To Change the World

In 1921 a Lutheran minister from Pennsburg, Pa. was pondering the world's sins as he strolled the quiet walks of Oxford. "How can one man change the world?" he asked himself. Suddenly, as he said afterwards, the answer came direct from God: "First one man changed, then two, then four, then eight. A million changed. A whole nation changed."

Dr. Frank Buchman, then 43, set to work without delay to "change" man No. 2.* As yet no whole nation has followed suit. But last week, Buchmanites all over the world celebrated their founder's 70th birthday. Frank Buchman himself attended the biggest party of all, which filled Los Angeles' Hollywood Bowl with 10,000 of the "changed" and the curious.

"International Family." The party was part of a fortnight-long World Assembly of Frank Buchman's ten-year-old Moral Re-Armament movement, and it clicked smoothly along in the well-oiled M.R.A. manner. Statesmen and ex-statesmen from 25 nations (including Italy, Germany and Japan) were there. The cablegram that invited them had been signed by some 51 Congressmen from 40 states (including Senators Barkley, Brewster and Bridges). On the local invitation committee were California's Governor Warren, Los Angeles' Mayor Fletcher Bowron, the University of California's President Robert Sproul, Hollywood's Jimmy Stewart and Joel McCrea. ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman sent warm greetings: "You are giving to the world the ideological counterpart of the Marshall Plan."

Before the speechifying started, the Bowl audience was entertained by a lively, two-hour amateur musical show called The Good Road, in which 160 Buchmanites skillfully compounded propaganda for "God-control" from such various elements as Swiss yodelers, Joan of Arc, Lincoln, Washington, the Magna Carta, a G.I. on Okinawa, and an average family.

Then Frank Buchman himself introduced a dozen or so "honored guests" for one-minute speeches. Dr. Kensuke Horinouchi, Japanese ambassador to the U.S. from 1938 to 1940, was "profoundly impressed with Dr. Buchman." Said grave, grey Dr. Chen Li-fu, newly elected Vice President of China's legislative Yuan: "The Chinese Parliament ... is still in session. But the urgency of the world situation . . . compels me to join forces with you today in this great international family." He told reporters earlier: "If Confucius were alive today, he would probably be here."

"Soul Surgeon." Such spiritual showmanship is the latest, and most successful, mutation of Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman's particular form of 20th Century evangelism. Born of Pennsylvania Dutch stock and educated at Allentown's (Pa.) Muhlenberg College, Buchman was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1902, and did welfare work in a Lutheran hospice for boys in a suburb of Philadelphia. From 1909 to 1915 he was secretary of the Y.M.C.A. at Pennsylvania State College. He has never married.

The "changed" souls that gathered around Buchman first called themselves the "First Century Christian Fellowship." But the name that stuck (to outrage many a Briton*) was the "Oxford Group."

On eastern U.S. campuses and in better-class communities, "Soul Surgeon" Frank Buchman's Groupers organized house parties for tennis, tea, and friendly arm-on-shoulder proselytizing. Groupers were encouraged to "get square with God" by "sharing" their sins in public confessions to their fellow members--a practice which led some outsiders to accuse Groupers of an undue interest in sex. No creed or doctrine was necessary. "Absolute Honesty, Absolute Purity, Absolute Unselfishness and Absolute Love" were the Buchmanite requirements, plus regular "quiet times" for listening to God.

"God Provides." In 1938 the Group took a new name--"Moral Re-Armament." Aims were piously unspecific ("You don't join anything, you don't pay anything, the idea is that you begin living the M.R.A. standards"). But there is nothing vague about the M.R.A. technique. Teams of 50 to 500 Buchmanites, many of them apple-cheeked, athletic Britons, have descended en masse upon communities, distributing literature, staging M.R.A. morality plays and organizing banquets to provide top-drawer local backing (like Los Angeles' George L. Eastman) for M.R.A. speakers.

With the coming of war, Buchman's fortunes and following diminished somewhat. Possible reasons: M.R.A. workers' requests for draft exemptions, and publicity given to Buchman's famed outburst (in 1936) thanking heaven "for a man like Adolf Hitler."*

Since war's end, however, things seem to have been looking up again for M.R.A. At last year's World Assembly, 5,000 delegates held their sessions at an Alpine resort hotel the Buchmanites had newly purchased in Switzerland. In Los Angeles last week, Assembly delegates ate, slept and lounged in a brand-new seven-story local headquarters. "Buchmanism" never seems to worry about funds. But its sources of income, like the number of its converts, are matters that Buchmanites are vague about. Says Founder Frank Buchman solemnly: "Where God guides, God provides."

* A skeptical Scottish undergraduate named Loudon Hamilton, who, when Buchman first urged him to listen for God's instructions, replied: "I have been accustomed to address God myself on occasion . . . but that was only a one-way communication. If God were to speak to me, as you suggest, I am not quite sure it would not be somewhat uncomfortable." * The real Oxford Movement took place in the mid-19th century under the leadership of John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman, John Keble and Edward Pusey. * Said Dr. Buchman, in a New York World-Telegram interview: I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler who built a front line of defense against the Anti-Christ of Communism . . . Think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to God . . . Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last bewildering problem."

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