Frank N. D. Buchman

Infobox Person
name = Frank Buchman


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birth_date = June 4, 1878
birth_place = Pennsburg
death_date = August 7, 1961
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nationality = American
ethnicity = Caucasian
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known_for = Founding the Oxford Group
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religion = Christianity
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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). [ [http://initiativesofchange.org/en/abt/ Initiatives of Change - An overview ] ] [ [http://www.aabibliography.com/oxfordsteps.html Oxford Group biography] ] He was decorated by the French and German governments for his contributions to Franco-German reconciliation after WW2 [Edward Luttwak, "Franco-German Reconciliation: The Overlooked Role of the Moral Re-Armament Movement", in "Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft", edited by Douglas Johnston & Cynthia Sampson, OUP 1994, page 52] , and twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 and 1953 [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info Garth Lean, "Frank Buchman - a life", Constable 1985, 392-303] ] .

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. Buchman studied at Muhlenberg College and Mount Airy Seminary and was ordained a Lutheran minister in June, 1902.

Buchman's career began with the creation of a new church in Overbrook. After a visit to Europe, he decided to establish a hostel (called a “hospice”) in a poor district of Philadelphia along the lines of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh’s colony for the mentally ill in Bielefeld and inspired by Toynbee Hall. However, conflict with the hostel board, who wished to cut expenditure, led to his resignation [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Garth Lean - "Frank Buchman - A Life",28] ] .

Exhausted and depressed, Buchman took his doctor's advice of a long holiday abroad. On a ship to Europe he was introduced to Princess Sophie of Greece, who was reportedly impressed with some assistance he had given to an elderly American couple in Greece. She asked him to send a message to Sultan Abdul Hamid of Turkey. 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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman",30-31] ]

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?" [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman",36] ] 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.

Applying the "quiet time", Buchman began to get ideas of people to talk to as part of a plan to "bring the whole college, as a community, Godwards". Changes in some key individuals made its mark, reducing liquor consumption and improving the performance of the school football team. 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 [MCA] 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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 38] ]

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". [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 46] ] 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. In Peking, for example, they hoped to bring together fifteen of the most influential Chinese Christians in the city and train them in the "how" of Christian work. While in China, 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 -one of the Peking "fifteen", Vice-Minister of Justice and later acting Prime Minister [ [http://www.bdcconline.net/bdcc_stories/china/beijing/xu_qian.html Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity] ] ) he got to know Sun Yat-sen. However, his criticism of other missionaries in China, with an inference 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. As in China, his methods were to train others, including students, to be effective in one-on-on "personal work". He gathered a group of associates around him that included Sam Shoemaker, who based at Princeton as Secretary of the Philadelphia Society. 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), [Thornton Duesbery "The Open Secret of MRA",11] 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 [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" ["Daily Express" 5 March 1928] .

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" [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean,"Frank Buchman", 138] ] .

Between 1931 and 1935, around 150 Oxford undergraduates were attending Oxford Group meetings every lunchtime. The group was publicized by the support of Paul Hodder-Williams, of the publishing firm Hodder and Stoughton, who 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. In his book "The Thirties" Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that in half a decade the Oxford Group had generated the only genuine religious revival of the period.

Buchman saw his efforts as an alternative to the attractions of Communism to intellectuals. During this time Buchman became increasingly well-known and well-connected.

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 heand 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 arrived, the mental outlook of the whole country was definitely changed." ["Tidens Teng", 24 December 1934] In 1935 Bishop Berggrav of Tromsø said "what is now happening in Norway is the biggest spiritual movement since the reformation." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 225] ] 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, USA 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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 227] ]

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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 242] ]

Moral Re-Armament

In 1938, as nations were rearming for war, 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 (or MRA) signalled 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". [Buchman "Remaking the world", 55] 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 President Roosevelt [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 229,303] ] 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. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 297] ] In Britain, novelist Daphne du Maurier wrote a best-selling book "Come Wind, Come Weather" 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. [Archie Mackenzie, "Faith in diplomacy", 52-55]

Centres

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 centre. 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 the war, 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. [Edward Luttwak, "Franco-German Reconciliation: The Overlooked Role of the Moral Re-Armament Movement", in "Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft", Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson (editors), Oxford University Press 1994] 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. [Luttwak, 38]

Similarly, 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 labour travelled to the MRA centre in Caux, and from there to America, where their senior representative, Chorijuo Kurijama, spoke in the Senate apologizing "for Japan's big mistake". In 1957 Prime Minister Kishi made historic apologies in nine of Japan's South-East Asian neighbours, significantly improving relationships. Returning to Tokyo he told the press: "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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 497] ]

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 that year President Bourguiba of Tunisia declared: "The world must be told what Moral Re-Armament has done for our country." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 454] ] Attempts to provide similar mediation 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 colour 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 that: "MRA has done a great deal to stabilize our recent election campaign. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 457] ]

Psychology and spirituality

"Remaking the world" ["Remaking the world", Blandford Press 1947] , the title of Buchman's collected speeches, was central to Buchman's vision.

"The Oxford Group is a Christian revolution for remaking the world. The root problems in the world today are dishonesty, selfishness and fear – in men and, consequently, in nations. These evils multiplied result in divorce, crime, unemployment, recurrent depression and war. How can we hope for peace within a nation, or between nations, when we have conflict in countless homes? Spiritual recovery must precede economic recovery. Political or social solutions that do not deal with these root problems are inadequate." ["Remaking the World", 29]

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

"Everybody wants to see the other fellow changed. Every nation wants to see the other nation changed. But everybody is waiting for the other fellow to begin. The Oxford Group is convinced that if you want an answer for the world today, the best place to start with is with yourself. This is the first and fundamental need." ["Remaking the World", 26]

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

"We need a power strong enough to change human nature and build bridges between man and man, faction and faction. This starts when everyone admits his own faults instead of spot-lighting the other fellow's. God alone can change human nature. The secret lies in that great forgotten truth, that when man listens, God speaks; when man obeys, God acts; when men change, nations change." ["Remaking the world", 46]

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, 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. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 79-80] ] . One further aspect of becoming a free person was the need to make restitution – to put right, as far as possible, any wrong done (e.g. returning stolen goods or money or admitting to having told lies). Sometimes, 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 honest, 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. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 76] ]

The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, William "Bill W." Wilson and Robert "Dr. 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 [Buchman] , 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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 153] ]

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." ["Remaking the world, 166] He had several meetings over the years with Mahatma Gandhi, whom he greatly respected saying: "the sphere of his usefulness will be sainthood, and a compelling one at that." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 120] ] He also expressed the hope that Muslim countries should become "a belt of sanity to bind East and West and bring moral rebirth." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 487] ]

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 centred 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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 388] ]

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. Whilst admiring the boldness and passion for change of communists, he believed that communism was inadequate because it was built on moral relativism and was militantly anti-God. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 147] ] A frequent theme was that the commitment and strategic ideology of communism must be matched by equally committed and strategic forces working for God. After visiting South American in the early '30s 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?" [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 148] ]

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." ["Remaking the world" 139-143]

After Krushchev's 1956 denouncement 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, [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 516] ] giving rise to a popular perception of Buchman and MRA as being primarily anti-communist, and, therefore, right wing. However this was a gross oversimplification. 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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 487] ]

In the late 1940s the coal mines and factories of Germany's Ruhr Area were an ideological battle ground. Moscow led communists expected to gain control of the work's councils as part of their plan to turn Germany into a communist state. Many of these workers leaders were among the 120,000 [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 360] ] 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 honest, purity, unselfishness and love", supporting their contention with quotations from Marx and Engels. Their approach was rejected and the men were expelled from the Party. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 364] ]

Buchman had accepted the invitation of Dr Heinrich Host, head of the German Coal Board, to send a team to the Ruhr. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 359] ] For two year Buchman sustained over 100 MRA workers in the area. Before their arrival, 72% of the work's councils seats were held by communists. By 1950 the percentage had shrunk to 25%. According to Hubert Stein, an executive member of the German Miners Union, this decline was "to a great extent due to Moral Re-Armament". [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 362] ] In 1950 Radio Berlin and other stations broadcast a speech by Buchman: "Marxists are finding a new thinking in a day of crisis. The class struggle is being superseded. Management and labour are beginning to live the positive alternative to the class war... Can Marxists pave the way for a greater ideology? Why not? They have always been open to new things... Why should the not be the ones to live for this superior thinking." ["Remaking the world", 177-184]

From this time, Buchman and Moral Re-Armament were periodically attacked by Radio Moscow. In 1952 Georgi Arbatov described MRA as "a universal ideology" which "supplants the inevitable class war" with "the permanent struggle between good and evil." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 418] ]

Private life

Buchman never married. Despite a stroke in 1942 and failing health that eventually led to blindness and immobility, he remained as active as possible until his death in 1961.

Controversy

Buchman was a controversial figure throughout much of his adult life, and critics dubbed his movement as "Buchmanism" from the 1920s. In the UK his critics included Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, and the Labour MP Tom Driberg who wrote an influential critique, "The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament". On the other hand, Buchman was supported by figures such as Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Gabriel Marcel [Gabriel Marcel, "Fresh Hope for the World"] . One of Buchman’s close colleagues, Peter Howard, was a "Daily Express" journalist who came into his orbit after investigating him for his newspaper.

Malcolm Muggeridge professed that for a long time he could not understand why Buchman caused such "extraordinary hostility", and later came to the conclusion that "in a libertine society any attack on libertinism is an anathema." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 271] ] This would certainly be one explanation for Driberg's life-long campaign against Buchman's work. (Winston Churchill once said of him, "Tom Driberg is the sort of person who gives sodomy a bad name". [ [http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-5316833.html/ A.N. Wilson in the London Evening Standard] ] ) Another reason may have been Driberg's early membership of the Communist Party and later recruitment by the KGB. Particularly from the late 1940s, the Communist Party regarded MRA as its ideological enemy and sought every opportunity to attack it.

Princeton

An early criticism centred on the accusation that Buchman had been thrown out of Princeton University in the '20s. [ [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,722677,00.html/ Time Magazine, 18 November 1926] ] In fact Buchman 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 organisation 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 practised 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 further, praising the "signal success" of the Society's work. [Thornton-Duesbery, "The Open Secret of MRA", 11] 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.

Hitler quote

One quote in particular always dogged Buchman, from an interview in the "New York World-Telegram", 25 August, 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 facing difficulties. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 240] ]

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." [Thornton-Duesbery, "The Open Secret of MRA", 59-61]

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

exual

Critics charged that the "total honesty" encouraged at Oxford Group house parties in fact 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 spoke of in that authoritarian 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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 139] ] This was supported by Dr J.W.C. Wand, then Dean of Oriel College and later Bishop of London who wrote in the August 1930 issue of "Theology" that "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." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 139] ]

Religious

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

*"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.(See "Christianity and Power Politics", by Reinhold Niebuhr)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer also accused Buchman of naivety 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." [Eberhard Bethge, "Dietrich Bonhoeffer", 282-284]

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 endagering the reputation of himself and his work. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 212] ] 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 humour and read the New Testament. The Groups in that sense have no reputation, and for myself, I have nothing to lose." [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 212] ]

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 from from 1934 until his death in a plane crash in 1937. [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 160, 256] ] . 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 that 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". [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 514] ]

Cardinal Franz Konig said that Buchman was "a turning point in the history of the modern world through his ideas". [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 2] ] and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, called Buchman "a modern St Paul" [ [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Lean, "Frank Buchman", 428] ]

References

External links

* [http://www.frankbuchman.info/ Frank Buchman - A Life (biography available online)]
* [http://www.iofc.org/ The Initiatives of Change global website]