Frank Buchman

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From 1909 to 1915, Buchman was YMCA secretary at Penn State College. 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?"

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.

Buchman's devotion to "personal evangelism", and his skill at re-framing the Christian message in contemporary terms, were admired by other campus ministry leaders. Maxwell Chaplin, YMCA secretary at Princeton University, wrote, after attending one of the Buchman's annual "Y[MCA] 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."

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."

From February to August 1916 Buchman worked with the YMCA mission in China, returning to Pennsylvania due to the increasing illness of his father.

Buchman next took a part-time post at Hartford Theological Seminary. 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 Kuling and Peitaiho, 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 Hsu Ch'ien (Xu Qian, vice-minister of justice and later acting prime minister,) 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, and thereafter relied on gifts from patrons such as Margaret (née Thorne) Tjader.

It was shortly after that he founded the First Century Christian Fellowship.

In June 1924, shortly after arriving in Europe on the SS Paris, Buchman accepted an invitation to meet with King George II of Greece and his family in Italy. The king’s mother, Sophie of Prussia, requested that Buchman visit her daughter Helen, wife of Crown Prince Carol of Romania, the future Carol II of Romania, in Bucharest. Carol’s mother, Queen Marie of Romania, invited Buchman to join her and her husband, King Ferdinand, at Peles Castle, where they were joined by Buchman’s close associate, Loudon Hamilton. When Hamilton was asked by both Queen Marie and her daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Helen, if he would accept the position of tutor to Helen’s young son Michael, the future King Michael, neither Hamilton or Buchman felt that he should accept.

In early 1926, Marie and Ferdinand were distressed by events concerning their eldest son, Crown Prince Carol, whose personal life had obliged him to renounce his succession rights to the throne a year earlier, his name being removed from the royal house of Romania by King Ferdinand. In March 1926, American friends of Queen Marie living in Turkey suggested that Buchman should spend time with her at Cotroceni Palace, offering his services as both spiritual guide and confidant, and “spreading his kind, uniting atmosphere over us all”.

Later in the year, as Buchman was preparing to return to America, he received a cable from Marie proposing that they travel to New York together on the same boat, and on October 12, they set sail from France on the Leviathan. Queen Marie was accompanied by her youngest children, Prince Nicholas and Princess Ileana. During their time together on the voyage, Queen Marie expressed her wish to demonstrate publicly the debt she felt to Buchman, with Nicholas suggesting that a house party be arranged for that purpose. A reception was organized to take place at the New York residence provided for Buchman’s stay, and he sent a cable stating, “Queen accepts tea twenty-fourth Ileana Nicholas accompany”.

By the time October 24 arrived, Buchman found himself facing challenges in regard to his work, fueled by magazine articles and press reports. Queen Marie and her family were also facing challenges, pressured by their official host, William Nelson Cromwell, to cold shoulder Buchman, whom they considered a valued friend. Despite mounting criticism, the reception took place as planned, and although Prince Nicholas attended, his mother, Queen Marie, did not. According to the New York Herald Tribune, Buchman phoned Queen Marie, arranging a brief audience for his guests at her hotel and supplying each of them with a blank card on which he had written, "Ambassador Hotel to meet Queen Marie".

A month later, Queen Marie returned to Romania to be with King Ferdinand, who was suffering from a terminal illness. Correspondence with Buchman continued briefly, her last letter to him dated April 15, 1927, and addressed to "Uncle Frank". Part of Buchman’s reply stated, “What hope is there for royalty or anyone else but rebirth?… Can this 'still, small voice' be the deciding factor in political situations, such as face you in these days of crisis?… Let me say, with the utmost conviction, it is the only thing that will …. With the rarest sense of fellowship with you… Your devoted friend.”

Buchman 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 Oxford, England, in addition, men trained by Buchman began holding regular lunchtime meetings in the study of J 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 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), 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 ... but also to [their] real effectiveness. Men 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."

In the summer of 1928, six of these Oxford men traveled for the vacations to South Africa where they originated. There, the press, at a loss how to describe this new religious movement, coined the term Oxford Group. Between 1931 and 1935, around 150 Oxford undergraduates were attending Oxford Group meetings every lunchtime. Paul Hodder-Williams, of the publishing firm Hodder and Stoughton, arranged for a regular column about the group to appear in the firm's magazine, the British Weekly. In 1932, Hodder also published a book about the group: For Sinners Only by A.J. Russell, managing editor of the Sunday Express, which went through 17 editions in two years and was translated widely. During university vacations, teams from Oxford took part in campaigns in East London and other industrial areas. Meanwhile, the numbers attending "house parties" grew to several thousands.

Buchman traveled widely in Europe during the 1930s. With the rise of the Nazis he focused on Germany, holding house parties and meeting church leaders. In 1932 and again in 1933 he sought, unsuccessfully, to meet with Adolf Hitler, whom he hoped to convert. By 1934, the Oxford Group's activities in Germany were being spied on and prominent members interrogated, making effective work under Hitler's regime increasingly difficult. In response, Buchman focused efforts on Scandinavia, believing that demonstrating a Christian revolution there would have a great impact in Germany. Accepting an invitation from Carl Hambro, he led a team to Norway in 1934. The Oslo daily Tidens Tegn commented in its Christmas edition, "A handful of foreigners who neither knew our language, nor understood our ways and customs came to the country. A few days later the whole country was talking about God, and two months after the thirty foreigners arrived, the mental outlook of the whole country was definitely changed." In 1935 Bishop Berggrav of Tromsø said that "what is now happening in Norway is the biggest spiritual movement since the reformation." Major splits between conservative and liberal factions in the church were healed, paving the way for more effective church opposition to Nazi rule during the war. A campaign in Denmark a year later had a similar impact. Speaking to the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, in 1954, the Bishop of Copenhagen, Fuglsang-Damgaard, reported: "The visit of Frank Buchman to Denmark in 1935 was an historic experience in the story of the Danish Church. It will be written in letters of gold in the history of the Church and the nation."

Buchman attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally. In 1936, the Central Security Office of the Gestapo sent out a document warning that the Oxford Group was "a new and dangerous opponent of National Socialism". This was followed by a 126-page report in 1939 claiming that the Oxford Group was "the pacemaker of Anglo-American diplomacy" and that "the Group as a whole constitutes an attack upon the nationalism of the state. ... It preaches revolution against the national state and has quite evidently become its Christian opponent."

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• Honorary degree in Doctor of Laws from Oglethorpe University (1939)
• Légion d'honneur, awarded on June 4, 1950
• Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1952