Franklin Nathaniel Daniel Buchman ( June 4 , 1878 – August 7 , 1961 ) was a Protestant Christian evangelist who founded the Oxford Group (known as Moral Re-Armament from 1938 until 2001, and as Initiatives of Change since then). He was decorated by the French and German governments for his contributions to Franco-German reconciliation after World War II, and twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 and 1953.
Early life
Frank Buchman was born in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of a wholesale liquor salesman and restaurateur and a pious Lutheran mother. When he was sixteen he moved with his parents to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Buchman studied at Muhlenberg College and Mount Airy Seminary and was ordained a Lutheran minister in June, 1902.
Buchman had hoped to be called to an important city church, but accepted a call to Overbrook, a growing Philadelphia suburb, which did not yet have a Lutheran church building. He arranged the rental of an old storefront for worship space, and lived upstairs. After a visit to Europe, he decided to establish a hostel (called a “hospice”) in Overbrook, along the lines of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh’s colony for the mentally ill in Bielefeld and inspired by Toynbee Hall. However, conflict developed with the hostel's board. In Buchman's recollection the dispute was due to the board's unwillingness to fund the hospice adequately. However, the Finance Committee of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania, which oversaw the budget, had no funds with which to make up an ongoing deficit and wanted the hospice to be self-supporting. Buchman resigned.
Exhausted and depressed, Buchman took his doctor's advice of a long holiday abroad. Still in turmoil over his hospice resignation, Buchman attended the 1908 Keswick Convention hoping to meet the renowned evangelist F.B.Meyer whom he believed might be able to help him. Meyer was not there, but in a small half-empty chapel he listened to Jessie Penn-Lewis preach on the Cross of Christ, which led to a religious experience.
I thought of those six men back in Philadelphia who I felt had wronged me. They probably had, but I'd got so mixed up in the wrong that I was the seventh wrong man.... I began to see myself as God saw me, which was a very different picture than the one I had of myself. I don't know how you explain it, I can only tell you I sat there and realized how my sin, my pride, my selfishness and my ill-will, had eclipsed me from God in Christ.... I was the centre of my own life. That big "I" had to be crossed out. I saw my resentments against those men standing out like tombstones in my heart. I asked God to change me and He told me to put things right with them. It produced in me a vibrant feeling, as though a strong current of life had suddenly been poured into me and afterwards a dazed sense of a great spiritual shaking-up.
Buchman wrote six letters of apology to the board members asking their forgiveness for harbouring ill will. Buchman regarded this as a foundation experience and in later years frequently referred to it with his followers.
YMCA work
From 1909 to 1915 Buchman was YMCA secretary at Penn State College. Despite quickly more than doubling the YMCA membership to 75% of the student body he was dissatisfied, questioning how deep the changes went. Alcohol consumption in the college, for example, was unaffected. During this time he began the practice of a daily "quiet time". Visiting the college, the Quaker-influenced Baptist, F.B.Meyer (1847-1929) asked Buchman "Do you let the Holy Spirit guide you in all you are doing? Buchman replied that he did indeed pray and read the Bible in the morning. "But", persisted Meyer, "do you give God enough uninterrupted time really to tell you what to do?" Another decisive influence appears to have been Yale University theology professor Henry Burt Wright (1877-1923) and his 1909 book The will of God and a man's lifework , which was itself influenced by F.B.Meyer and Henry Drummond, among others.
Buchman's devotion to personal evangelism, and his skill at re-framing the Christian message in contemporary terms, were admired by other campus ministry leaders. Maxwell Chaplin, YMCA secretary at Princeton University wrote: "In five years the permanent secretary at Penn State has entirely changed the tone of that one-time tough college," after attending one of the Buchman's annual "Y Week" campaigns. Lloyd Douglas, author of The Robe took part in the same campaign. "It was", he wrote afterwards, "the most remarkable event of its kind I ever witnessed.... One after another, prominent fraternity men ... stood up before their fellows and confessed that they had been living poor, low-grade lives and from henceforth meant to be good."
In 1915 Buchman's YMCA work took him to India with evangelist Sherwood Eddy. There he met, briefly, Mahatma Gandhi (the first of many meetings), and became friends with Rabindranath Tagore and Amy Carmichael, founder of the Dohnavur Fellowship. Despite speaking to audiences of up to 60,000, Buchman was critical of the large-scale approach, describing it as "like hunting rabbits with a brass band". From February to August 1916 Buchman worked with the YMCA mission in China, returning to Pennsylvania due to the increasing illness of his father.
At Hartford and China
Buchman next took a part-time post at Hartford Theological Seminary. There he began to gather a group of men to assist in the conversion of China to Christianity. He was asked to lead missionary conferences at Kuling and Peitaiho, which he saw as an opportunity to train native Chinese leaders at a time when many missionaries held attitudes of white superiority. Through his friendship with Hsu Ch'ien (Xu Qian, Vice-Minister of Justice and later acting Prime Minister) he got to know Sun Yat-sen. However, his criticism of other missionaries in China, with an implication that sin, including homosexuality, was keeping some of them from being effective, led to conflict. Bishop Logan Roots was deluged with complaints, and in 1918 asked Buchman to leave China.
While still based at Hartford, Buchman spent much of his time travelling and forming groups of Christian students at Princeton University and Yale University, as well as Oxford. Sam Shoemaker, a Princeton graduate and one-time Secretary of the Philadelphian Society who had met Buchman in China, became one of his leading American disciples. In 1922, after a prolonged spell with students in Cambridge, Buchman resigned his position at Hartford, and thereafter relied on gifts from patrons such as Margaret Tjader.
The Oxford Group
Buchman designed a strategy of holding “house parties” at various locations, during which he hoped for Christian commitment among those attending. In addition, men trained by Buchman began holding regular lunchtime meetings in the study of J Thornton-Duesbery, then Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. By 1928 numbers had grown so large that the meetings moved to the ballroom of the Randolph Hotel, before being invited to use the library of the Oxford University Church, St Mary's.
In response to criticism by Tom Driberg in his first scoop in the Daily Express that this "strange new sect" involved members holding hands in a circle and publicly confessing their sins (a fabrication according to those who where there), the Express printed a statement by Canon L.W. Grensted, Chaplain and Fellow of University College and a university lecturer in psychology bearing "testimony not only to general sanity... but also to real effectiveness. Men whom I have known... have not only found a stronger faith and a new happiness, but have also made definite progress in the quality of their study, and in their athletics too" .
In the summer of 1928 six of these Oxford men traveled, without Buchman, to South Africa where the press, at a loss how to describe this new religious movement, coined the term the "Oxford Group" . Between 1931 and 1935, around 150 Oxford undergraduates were attending Oxford Group meetings every lunchtime. Paul Hodder-Williams, of the publishing firm Hodder and Stoughton, arranged for a regular column about the group to appear in the firm’s magazine, the British Weekly . In 1932 Hodder also published a book about the group: For Sinners Only by A.J.Russell, managing editor of the Sunday Express, which went through 17 editions in two years and was translated widely. During university vacations, teams from Oxford took part in campaigns in East London and other industrial areas. Meanwhile, the numbers attending "house parties" grew to several thousands.
Buchman traveled widely in Europe during the 1930s. With the rise of the Nazis he focused on Germany, holding house parties and meeting church leaders. In 1932 and again in 1933 he sought, unsuccessfully, to meet with Hitler, whom he hoped to convert. By 1934 the Oxford Group's activities in Germany was being spied on and prominent members interrogated, making effective work there increasingly difficult. In response, Buchman focused efforts on Scandinavia, believing that demonstrating a Christian revolution there would have a great impact in Germany. Accepting an invitation from Carl Hambro, he led a team to Norway in 1934. The Oslo daily Tidens Tegn commented in its Christmas edition A handful of foreigners who neither knew our language, nor understood our ways and customs came to the country. A few days later the whole country was talking about God, and two months after the thirty foreigners
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