Background
Franklin Nathaniel Daniel Buchman was born on June 4, 1878 at Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Frank Buchman, a hotel owner, and Sarah Greenawalt. When he was fifteen, the family moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Franklin Nathaniel Daniel Buchman was born on June 4, 1878 at Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Frank Buchman, a hotel owner, and Sarah Greenawalt. When he was fifteen, the family moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania.
After graduating from Allentown High School and Muhlenberg College (1899), he completed the course at the Mt. Airy Lutheran Theological Seminary and was ordained in 1902. In 1902-1903 he studied at Westminster College, Cambridge, England, and at Inner-Mission in Germany.
For the next five years Buchman served as minister at the Overbrook Church of the Good Shepherd, in an impoverished section of West Philadelphia, and founded and administered settlement house centers in Philadelphia and other cities. In 1908 he ceased his involvement with the settlement centers because of a financial dispute with the governing trustees.
He then went to England to attend the "deeper-life" Keswick Convention. While there he became convinced of the "selfishness, pride and ill-will" in his life and confessed the same in letters to the trustees with whom he had quarreled. The experience, he said, changed his life. After returning to the United States, Buchman spent the years from 1909 to 1915 as the leader of the Pennsylvania State University YMCA chapter. Here he gained valuable experience in fund raising, recruiting members (the membership doubled during his tenure), and developing a dynamic organization.
After a year with evangelist Sherwood Eddy in the Orient, Buchman in 1916 accepted the position of "extension lecturer" in evangelism at Hartford Seminary. The seminary allowed him to spend much time off campus in evangelistic work. Accordingly, he again traveled in the Far East in 1917-1919. While on campus Buchman received a mixed reception from students and faculty. His emphasis was always practical rather than intellectual, and some thought that his group sessions diverted too much attention from scholarly pursuits.
His off-campus activities, by contrast, met with increasing success; consequently, in 1921 he chose to pursue his religious endeavors independent of any institutional connection.
This independent movement initially assumed the name First Century Christian Fellowship. During the early 1920's Buchman worked primarily through "house parties" on prestigious eastern college campuses, where he sought to lead the students to changed lives through public confession of their sins. These confessions often centered on sexual matters, with resultant public disapproval. (President John Grier Hibbin banned him from Princeton in 1924 after he refused to delete sexual discussions from the meetings. )
After the mid-1920's Buchman worked with people of all ages, and increasingly he concentrated his efforts and experienced his greatest satisfaction outside the United States. When a team of his disciples, composed mostly of Oxford students, visited South Africa in 1928 to seek to ease the racial problems of that country through evangelism, the Cape Times referred to them as "the Oxford Group. "
To the pleasure of Buchman, who always enjoyed identification with prestigious organizations and people, the name gained acceptance as a label for the movement as a whole. Buchmanism was a movement outside the established churches that sought to bring individuals to dynamic spiritual earnestness within the framework of their own religious traditions. What theology it had was drawn from the common elements of the major world religions.
The "good road" was a changed world order that was to be brought about by individuals who had confessed their sins, committed themselves to God absolutely, and regularly sought God's guidance through meditation. The confessions took place at house parties (often held in luxurious settings) in front of caring support groups that were led by Buchman and his staff of "life-changers. "
Recruits--especially from the upper class--were attracted to the meetings by lists of prominent sponsors (statesmen, generals, entrepreneurs, the social elite, theologians, and even labor leaders) whose backing Buchman actively solicited. By the mid-1930's Henry P. Van Dusen, a student of the movement, could describe it as "the most striking spiritual phenomenon of our time. "
In 1938, as the nations rearmed preparatory to World War II, Buchman changed the name of his organization to Moral Re-Armament (MRA) to dramatize its new specific goal of "preventing war by a moral and spiritual awakening. "
In contrast with his earlier small-group techniques, his effort to prevent the war involved mass rallies and mass advertising campaigns.
It also brought him great attention and acclaim, especially in an England that was ill prepared and panicky in the face of the mounting Nazi military power. The coming of World War II brought a sharp decline in the influence of the movement, which many associated with the discredited appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Although the movement never again realized the degree of influence that it knew in the 1930's, it did rally somewhat after the war. Buchman's efforts in postwar reconciliation and international goodwill resulted in his receiving citations from the governments of France, West Germany, Japan, Greece, the Philippines, Thailand, and Iran.
A plush conference center at Caux, Switzerland, became the world headquarters, and Buchman spent part of his later years there.
He died at Freudenstadt, Germany. Buchman combined an unusual commitment to doing the will of God, as he understood it, with brilliant organizational and promotional skills, energy and self-assurance almost without limit, and a near-psychic ability to diagnose quickly and accurately the problems of the people he counseled.
The international movement Buchman founded has been variously called First Century Christian Fellowship, the Oxford Group, Moral Re-Armament (often known as MRA), and Buchmanism. He was also a head (1905–15) of religious work at Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State Univ. ). His awards included Honorary degree in Doctor of Laws, which he received from Oglethorpe University in 1939, Légion d'honneur, awarded on 4 June 1950, Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1952.
Buchman's parents trained him in a theologically conservative brand of German Lutheran Pietism. Buchman was ordained in the Lutheran ministry in 1902.
The work of evangelism for personal and national spiritual reconstruction is conducted informally and intimately in groups gathered in educational institutions, in church congregations, or in homes. "House parties" take the place of conferences, and religious experiences are shared in personal confessions. The evangelists stress absolute honesty, purity, love, and unselfishness. Moral Re-Armament has always been a controversial organization, resulting from its strident anti-Communist positions as well as from Buchman's open admiration of Adolf Hitler.
Quotations:
As Buchman stated: "Catholic, Jew and Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucianist--all find they can change where needed and travel along this good road together. "
"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 center 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. "
He was a lifelong bachelor.
Through his friendship with Hsu Ch'ien (Xu Qian, Vice-Minister of Justice and later acting Prime Minister) he got to know Sun Yat-sen.
He was Buchman's chief American sponsor, whose Manhattan Calvary Episcopal Church had served as movement headquarters.
He became friends with Rabindranath Tagore and Amy Carmichael, founder of the Dohnavur Fellowship.
