8. Steps

Buchman was, as his name suggested, Frank. He grew up as a fun-loving, deep-thinking son of a close-knit American family in Pennsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied first in Pennsylvania but continued to Yale Divinity School after which he was ordained and embarked on his first job at Penn State College. Here he took care of a group of boys at the YMCA. Frank wanted them to experience a warm family life in which food was an important ingredient – including pancakes on Sundays! But when the board decided to cut the cost of food, Buchman bucked, they disagreed, and he was fired. He became bitter, depressed and unwell. His doctor suggested that he take a cruise and in 1908 he left for Europe.
It was at a small conference in the Lake District that Buchman’s life changed dramatically. One day he attended a gathering of 17 people in a church in Keswick where Jessie Penn Lewis described the crucified Christ in a way that challenged Buchman deeply. He decided to write to each member of the YMCA board whom he hated and ask for their forgiveness for his self-will. He never heard from them again but from then on he felt free. That afternoon he took a walk with a student and told him what he had just done. The student decided to take similar steps and this became the blueprint for Buchmans work: recognising a need for divine intervention; knowing that the only place you can start is with yourself; putting right what you can; experiencing that sin is the only thing that can get between you and God; and passing it on. This was the basic process of ”change” that became the hallmark of his work.

Since that time in Keswick he found a new purpose in his life. Buchman shared his personal experience of change tirelessly. He knew that he could never change others, but once he discovered how freeing it was to put right what was wrong in his own life, he longed that everyone had the opportunity to get that same experience of freedom. The spirit of change and the freedom it brought with it was infectious and spread fast. Frank had a knack of ”reading” people, seeing their deepest needs and at times fearlessly challenging them to see them too. This was a quality that could be attractive or repulsive depending on where a person stood in his or her own life at the time!

One day in 1921 when bicycling in Cambridge, Buchman had an amazing thought that was so distinct that he wobbled and nearly fell off his bike as the thoughts sank in: ”You will be used to remake the world. You will be used to remake the men who will remake the world.”  From then on this thought was etched in his spirit and added new focus to his work. He knew that if he was to bring change to the world he needed to be prepared to meet the deepest needs of people in every sphere of life in the same way that he challenged himself and his team. Personal change was the key. No easy task but he believed that reconciliation between nations could be built by reconciliation between people.

Buchman developed his personal daily practice by building on the ideas of some of the great thinkers of his time. He initially called this practice the First Century Christian Fellowship and the core structure was built on:

• Reviewing one’s life in light of four standards of absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, summarized from the Sermon on the Mount in the Bible.
• Taking ’quiet times’ daily to seek God’s guidance to manage one’s life.
• Taking steps to put right what one could.
• Sharing these steps of personal change with others and effectively passing it on.

This personal experience was basic to Buchman who described sin as, ”Anything that comes between me and God.” He was no saint but he used to talk about ”Driving my sins like a team of horses!” and he tended to have a dynamic effect on people.

As a young man, Frank travelled extensively on speaking tours and often brought along students who were experimenting with these ideas. When he visited Beijing in 1918 he met Sam Shoemaker a young theology student who had taken leave from Divinity Studies at Princeton to work for a few years in China. Sam had started a branch of YMCA in Beijing and also taught business there as part of the Princeton-in-China Program. Buchman shared his experiences with Sam who in turn reviewed his own life in the light of these principles and decided to let God guide his life. He later returned to Princeton where Frank and Sam started a group of the First Century Christian Fellowship and they stayed in close touch with each other. Buchman visited him often and Sam travelled with him in Europe, the Middle East, and India from 1922 to 1933.
After graduation and ordination, Shoemaker joined Buchman and two British university graduates on a journey through Europe and the Middle East, exploring the meaning of Christian discipleship. On this trip in 1924 Shoemaker received an invitation from Calvary Episcopal Church in New York to become their rector. Shoemaker eventually accepted. Sam married fellow Princeton student Helen Smith in 1925 and together they managed to combine the diverse interests of Calvary Church with the lifestyle and program of the Oxford Group eventually.

Calvary Church’s old rectory was eventually replaced by a new seven-story building known as Calvary House where the US headquarters of the First Century Christian Fellowship (soon to be named Oxford Group) was established. Calvary House remained the US east coast center for the Oxford Group for over 15 years. On the west coast in Los Angeles their headquarters was at 833 Flower Street, known as The Club.and it was at Calvary House that the international task force based when they arrived in New York in 1939. In the basement Arthur and Signe ran the MRA photo lab and trained a group of young people in photography and graphic art. Many of those youngsters worked as photographers recording the work of MRA for most of their lives.
At a different location the church also owned and operated the Calvary Mission, an outreach project to serve people in need. During its 10 years of operation Calvary Mission served over 200 000 meals and could house up to 57 homeless men at a time. It was here that Bill Wilson found a new start and first conceived of Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12 steps. Together with Sam they created the blueprint for AA inspired by the steps in the First Century Christianity Fellowship by then known as the Oxford Group or Moral re-Armament.

By the time the international team arrived in New York, Buchman and his US team had booked Madison Square Garden; Constitution Hall in Washington DC; the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles; The World’s Fair in San Francisco aswell as many other meeting halls around the United States. Arthur’s task was again to enlist the press. The large photomurals that he had been working on were perfect billboards for these meetings as they were designed to be read in public places.
Signe was asked to meet Arthur at the boat on his arrival from England, as there was lettering that needed to be done immediately and she fell in love immediately! But putting that aside she set to work on the posters and billboards announcing the strategy for a Hate free, Fear free, Greed free America and to announce ”Moral Re-Armament week” from 7-14 May around New York, culminating at a major ”Citizens Meeting” at Madison Square Garden on May 14th 1939. Signs reading Moral Re-Armament the world’s security and MRA – a race with time to remake men and nations framed the arena and 14 000 people took part.
Arthur remembered how ”At the Madison Square Garden meeting there was a radio link-up with Britain and my English friend Tod Sloan.”

Buchman’s arrival in America with this multinational was a formidable instrument in the implementing of the vision that God had given him to remake the world. The young people who joined him from Oxford, Cambridge, Holland, Switzerland and Scandinavia were personally equipped, thanks to their own experiences of change. They divided into teams to work with the press, labour, industry, stage and art all over the country, in close co-ordination with Buchman’s strategic goals to impact the whole of America.

After the meetings in New York the task force left in a cavalcade of cars to Washington DC where 4 000 people attended a rally at Constitution Hall, near the White House on June 4, 1939, Buchmans birthday. Senator Truman who was unknown in those days – nobody thought he would become President – read what took place at the meeting in Washington into the Congressional Record, so that it went all over the country. One of the things he read was a message from President Roosevelt, who sent a special message to the meeting.

Once they got to California, Arthur enlisted a team to create an 18 foot long billboard, something that had never been done before. It stated Fear free, Hate free, Greed free world and was illustrated with portraits of people who had already started to implement the idea that change is possible and necessary in order to bring real peace in the world. 300 delegates attended a conference in Los Angeles on July 18th followed by a meeting of 30 000 people the following day in the Holywood Bowl. 15 000 were turned away due to lack of space! There were 4 searchlights beaming into the sky from the stage and at the end of this meeting Arthur scrambled up the slope to take a photo. A second after he took the photo the lights went out! ”Quote from Arthur”.

This was followed by a 10-day conference in Del Monte, now part of Monterey and culminating in an international parade which passed all the way down the middle of the high street at the San Francisco’s World Fair Golden Gate International Exposition at Treasure Island. It was a dramatic scene where 25 countries were represented marching 10 abreast with their national flags flying.
The Los Angeles News, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco papers carried reports of all these events on the west coast.

Despite the mood in America MRA’s practical personal steps of change and idealism appealed to the American people who finally saw something that they could do. This was something that had been gathered into a workable idea and made sense. Meeting halls drew people to overflowing presentations, indicating a hunger for a deeper meaning in life and the advance was great. Everyone in the task-force was expected and invited to contribute ideas and insights. Every morning they met as a team to compare notes, make plans and iron out any difficulties or personal differences which naturally appeared at times. These were no saints! They were normal human beings.  They learnt how to work together without getting emotionally involved in each other and were expected to keep relationships free of romance. There was a tremendous outpouring of hidden talent. Signe found this to be “A satisfying, thrilling experience that turned many heartaches into insight. Caring for others provides an immense release of creative power. The writing, the music, the mounting of plays and the arranging of occasions that inspired solutions to social conflicts were vast.”

As the summer passed things looked worse regarding war in Europe. Many of Signe’s European colleagues planned to return home after the three months were up. Signe’s father sent her money for her fare home so one day while they were in San Francisco Signe told Buchman that she felt it was time for her to go home too. He looked out into the distance for a while and then he looked at her and suggested that she stay a little longer. He didn’t say much but he had touched something in her heart that was deep and she responded positively. After that talk Signe went home to her lodgings and cried. “They were tears of relief because in my heart I felt that she should stay, but they were also tears of pain because I was afraid that I might never see my family or country again. At least not for a long time.”

Signe longed to go home to her family and spend time in her home country Norway now that her family was living there again. Growing up as she had in Sweden, she had never had the opportunity to really get to know Norway apart from brief family visits to Sulitjelma and Horten. In Visby Buchman had inspired her to start this uncertain journey of getting to know herself, of being honest, and to begin the practice of listening to her inner guiding voice and now she sought that guidance in one of the biggest decisions she had ever made. When most of the other Scandinavians left for home Signe stayed on in America. The money for the fare was used on dentist bills instead.

WW II started officially when Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939. Honoring their guarantee to Poland to secure Poland’s borders, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3 and Poland was invaded from the east by the Soviet Union on September 17th. But that was not all, Denmark and Norway were invaded by Hitler on April 9th 1940, Luxemburg on May 10th, the Netherlands on May 14th, Belgium on the 28th. Meanwhile the battle for France’s freedom was waged between May 10th and June 25th when France capitulated, isolating Britain in what was to become the toughest period of the war for Britain known as the Battle of Britain which was won thanks to all those who joined the Royal Air Force from from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Belgium, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. There were even some pilots from the neutral United States and Ireland. America supported Europe with armaments from 1940 but it was not untill the Japanese attack on the US Navy in Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the US fully entered the war. President Roosevelt had feared he would lose his support as president if he supported Britain openly but he maintained a close relationship with Churchill. After the attack on Pearl Harbour when America’s navy was destroyed in a matter of hours, Churchill scrubbed his programme for the next two weeks and went and stayed with Roosevelt in the White House. This was the basis of Britain and American unity during the remainder of the war.

Those who stayed to work with Buchman during the war, felt that their work, though not in time to avert World War II, could and should become the basis for reconstruction after the war. Their goal during those years was that an inspired ideology of democracy could later spread from America to the world and they were committed to developing this strategy. Close to one hundred years later one can but wonder at the sacrificial commitment and deep sense of calling that led to these decisions.