Frank Buchman

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". Buchman finally got to meet Frederick Brotherton Meyer, who when visiting the college 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?"[10]

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 Frederick Brotherton 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, after attending one of the Buchman's annual "Y[MCA] Week" campaigns: "In five years the permanent [YMCA] secretary at Penn State has entirely changed the tone of that one-time tough college." 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."[11]

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."[12]

From February to August 1916 Buchman worked with the YMCA mission in China, returning to Pennsylvania due to the increasing illness of his father.

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 Guling and Beidaihe, 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 Xu Qian (vice-minister of justice and later acting prime minister,[13]) 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, deluged with complaints, asked Buchman to leave China in 1918.

While still based at Hartford, Buchman spent much of his time traveling and forming groups of Christian students at Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of 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 (née Thorne) Tjader.

It was shortly after that he founded the First Century Christian Fellowship.

In June 1924, shortly after arriving in Europe on the SS Paris, Buchman accepted an invitation to meet with King George II of Greece and his family in Italy. The king’s mother, Sophie of Prussia, requested that Buchman visit her daughter Helen, wife of Crown Prince Carol of Romania, the future Carol II of Romania, in Bucharest. Carol’s mother, Queen Marie of Romania, invited Buchman to join her and her husband, King Ferdinand, at Peles Castle, where they were joined by Buchman’s close associate, Loudon Hamilton. When Hamilton was asked by both Queen Marie and her daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Helen, if he would accept the position of tutor to Helen’s young son Michael, the future King Michael, neither Hamilton or Buchman felt that he should accept.[14]

In early 1926, Marie and Ferdinand were distressed by events concerning their eldest son, Crown Prince Carol, whose personal life had obliged him to renounce his succession rights to the throne a year earlier, his name being removed from the royal house of Romania by King Ferdinand. In March 1926, American friends of Queen Marie living in Turkey suggested that Buchman should spend time with her at Cotroceni Palace, offering his services as both spiritual guide and confidant, and “spreading his kind, uniting atmosphere over us all”.[15]

Later in the year, as Buchman was preparing to return to America, he received a cable from Marie proposing that they travel to New York together on the same boat, and on October 12, they set sail from France on the Leviathan. Queen Marie was accompanied by her youngest children, Prince Nicholas and Princess Ileana. During their time together on the voyage, Queen Marie expressed her wish to demonstrate publicly the debt she felt to Buchman, with Nicholas suggesting that a house party be arranged for that purpose. A reception was organized to take place at the New York residence provided for Buchman’s stay, and he sent a cable stating, “Queen accepts tea twenty-fourth Ileana Nicholas accompany”.[16]

By the time October 24 arrived, Buchman found himself facing challenges in regard to his work, fueled by magazine articles and press reports.[17] Queen Marie and her family were also facing challenges, pressured by their official host, William Nelson Cromwell, to cold shoulder Buchman, whom they considered a valued friend.[18] Despite mounting criticism, the reception took place as planned, and although Prince Nicholas attended, his mother, Queen Marie, did not. According to the New York Herald Tribune, Buchman phoned Queen Marie, arranging a brief audience for his guests at her hotel and supplying each of them with a blank card on which he had written, "Ambassador Hotel to meet Queen Marie".[19]

A month later, Queen Marie returned to Romania to be with King Ferdinand, who was suffering from a terminal illness. Correspondence with Buchman continued briefly, her last letter to him dated April 15, 1927, and addressed to "Uncle Frank". Part of Buchman’s reply stated, “What hope is there for royalty or anyone else but rebirth?… Can this 'still, small voice' be the deciding factor in political situations, such as face you in these days of crisis?… Let me say, with the utmost conviction, it is the only thing that will …. With the rarest sense of fellowship with you… Your devoted friend.”[20]

Buchman designed a strategy of holding "house parties" at various locations, during which he hoped for Christian commitment to his First Century Christian Fellowship among those attending.

In Oxford, England, 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 were there),[21] the Daily 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 [their] general sanity ... but also to [their] 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."[22]

In the summer of 1928, six of these Oxford men traveled for the vacations to South Africa, where they originated. There, the press, at a loss how to describe this new religious movement, coined the term Oxford Group.[23] 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 Adolf Hitler, whom he hoped to convert. By 1934, the Oxford Group's activities in Germany were being spied on and prominent members interrogated, making effective work under Hitler's regime increasingly difficult. In response, Buchman switched his focus to 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 arrived, the mental outlook of the whole country was definitely changed."[24] In 1935 Bishop Berggrav of Tromsø said that "what is now happening in Norway is the biggest spiritual movement since the reformation."[25] Major splits between conservative and liberal factions in the church were healed, paving the way for more effective church opposition to Nazi rule during the war. A campaign in Denmark a year later had a similar impact. Speaking to the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, in 1954, the Bishop of Copenhagen, Fuglsang-Damgaard, reported: "The visit of Frank Buchman to Denmark in 1935 was an historic experience in the story of the Danish Church. It will be written in letters of gold in the history of the Church and the nation."[26]

Buchman attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally.[27] In 1936, the Central Security Office of the Gestapo sent out a document warning that the Oxford Group was "a new and dangerous opponent of National Socialism". This was followed by a 126-page report in 1939 claiming that the Oxford Group was "the pacemaker of Anglo-American diplomacy" and that "the Group as a whole constitutes an attack upon the nationalism of the state. ... It preaches revolution against the national state and has quite evidently become its Christian opponent."[28]

During World War II, MRA's efforts were valued by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt[30] as a contribution to morale. At this time MRA started what became an extensive use of theatrical reviews and plays to convey its message. A play, You Can Defend America, based on an MRA booklet of the same name which called for "sound homes – teamwork in industry – a united nation", toured through 21 states and performed before more than a quarter of a million people.[31] In Britain, novelist Daphne du Maurier wrote a best-selling book, which she titled Come Wind, Come Weather and dedicated to Buchman, telling stories of how ordinary people affected by MRA were facing up to wartime conditions.

Buchman and his team were in San Francisco at the time of the first United Nations conference in 1945. A dispute over the "Trusteeship Chapter" in the proposed UN Charter was averted by the change in General Romulo, attributed to MRA.[32]

From 1942 to 1971, MRA had a base on Mackinac Island, Michigan. In 1946, Swiss supporters bought the derelict Caux Palace Hotel in the village of Caux, above Lake Geneva for use as a conference center. From 1946 to 1999, the Westminster Theatre served as the London base for MRA, continuing the tradition of using plays and reviews to promote its message.

After World War II, MRA played a significant role in enabling reconciliation between France and Germany, through its conferences in Caux and its work in the coal and steel industries of both countries.[33] German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was a regular visitor to the MRA conferences in Caux, and Buchman facilitated meetings between Robert Schuman, French Foreign Minister, and Adenauer. Buchman was awarded the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by the French government, and also the German Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for this work. Buchman's contact with surviving anti-Nazi Germans, stemming from his pre-war work in Germany, was an important factor in facilitating this reconciliation.[34]

MRA facilitated some of the first large delegations of Japanese to travel abroad after the war. In 1950, a delegation of 76, including members of Parliament from all the main parties, seven governors of prefectures, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and leaders of industry, finance, and labor traveled to the MRA center in Caux, and from there to the United States, where their senior representative, Chorijuo Kurijama, spoke in the United States Senate, where he apologized "for Japan's big mistake". In 1957, Prime Minister Kishi made historic apologies in nine of Japan's Southeast Asian neighbors, significantly improving relationships. Returning to Tokyo, he told the media, "I have been impressed by the effectiveness of Moral Re-Armament in creating unity between peoples who have been divided. I have myself experienced the power of honest apology in healing the hurts of the past."[35]

MRA played an important role in the peaceful decolonization of Morocco and Tunisia. In 1956, King Mohammed V of Morocco wrote to Buchman, "I thank you for all you have done for Morocco, the Moroccans and myself in the course of these last testing years. Moral Re-Armament must become for us Muslims just as much an incentive as it is for you Christians and for all nations." In December of that year, President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia declared: "The world must be told what Moral Re-Armament has done for our country."[36] But attempts to provide similar mediation in Algeria failed.

In 1955, Buchman suggested to a group of African leaders from several countries meeting in Caux that they put what they had learned of MRA into a play. The play, Freedom, was written within 48 hours and first performed at the Westminster Theatre a week later, before touring the world and being made into a full-length color film. In Kenya, the film was shown to the imprisoned Jomo Kenyatta, who asked that it be dubbed into Swahili. The film was shown to a million Kenyans in the months before the first election. In the spring of 1961, The Reporter of Nairobi wrote: "MRA has done a great deal to stabilize our recent election campaign."[37]

An early criticism centered on the accusation that Buchman had been expelled from Princeton University in the 1920s.[62] In fact, Buchman had never held any position there, though following his success at Hartford Seminary a group of Buchman's proteges were running the Philadelphian Society (the main Christian organization at the university) along Buchman's principles. After a number of complaints, President Hibben set up a high level committee to investigate, saying to the press, "There is no place for Buchmanism in Princeton." After some months, the report appeared, saying that it had looked into the charges that members of the Society had practiced an aggressive and offensive form of evangelism; that individual privacy had been invaded; that confessions of guilt had been required as a condition of Christian life; that meetings had been held where mutual confession of intimate sins had been encouraged; and that emphasis had been placed on confessions of sexual immorality. The authors concluded, "We have endeavored in every way to secure any evidence which would tend to substantiate or justify these charges ... no evidence has been produced before us which substantiates or justifies them ... Under these circumstances we feel that in justice we should state that in our opinion the charges are the result either of misapprehension or criticism without foundation." In fact, the report went farther, praising the "signal success" of the society's work.[63] Despite this, Hibben demanded that the leadership of the Philadelphia Society sever their connections with Buchman or lose their positions. Rather than complying, they resigned.

One quote in particular always dogged Buchman, from an interview he gave to the New York World-Telegram, which it published on August 25, 1936:

• "I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism."

And along the same lines:

• "My barber in London told me Hitler saved Europe from Communism. That's how he felt. Of course, I don't condone everything the Nazis do. Anti-Semitism? Bad, naturally. I suppose Hitler sees a Karl Marx in every Jew."
• "Human problems aren't economic. They're moral and they can't be solved by immoral measures. They could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship."

Garrett Stearly, who was present when Buchman spoke to the journalist, was amazed at the story which was "so out of key with the interview. ... He said that Germany needed a new Christian spirit, yet one had to face the fact that Hitler had been a bulwark against Communism there - and you could at least thank heaven for that. It was a throw-away line. No eulogy of Hitler at all." Buchman himself refused to be drawn into further public comment, which he believed could only lead to more public controversy and endanger his friends in the Oxford Group inside Germany who were already, as stated above, facing difficulties.[64]

Gestapo documents released after the war showed that the Nazis believed that Buchman was working for British intelligence, and referred to the Oxford Group as "a new and dangerous opponent of National Socialism". "The Group as a whole", says the 126-page report Die Oxfordgruppenbewegung, "constitutes an attack on the nationalism of the State and demands the utmost watchfulness on the part of the State. It preaches revolution against the National State, and has quite evidently become its Christian opponent."[65]

During World War II, there was also controversy over British members of Moral Re-Armament working in the U.S. when they would have been eligible for call-up in the UK.

Critics charged that the "total honesty" encouraged at Oxford Group house parties really concentrated morbidly on sexual issues, particularly masturbation. In response to these criticisms, Buchman said, "We do unhesitatingly meet sex problems in the same proportion as they are met and spoken of in that authoritative record, the New Testament...No one can read the New Testament without facing it, but never at the expense of what they consider more flagrant sins, such as dishonesty and selfishness."[66] This was supported by J.W.C. Wand, then dean of Oriel College and later Bishop of London who wrote, in the August 1930 issue of Theology: "One hears more of selfishness, pride, ill-will than anything else, and the charge that 'Buchmanism' is unduly concerned with sexual matters had better be dismissed as the merest nonsense."[66]

In the U.S., Buchman was strongly opposed by Reinhold Niebuhr, who charged:

• "In other words, a Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning. We may be grateful to the leader for revealing so clearly what has been slightly hidden. Now we can see how unbelievably naïve this movement is in its efforts to save the world. If it would content itself with preaching repentance to drunkards and adulterers one might be willing to respect it as a religious revival method which knows how to confront the sinner with God. But when it runs to Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations, or to Prince Starhemberg or Hitler, or to any seat of power, always with the idea that it is on the verge of saving the world by bringing the people who control the world under God-control, it is difficult to restrain the contempt which one feels for this dangerous childishness."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer also accused Buchman of naivete over his attempts to convert Hitler:

• "The Oxford Group has been naïve enough to try to convert Hitler - a ridiculous failure to understand what is going on - it is we who are to be converted, not Hitler."[67]

The Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, who had frequently acknowledged his debt to Buchman, also tried to dissuade Buchman from his efforts to convert the Nazi leadership on the basis that he was endangering the reputation of himself and his work.[68] Buchman replied to Brunner: "Your danger is that you are still the Professor thundering from the pulpit and want the theologically perfect. But the German Church crisis will never be solved this way. Just think of your sentence, 'Unfortunately this hopeless fellow Hossenfelder has damaged the reputation of the Groups.' It sounds to me like associating with 'publicans and sinners.' Just keep your sense of humor and read the New Testament. The Groups in that sense have no reputation, and for myself, I have nothing to lose."[68]

As well as Brunner, several other theologians spoke highly of Buchman. Canon B.H. Streeter, Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford and a highly respected New Testament scholar of the 1920s and 1930s, publicly associated himself with the Oxford School from 1934 until his death in a plane crash in 1937.[69] Klaus Bockmuehl, Professor of Theology and Ethics, Regent College, Vancouver and author of Listening to the God Who Speaks, wrote: "The genius of Moral Re-Armament is to bring the central spiritual substance of Christianity (which it often demonstrates in a fresher and more powerful way than do the Churches) in a secular and accessible form. Hence the emphasis on absolute moral standards. But the direction of the Holy Spirit is just as essential. ... The genius is in the balance of the two."[70]

Cardinal Franz König said that Buchman was "a turning point in the history of the modern world through his ideas",[71] and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, called Buchman "a modern St. Paul".[72]