, not outer.

[2] https://www.elijahhouse.com.my/founders/ (accessed 2025—12-09)

[3] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family,.166 “Fathers’ love for their children is so important that without it, a curse comes upon the land. (Malachi 4:5-6)”

[4] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 91 “…twenty years of counselling as many as 1,200 hours in each year.”  

[5] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man (Bridge Publishing, Inc., Plainfield, NJ, 1982),214.

[6] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family,. ix.

[7] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man,  5.

[8] John and Paula Sandford (Elijah House)- How To Minister Effectively, Core Bible Study

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWjT-lt3X6k (accessed 2025-12-10).

[9] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 151.

[10] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 4  “Many pastors, doctors, nurses, and others came and learned; among them were Francis MacNutt, Barbara Shlemon, Tommy Tyson, Herman Riffel, Paula and myself…”

[11] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, vi  “Of course no list of acknowledgements could be complete in a book concerning the healing of the inner man which does not give thanks for the pioneering work of Agnes Sanford.  Not only was she for all of us the forerunner in the field of inner healing by prayer, but she was also our own first mentor in the Lord, our friend and advisor. It was her solid common sense which first hauled our soaring mysticism to safe moorings in sound theology, the Word of God, and earthiness.” 

[12] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 141.

[13] John and Paula Sandford (Elijah House)- How To Minister Effectively, Core Bible Study

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWjT-lt3X6k (accessed 2025-12-10).

[14] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 4 “I (John) met Agnes Sanford in 1961 in Springfield, Missouri, where she prayed for the healing of my back by asking the Lord to enable me to forgive my mother.  (Until I was thirteen, my relationship with my mother had been terrible. But then I forgave her and was forgiven, and since that time, we have enjoyed a good, if imperfect relationship.)  I knew by my psychological training that Agnes was praying for the inner boy from conception to thirteen whom I could not reach.  It worked. I was healed.”

[15] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 4-5.

[16] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 5, “In 1963, I joined Agnes as a teacher in many seminars conducted by the School of Pastoral Care.  Together for several years, we taught the healing of the inner many in schools and missions across the country.” 

[17] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 221.

[18] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 232 “Authority breaks inner vows.  Friendship overcomes hearts of stone.  Forgiveness expressed by a counselor washes away guilt.”

[19] John Sandford, Performance Orientation #3241, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SMZpDQgEJE&t=10s (accessed 2025-12-15).

[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyShRWSXxG0 (accessed 2025-12-10)

[21] Paula Sandford, A Life Well Lived – Elijah Rain Ministries (accessed 2025-12-10).

[22] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 242 “Bitter-root judgments are the most common, most basic sins in all marital relationships –perhaps in all of life.” 

[23] elijahhouse.com.my/audio/bitterroots.mp3 (accessed 2025-12-10).

[24] elijahhouse.com.my/audio/bitterroots.mp3 (accessed 2025-12-10).

[25] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 54.

[26] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 67.

[27] Session E (Healing Life's Hurts 2004) John Sandford, Paula Sandford, Catch The Fire Toronto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-xyesqGYEE  (accessed 2025-12-14).

[28] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 101.

[29] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 101.

[30] John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man, 104 “Forgiveness brings us to rest”.; 117 “But if we have laid the ax to the root and prayed, that thing is in fact dead.”

 

[31] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 64.

[32] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 63.

[33] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 92.

[34] John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 33 “Faithful ministers of the gospel common suffer from a heart of stone, for the minister’s concept of his office seduces him to value giving but not receiving.”

[35]John and Paula Sandford, Restoring The Christian Family, 31.

[36] John and Paula Sandford (Elijah House)- Hearts of Stone, Core Bible Study

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY6RnvMP46w (accessed 2025-12-10) .

[37] John Sandford, Performance Orientation #3241John,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SMZpDQgEJE&t=10s (accessed 2025-12-15)