Surrender
By saying the third step prayer AA words, the individual acknowledges that their own "self-will" has caused suffering and that a new direction is needed.
Recited daily in meetings worldwide, the Third Step Prayer was never printed as a stand-alone prayer. Here is where those words come from.
Written in a Brooklyn Bedroom
The prayer first appeared in Alcoholics Anonymous — the “Big Book,” published in April 1939 — in Chapter 5, “How It Works,” in the passage on Step Three. It arrives unlabeled, mid-narrative: “Many of us said to our Maker,” the text reads, and the book immediately adds that the wording is optional so long as the idea is expressed. The chapter was written by co-founder Bill Wilson, and the Twelve Steps at its heart came quickly. By his own account, he drafted them one night late in 1938, in bed at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn, with a pencil and a tablet of scratch paper: “It took perhaps half an hour. The words kept right on coming.”
The Oxford Group Surrender Behind the Words
Wilson and Dr. Bob both came to sobriety inside the Oxford Group, an evangelical movement founded by Lutheran minister Frank Buchman, where joining meant making “a surrender” — kneeling and handing one’s will and life over to God. Wilson never hid the debt: early AA, he wrote, took self-examination, admission of character defects, restitution, and work with other alcoholics “straight from the Oxford Groups and directly from Sam Shoemaker … and from nowhere else” (Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, p. 39). The closest ancestor on record belongs to V. C. Kitchen, a New York advertising man sober in the Group. His 1934 memoir I Was a Pagan reconstructs his own surrender prayer — “I surrender Thee my entire life, O God” — asking God to take the whole thing and run it by His plan. Five years before the Big Book, the prayer’s shape was on the page.
From “Get Down upon Your Knees” to “Many of Us Said”
The Group’s fingerprints survive in the Big Book’s drafts. In the 1938 pre-publication manuscript — circulated to friends of the founders before printing — the passage is a command: “Get down upon your knees and say to your Maker,” followed by the prayer word for word as it reads today. Before publication, the kneeling went out and the directive “you” softened into the fellowship’s “we” — Wilson’s account recalls friends objecting that same night that the draft leaned too heavily on God and on putting drunks on their knees. The prayer itself was left alone: its wording is identical in the 1938 draft and on page 63 today.
A Stubborn Myth — and Why It Stays on Page 63
Some articles claim the prayer’s real author was Harold Hill, an AA member whose 1976 book How to Be a Winner includes a similar prayer. The manuscript settles it: the full text was circulating by 1938, decades before Hill’s book — the Big Book’s prose, unsigned by design, simply attracts claimants. The page number, meanwhile, has barely moved: “How It Works” fills pages 58–71 in today’s printings, and AA has kept the recovery text “left largely untouched” through the second (1955), third (1976), and fourth editions.