The readings that open the hour
The Preamble, How It Works, the Promises and the Saint Francis prayer: the short texts every meeting reads aloud, and what each one does.
A meeting's first ten minutes are scripted by short texts the fellowship has kept stable for decades. The old district site collected them as "meeting readings and printables," a page that existed for the chairperson printing a clean copy on the way to the hall. Four of them do most of the work.
The Preamble
One paragraph, read first: AA is a fellowship of people who share their experience, strength and hope to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees; the fellowship is self-supporting; it is allied with no sect, denomination or institution; its primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics. A district could hang its entire mission statement on that paragraph, which is exactly why it is read before anything else.
How It Works
The excerpt from Chapter 5 of the Big Book is the longest regular reading: the admission of powerlessness, the promise that "half measures availed us nothing," the twelve steps listed in full, and the closing observation that the principles are guides to progress, not perfection. Members know its cadence by heart; it is the one reading where half the room mouths the last lines.
The Promises
A mid-meeting or closing favorite, the Ninth Step Promises are a paragraph of conditional prophecy: if the work is done painstakingly, then fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave, self-seeking will slip away, and "we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us." The reading functions as the program's optimistic voice, deliberately scheduled where a discouraged listener most needs it.
The Saint Francis prayer
Not AA literature at all, technically: the prayer attributed to Saint Francis, "Lord, make me a channel of thy peace," entered the fellowship's oral tradition early enough that the district site kept a printable copy alongside the official texts. Groups use it as a closing meditation or an opening reflection. Its presence on the table is a reminder that AA's shared texts grew partly by adoption, picked up where they proved useful, printed, laminated, and read until they felt like they had always been there.
Why printables mattered
The old site kept these as clean PDFs for a practical reason: a group's reading cards wear out, and a district that can print replacements overnight keeps the opening of the meeting stable across thirty rooms. The texts are identical everywhere by design; what a district supplies is the paper.
The closing argument
The one text not printed on the district site is the one most rooms end with. Whether to close with the Lord's Prayer, the Serenity Prayer or a secular reading is a question every group answers by conscience, and it reopens reliably every few years. The fellowship's compromise is visible in the rooms themselves: most Seacoast groups read the Serenity Prayer, several keep the Lord's Prayer, and a few close with a moment of silence and the responsibility declaration. The argument is as old as the texts and it is never settled, only rotated, because a group's format belongs to its conscience and not to any district or office. The printables page stayed out of it deliberately: it stocked the texts, not the vote.
What the readings are for
Taken together, the opening texts do one job: they make the meeting identical to itself across towns and years, so that a member from Rochester can walk into a room in Portsmouth and recognize the hour before a word of it is shared. That is why a district bothered to keep printables at all. The literature table carries many kinds of text, but only these are read aloud every single week; the readings are the table's front edge, the pieces a newcomer hears before they ever learn to pick one up.
