Buchman meaning

Why did the oxford group fail
Oxford group literature
Buchman pronunciation

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Buchman, Frank Nathan Daniel

, 1878–1961, American evangelist, b. Pennsburg, Pa. The international movement he founded has been variously called First Century Christian Fellowship, the Oxford Group, Moral Re-Armament (often known as MRA), and Buchmanism. Buchman was ordained in the Lutheran ministry in 1902. He was head (1905–15) of religious work at Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State Univ.). In 1921, Buchman, after five years of extension lecturing for the Hartford Theological Foundation, visited England. There he preached “world-changing through life-changing” among the students at Oxford, hence the name Oxford Group. In 1938 he instituted a campaign known as Moral Re-Armament. 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-

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Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group

By bob k

The founder of the Oxford movement – a Christian evangelical movement and the birthplace of AA – Frank Nathaniel Daniel Buchman was born in the small town (pop. 1,200) of Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, on June 4th, 1878, fourteen months earlier than AA’s future co-founder, Bob Smith. Pennsburg’s population was almost exclusively German, morally conservative, “where the only permissible vice was overeating”. (Frank Buchman – A Life, Garth Lean, p. 3)

Buchman’s mother was a devout Lutheran, with grand ambitions for her son. His father was entrepreneurial, operating first a General Store, and later a railroad inn with a restaurant and bar. Pennsburg had no high school which prompted the family to move to nearby Allentown, which was larger (pop. 18,000) and rapidly growing.

Frank Buchman

In Allentown, Frank attended high school and his father became a wholesale liquor distributor. The teenager was no more than an average student. Nonetheless, he moved on to Muhlenberg College and Mount Ai

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Oxford Group

Christian organization

Not to be confused with Oxford Movement.

For the 1960s/1970s group of animal rights advocates at the University of Oxford, see Oxford Group (animal rights).

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, England when he attended a decisive sermon by Jessie Penn-Lewis in the course of the 1908 Keswick Convention.^[1] 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 t