I hesitate to contribute to this thread in many ways but also feel somewhat compelled to share my experience of AA as a newcomer. Former newcomer that is I no longer attend. First may I say that I have a massive amount of respect and admiration for the fellowship of AA and its members. To have a worldwide support network where 364 days of the year you can fairly easily find a door with the AA symbol on it and walk into a meeting run by volunteers whose only reason to be there is to help the suffering alcoholic is nothing short of miraculous.
The difficulty with statistics is that nobody really knows. Plus as has been pointed out success itself is a subjective word when it comes to sobriety as we are all only as sober as we are today. I do however suspect that AAs "success" is likely to be in decline.
Yes the emergence of other "recovery methods" and the accessibility of such information via the internet may provide choice that was perhaps not there 20 or 30 years ago. But surely this would result in declining numbers of newcomers rather than the success rate.
In my experience / opinion it all surrounds what it takes to "succeed" i.e.
"it works if you work it" and "get a sponsor work the steps" kind of thing......
Great! Bring it on!
Oh hang on......I'm a 45 year old single mum, I have 2 jobs, I have 2 school age children, my ex husband only has them once a week, I'm not allowed a make sponsor and there are max 1 in 20 females attend AA where I come from.
That's the rub for me. I do understand the program. I do see how it works. I'm not afraid of AA or prejudice against the higher power concept in any way.
I simply see that there is an issue with a program designed many years ago and the demographic of "alcoholics" (for want of a better word) has changed. Many more women. Many more mums of small children. I hear you say that I have contradicted myself when I previously said about 1 in 20 attendees being female. Yes exactly! A massive proportion of women to whom the AA programme is virtually unachievable.
I read previous postings about greeters etc with wistful amazement. That is an amazing idea and I've not once seen anything like that.
I did attend 3 x per week for at least 6 months so I do feel like I have a good feel for AA in my region. No I didn't get a sponsor. Oops yes I did but I was unceremoniously dumped after about a month. I heard time and time again shares from "old-timers" (many of whom I grew to love so this is not meant in a disparaging way) about how much support they received in the bad times and it just didn't seem to be the kind of support network available today. This is all anecdotal of course but I am saying it as I saw it.
I am also a little sad to read posts on the lines of "well it works 100% for me!"..... got to be honest this flies in the face of the spirit of AA IMHO and maybe part of the "problem" (if indeed there is one).
What am I getting at? I do ramble on a bit sorry.......
In my own experience I believe there is potential for AA to ignore changes in society that in turn may result in the program/fellowship becoming less and less relevant.
My two-penneth for what it's worth.....