The Oxford Group was a Christian organization founded by American Lutheran minister Frank Buchman in 1921, originally under the name First Century Christian Fellowship. Buchman believed that fear and selfishness were the root of all problems. He also believed that the solution to living without fear and selfishness was to "surrender one's life over to God's plan". It featured surrender to Jesus Christ by sharing with others how lives had been changed in the pursuit of four moral absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love.
Buchman said that he had a spiritual experience at a chapel in Keswick, Cumbria, England, when he attended a decisive sermon by Jessie Penn-Lewis in the course of the 1908 Keswick Convention. He resigned a part-time post at Hartford Seminary in 1921 to found a movement called the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement. By 1928, the Fellowship had come to be known as The Oxford Group or Oxford Groups.
The Oxford Group enjoyed wide popularity and success in the 1930s. In 1932, Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang said, "There is a gift here of which the church is manifestly in need."Minutes of meeting of Diocesan Bishops, Church House, Westminster, January 18, 1932 Buchman encouraged participants in his group to continue as members of their own churches.
Two years later, Archbishop of York William Temple paid tribute to The Oxford Groups "which are being used to demonstrate the power of God to change lives and give to personal witness its place in true discipleship". As a Protestant movement, it was criticized by some Roman Catholic authorities, yet praised by others.
The tenets and practices of an American Oxford Group greatly influenced the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Ebby Thacher’s sobriety led to Bill Wilson's victory over alcoholism. Wilson's efforts to carry the "spiritual solution" of the Group to suffering alcoholics led to Dr. Bob’s sobriety in 1935. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob shortly after founded Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
In 1938, Buchman proclaimed a need for "moral re-armament" and that expression became the Oxford Groups movement's new name. Buchman headed the Moral Re-Armament for 23 years until his retirement in 1961. In 2001 the movement was renamed Initiatives of Change.
Frank Buchman
Frank Buchman, originally a Lutheran, was deeply influenced by the Higher Life movement whose strongest contribution to evangelism in Britain was the Keswick Convention.
Buchman had studied at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania and at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia and was ordained a Lutheran minister in June 1902. Having hoped to be called to an important city church, he accepted a call to Overbrook, a growing Philadelphia suburb, which did not yet have a Lutheran church building. He arranged the rental of an old storefront for worship space, and lived upstairs.
After a visit to Europe, he decided to establish a hostel for mentally disabled in Overbrook, along the lines of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh’s colony for the mentally ill in Bielefeld, Germany, and inspired by Toynbee Hall charitable institution in East London.
Conflict developed with the hospice's board. In Buchman's recollection the dispute was due to the board's "unwillingness" to fund the hospice adequately.Lean, Garth, Frank Buchman - a life, Constable 1985, p. 28. However, the Finance Committee of the Lutheran church body of Pennsylvania, aka Pennsylvania Ministerium, 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, Tom The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament.
Exhausted and depressed, Buchman took his doctor's advice of a long holiday abroad, and this is how, still in turmoil over his resignation, Buchman attended the Keswick Convention in 1908, hoping to meet pastor F. B. Meyer, one of the leading lights of the Keswick Convention and one of the main advocates of Quiet Time as a means to be "inspired by God".
F. B. Meyer was not present, and Frank Buchman chose to attend the sermon by Jessie Penn-Lewis instead, which became "a life-changing experience" for him "I thought of those six men back in Philadelphia (the hospice's board) 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 to 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 center of my own life. Not Him. 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."Lean, Garth, Frank Buchman - a life, Constable 1985, pp. 30-31. 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.
F. B. Meyer and the Keswick Convention's influence on Buchman was a major one. Meyer had published The Secret of Guidance in 1896.Meyer F. B., The Secret of Guidance, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1896,Online text One of his mottos was: "Let no day pass without its season of silent waiting before God." Meyer personally coached Buchman into "daily guidance".
The theology of the Keswick Convention at the time was that of the Holiness movement with its idea, originally derived from Methodism, of the second work of grace which would allow "entire sanctification": Christians living "in close union with Christ" could remain "free from sin" through the Holy Spirit. That is where Buchman's assertion (bizarre to many Lutheran or Reformed ears) that "human nature can change" originates.Sacks Daniel, Moral Re-Armament: The Reinvention of an American Religious Movement, Springer, 2009, 230 pages, , p. 128 Another assertion was "Absolute moral standards belong by Holiness", even though this formula used by Buchman had been formulated by the American Presbyterian missionary Robert Elliott Speer.
From 1909 to 1915, Buchman was YMCA secretary at Pennsylvania State University. 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, Garth, Frank Buchman - a life, Constable 1985, 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.
Frank Buchman was also very influenced by Presbyterian Yale theology professor Henry Burt Wright/ Lean, Garth, Frank Buchman - a life, Constable 1985, p. 74-78. (see The Four Absolutes infra).
Buchman's devotion to "personal evangelism", and his skill at re-framing the Christian message in contemporary terms, were admired by campus ministry leaders. Maxwell Chaplin, YMCA secretary at Princeton University, wrote, after attending one of the Buchman's annual "YMCA 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, Garth, Frank Buchman - a life, Constable 1985, 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, Garth, Frank Buchman - a life, Constable 1985, p. 46.
From February to August 1916 Buchman worked with the YMCA mission in China and eventually returned to Pennsylvania due to the increasing illness of his father.
Buchman next took a part-time post at Hartford Theological Seminary as a personal evangelism lecturer. 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,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 and Yale University, as well as 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 to live by faith and launch the First Century Christian Fellowship.
First Century Christian Fellowship to Oxford Groups Following a dissent with Princeton University, Buchman found greater support in England where he 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 addition, men trained by Buchman began holding regular lunchtime meetings in the study of Julian 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 Oxford 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 and good health but also to [their] real effectiveness. Men student 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. Cited in