The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman

Introduction

Introduction “The world is slow to realise that the spiritual is more powerful than the material ,” declared the American religious leader Frank Buchman in November 1938. He was talking on the BBC, with the growing polarization of Europe on his mind, and wanted to alert his listeners to the power of what he called “valid religious experience” to generate personal and social change. There was a missing ingredient in contemporary attempts to avert war, he thought: an awareness of how an encounter with God could change people’s lives and give them the resources to live peacefully and unselfishly.1 In other words, the answer to the crisis in the world lay at the spiritual level. This view was typical of Buchman. Throughout his life he stressed the importance of faith and moral standards for resolving conflict and bringing about social change. The Holy Spirit, he believed , had plans for humanity that could bring unity out of division and which people could work toward in practical ways. Buchman first came to prominence through his work as secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) at State College, Pennsylvania (henceforth Penn State) in 1909–15. The mixture of well-coordinated campaigns and focused work with individuals that he adopted led to a resurgence of Christian commitment on the campus and gained him a reputation as a gifted evangelist. Further appointments resulted—as a YMCA missionary in Asia in 1915–19 and a visiting lecturer at Hartford Theological Seminary in 1916–22— before he branched out to work in an independent capacity. The beginnings of the international movement that subsequently grew out of his work were often traced to a visit he made to Oxford University in May 1921, when his presence at a meeting of a college debate society sparked the emergence of a network of students dedicated to working with him.2 Although he had been ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1902, Buchman’s approach was nondenominational. He also placed little emphasis on platform speeches, at that time spreading his message 2 The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman mainly through one-to-one conversations, small fellowship groups, and house parties. This was the basis for his work in Oxford and elsewhere, which grew steadily in the 1920s, and rapidly in the 1930s, to the point that house parties were often attended by thousands of people and the movement attracted much attention from the press. In the 1920s Buchman and his supporters called themselves the First Century Christian Fellowship (FCCF). That name gave way from 1928 onward to the Oxford Group (OG), particularly because of the strength of the work at Oxford University—although the OG was in fact an increasingly international endeavor that made appeals to people of all ages and classes. Much of the group’s work was concerned with helping people at an individual level. It was also practical rather than theological in orientation, placing emphasis, for example, on confession of sin, listening to God, and absolute moral standards. In the 1930s, however, the OG increasingly tried to relate its message to wider national and international issues and to stress the link between spirituality and politics. The OG became one of the more influential movements of Christian revival in the interwar era in a number of northern European states and also in dominions of the British Empire such as South Africa and Canada. Its influence in parts of the United States was also considerable. Yet in the late 1930s Buchman was looking for a new way to articulate his message and in that context launched “Moral Re-Armament” (MRA), a program of moral and spiritual renewal running through national and international life that was conceived as an answer to bitterness and militarism; the OG soon came to be known by that name. His desire to express this in the context of the ideological battles of the time led him in 1943 to describe MRA as an ideology, and in subsequent decades it was presented as offering an alternative to materialist thinking in both the East and West. As MRA tried to apply this philosophy to urgent political issues—like postwar reconciliation and reconstruction, industrial conflict, and decolonization—its identity began to change. Its adherents increasingly came from all continents and religious traditions, and this turned it from what had initially been a kind of evangelistic enterprise into something increasingly multireligious in character. The expansion of the work meant that at its peak in the 1960s an...