Frank Buchman

Franklin Nathaniel Daniel Buchman (June 4, 1878 – August 7, 1961), best known as Frank Buchman, was an American Lutheran who founded the First Century Christian Fellowship in 1921, renamed as the Oxford Group in 1928, that was transformed under his leadership in 1938 into the Moral Re-Armament and became Initiatives of Change in 2001. As a leader of the Moral Re-Armament, he was decorated by the French and German governments for his contributions to Franco-German reconciliation following the end of World War II.

Early life and education

Buchman was born on June 4, 1878, in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Sarah (Greenwalt) and Franklin Buchman, a farmer, then hotelier, restaurateur, and eventually wholesale drinks salesman. His mother was a pious Lutheran.

At age sixteen, circa 1894, he moved with his parents to Allentown to enter high school and then attended Muhlenberg College, where he graduated. He then moved to Philadelphia to enter Mount Airy Lutheran Seminary and was ordained a Lutheran minister in June 1902.

Career

Buchman had hoped to be called to an important city church, but eventually accepted a call to Overbrook, a growing section of Philadelphia that did not yet have a Lutheran church building. No salary was given him the day he was ordained. He arranged the rental of an old storefront for worship space, settled upstairs, and opened the Church of the Good Shepherd. After a year of spending himself entirely on his work, he was so exhausted that his doctor prescribed a long holiday and he sailed to Europe where he visited Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. On his return, he decided to establish a home for young people in need in Overbrook, along the lines of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh's colony of hospital farms and workshops for the mentally ill in Bielefeld and of Canon Barnett's Toynbee Hall. However, conflict developed with the board of the new ''Luther hospice for young men''. 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 in England hoping to meet the renowned Quaker-influenced, Baptist evangelist F. B. Meyer (1847–1929), who 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.

Buchman wrote letters of apology to the six board members asking their forgiveness for harboring ill will. Buchman regarded this as a foundation experience and in later years frequently referred to it with his followers.

YMCA

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?"

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 CAWeek" campaigns: "In five years the permanent MCAsecretary 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."

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.

Hartford Theological Seminary and missionary in China

Buchman next took a part-time post at Hartford Theological Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, where 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,) 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 University 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 at the University of Cambridge, Buchman resigned his position at Hartford, and thereafter relied on gifts from patrons such as Margaret (née Thorne) Tjader.

Shortly after, he founded the First Century Christian Fellowship.

Interaction with Romanian royalty

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.

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”.

Later in the year, as Buchman was preparing to return to the United States, he received a cable from Marie proposing that they travel to New York City 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”.

By the time October 24 arrived, Buchman found himself facing challenges in regard to his work, fueled by magazine articles and press reports. 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. 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".

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.”

Oxford Group

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), 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 heirgeneral sanity ... but also to heirreal 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 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''. 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'' 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." In 1935 Bishop Berggrav of Tromsø said that "what is now happening in Norway is the biggest spiritual movement since the reformation." 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."

Buchman attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally. 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."

Moral Re-Armament

In 1938, as nations were rearming for World War II, a Swedish socialist and Oxford Group member named Harry Blomberg, wrote of the need to re-arm morally. Buchman liked the term, and launched a campaign for Moral and Spiritual Re-Armament in East London. More than just a new name for the Oxford Group, Moral Re-Armament (MRA) signaled a new commitment on Buchman's part to try to change the course of nations. In a speech to thousands on the Swedish island of Visby, he said: "I am not interested, nor do I think it adequate, if we are going to begin just to start another revival. Whatever thoughtful statesman you talk to will tell you that every country needs a moral and spiritual awakening." Referring to the Spanish Civil War, he continued: "I find here the same sort of inflammable matter that made Spain possible. Unless we and others see the bigger vision of spiritual revolution, the other may be possible." At this point, some who had been active with the Oxford Group ceased working with Buchman, uncomfortable with what they saw as a new "political" direction.

War work

During World War II, MRA's efforts were valued by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt 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. 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.

Centers

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.

Post-war reconciliation

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. 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.

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."

Decolonization

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." 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."

Psychology and spirituality

''Remaking The World'', the title of Buchman's collected speeches, was central to Buchman's vision.

In order to "remake the world", people had to change:

Launching a campaign for "Moral Re-Armament" in East Ham Town Hall in 1938, Buchman said:

Drawing on his experiences in Penn State and China, Buchman advocated personal work with individuals that would go deep enough to deal with root motives and desires. Asked on a ship to China how he helped individuals, Buchman replied with the "five C's:" Confidence, Confession, Conviction, Conversion, and Continuance.

Nothing could be done unless the other person had "Confidence" in you, and knew that you could keep confidences. "Confession" meant getting honest about the real state of affairs behind the public persona. This would lead to a "Conviction" of sin, a desire to change, leading in turn to "Conversion", a decision of the will to live God's way. He felt that the most neglected "C" was "Continuance", the ongoing support of people who had decided to change. One additional aspect of becoming a free person was the need to make restitution and to put right, as far as possible, any wrong done. If the sin was a public one, restitution might involve making a public confession.

Buchman always stressed that "life changing" was not a matter of technique so much as the natural result of asking God for direction. God alone could change a person and the role of the "life changer" was to listen in silence for the "still small voice" of God.

Foundational to Buchman's spirituality was the practice of a daily "quiet time" during which, he claimed, anyone could search for, and receive, "divine guidance" on every aspect of their life. Because of the dangers of self-deception leading a person to mistake their own will, or shadow, for the will of God, Buchman proposed a "six-fold test" of the thoughts which came in the quiet time:
1. Look for a willingness to obey, without self-interested editing.
2. Watch and see if circumstances intervene to make the thought impractical.
3. Compare the thoughts against the highest moral standards of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love.
4. Is the thought consistent with Holy Scripture?
5. Get the advice of trusted friends.
6. Draw on the experience and teaching of the Church.

The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, William "Bill W." Wilson and Bob Smith, were both active members in the Oxford Group and believed that the principles of the Oxford Group were the key to overcoming alcoholism. Psychologist Howard Clinebell called Buchman "one of the foremost pioneers of the modern mutual-assistance philosophy". Swiss psychologist and author Paul Tournier said: "The whole development of group therapy in medicine cannot all be traced back to Frank uchman but he historically personified that new beginning, ending a chapter of the purely rational and opening a new era when the emotional and irrational also were taken into account." Referring to Buchman's effect on the Church, Tournier observed: "Before Buchman the Church felt its job was to teach and preach, but not to find out what was happening in people's souls. The clergy never listened in church, they always talked. There is still too much talking, but silence has returned. Frank helped to show again that the power of silence is the power of God."

Attitude to other religions

Buchman's willingness to work with people of different religions without demand that they convert to Christianity was often a source of confusion and conflict with other Christians. In a speech in 1948, he said: "MRA is the good road of an ideology inspired by God upon which all can unite. Catholic, Jew and Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Confucianist - all find they can change, where needed, and travel along this good road together." He had several meetings over the years with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whom he greatly respected, saying: "The sphere of his usefulness will be sainthood, and a compelling one at that." He also expressed the hope that Muslim countries should become "a belt of sanity to bind East and West and bring moral rebirth."Lean, ''Frank Buchman'', p. 487.
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Yet according to his biographer, Garth Lean, Buchman would always give those at his gatherings, whatever their faith or lack of it, "the deepest Christian truths he knew, often centered round the story of how he himself had been washed clean from his hatreds by his experience of the Cross at Keswick and how Christ had become his nearest friend. This was done with the utmost urgency - that everyone must face the reality of their own sin, and find change and forgiveness. But he never added that those in his audience must break with their traditions, or join this or that church."

Buchman and communism

After his early experiences in China, Buchman was acutely aware that the failure of the vast Western missionary effort in China enabled an alternative set of beliefs, communism, to take root. In his subsequent work in British and American universities, he found that communism was a potent and attractive force. Though he did admire the boldness, and the passion for change, of communists, he believed that communism was inadequate because he found it to be built on moral relativism and militantly anti-God. A frequent theme became that the commitment and strategic ideology of communism must be matched by equally committed and strategic forces working for God. After visiting South America in the early 1930s, he told some of the young people working with the Oxford Group: "In one country I was told two young Communists had made it their duty to attach themselves to each Cabinet Minister to win him to the Party line. Which of you will plan as thoroughly to bring a Christian revolution to your leaders?"

Buchman believed that both fascism and communism had their roots in materialism, which he called "the mother of all '-isms and, as such, materialism was democracy's greatest enemy: "People get confused as to whether it is a question of being Rightist or Leftist. But the one thing we really need is to be guided by God's Holy Spirit. That is the Force we ought to study. ... The Holy Spirit will teach us how to think and live, and provide a working basis of our national service. ... The true battle line in the world today is not between class and class, not between race and race. The battle is between Christ and anti-Christ."

After Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalinism and the apparent thawing of relationships with the West, MRA produced a pamphlet, "Ideology and Co-Existence", alerting the West to the strategies and tactics of communism. It was translated into 24 languages and became the most widely distributed publication which MRA ever produced, giving rise to a popular perception of Buchman and MRA as being primarily anti-communist, and, therefore, right-wing. In the 1950s, he told a colleague: "If Britain and America were to defeat Communism today, the world would be in a worse state than it is. Because the other man is wrong doesn't make me right."

In the late 1940s, the coal mines and factories of Germany's heavily industrialized Ruhr Area were an ideological battleground. Moscow-led communists expected to gain control of the workers' councils as part of their plan to turn Germany into a communist state. Many of these workers' leaders were among the 120,000 from the Ruhr who saw the MRA play ''The Forgotten Factor'' and heard from employers who had changed their attitudes from exploitation to cooperation. Some senior communist leaders from the area embraced MRA and were summoned to account for themselves at the Communist Party headquarters for North Rhine-Westphalia. There, they recommended that the Party should make itself acquainted with MRA and "take the next step of its development by facing up to the moral standards of absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love", supporting their contention with quotations from Marx and Engels

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