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.Initiatives of Change – An overview Oxford Group biography 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.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.Garth Lean, Frank Buchman - A Life, Constable 1985, 292-303.
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.Garth Lean - Frank Buchman - A Life, p. 28. 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.Driberg, The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament.
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?"Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 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 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."Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 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."Lean, Frank Buchman, p. 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.
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,Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity.) 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),Thornton Duesbery, The Open Secret of MRA, p. 11. 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."Daily Express, March 5, 1928.