Happy Valentine's Day! It's also Ash Wednesday, for those who observe the Easter holidays. We got hit with a fast-moving snowstorm yesterday which dumped an entire foot of snow on my neighborhood, but fortunately, we never lost power so here I am.
I invited the followers of the blog's Facebook account to vote on this week's topic. It was very nearly a three-way tie, but by a margin of one vote, we had a winner. He gained international renown for his rather unusual approach to world peace.
 |
| The marker is located at 772 Main Street |
Frank started his career in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in a neighborhood called Overbrook. It didn't then have a Lutheran church, so he accepted the call with no salary; he rented an empty store, moved into the apartment above it, and started operating the Church of the Good Shepherd out of the storefront. As far as I can tell, the church as he established it no longer exists, which means it likely merged with another congregation at some point. After a year of working on this, the exhausted Frank was ordered by his doctor to take a very long vacation, so off he went to Europe. He spent several weeks in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, and was inspired to go home and set up a hospital farm-type of home for Overbrook's young people in need. The Luther Hospice for Young Men was assigned a board of directors, but after a short time there was conflict between Frank and the six board members. According to Frank, the board members just didn't want to provide the money for the hospice, but the budget was managed by the Finance Committee of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania, and it was their stance that there was no money to provide. In order to continue, the hospice needed to be more self-sufficient, along the lines of how Harrisburg State Hospital had been in the 19th century. Frustrated, Frank decided to resign and, again at his doctor's urging, went back to Europe for another vacation.
This time he went to England. It was 1908, and he attended the Keswick Convention, which is an annual gathering of conservative evangelical Christians. They still hold one every year in the county of Cumbria. Frank was hoping to meet with a particular evangelist there, Frederick Brotherton Meyer, as he thought the learned gentleman might be able to give him some counsel. Meyer wasn't there. Instead, Frank listened to a sermon about the Cross of Christ by another preacher, Jessie Penn-Lewis; she was a Welsh woman whose husband was descended from our William Penn (or at least he claimed to be - it's unknown whether that was true). Listening to her, Frank was overcome with what he later described as a fundamental religious experience. He realized that he had centered his life too much around himself, rather than around his faith, and that he had continued to resent the board members for far longer than he should have done, and he prayed for divine guidance. For the rest of his life, Frank claimed that during this moment, God spoke to him and told him to put things right between himself and the board members; he also maintained that listening to Penn-Lewis preach cured him of his depression. Afterward, he wrote each of the board members a letter of apology, asking them to forgive him for retaining so much ill will toward them.
Returning to Pennsylvania, Frank took the position of YMCA secretary at Penn State College. During this time he began his daily practice of 'quiet time,' in which he would pray and read the Bible. He also finally got to meet Meyer, whom he'd hoped to encounter at the Keswick Convention, when he visited the college, and they discussed Frank's 'quiet time.' Meyer advised Frank to continue this practice, but not to forget to "give God enough uninterrupted time to really tell you what to do". Influenced by Meyer and other prominent theologians of the day, Frank became devoted to the ideal of personal evangelism; he had a particular gift for putting the Christian message into more modern terms that the young men of the college could find relatable, and many of the students were inspired to improve their own behavior and live better lives. His work with the YMCA and the transformative effect it had on young men took him to India (where he met Mahatma Gandhi) and China for a few years. However, he came back to Pennsylvania in 1916 because his father was very ill and getting steadily worse.
Throughout the 1920s, while this was slowly taking off, he became a friend and advisor to members of the royal families of Greece and Romania. He traveled throughout Europe during the 1930s; with the rise of the Nazis, he focused many of his efforts on Germany and even tried (without success) to meet with Hitler, as he hoped to convert him. But as the Nazis took control of the country, the Oxford Group came under heavy scrutiny and Frank decided to relocate their work to safer quarters in the Scandinavian countries. On returning to London in 1938, he started a campaign for Moral and Spiritual Re-Armament, urging people to undergo a spiritual revolution in order to bring peace to the world. He renamed the Oxford Group to the MRA, short for Moral Re-Armament. Some of his longtime followers ended up leaving the Oxford Group over this new focus, as they found it too political; others, including Franklin Roosevelt, felt that the MRA contributed greatly to Allied morale in World War II. After the war, Frank and his crew were on hand for the first United Nations conference in 1945, and were credited with helping to avert a dispute over part of the proposed UN Charter.
Frank and his team were a big part of brokering a reconciliation between France and Germany following the war, and the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer often attended MRA conferences. For his work to promote peace, Frank was awarded the German Grand Cross of the Order of Merit, while the French grave him the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur. The MRA enabled Japanese delegations to once again travel abroad after the war, helping them to visit the United States and various Asian countries in order to make historic apologies for Japan's actions. The peaceful decolonization of Morocco and Tunisia was also assisted by the work of the MRA, though they were unable to do the same in Algeria.
One of the most enduring legacies of the MRA is the existence of Alcoholics Anonymous. Both of its founders, William Wilson and Bob Smith, were active in the Oxford Group and believed that the organization's principles were the best way to overcome alcoholism.
Frank was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize multiple times - every year from 1951 to 1959, and then one more time in 1961. He never actually won, however. This may have been because he was regarded by many as controversial for a number of reasons; one of the things about him which puzzled many other Christians was how he was willing to work with anyone regardless of their religious beliefs and without insisting on their conversion. In 1948, he gave a speech in which he explained that "Catholic, Jew and Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Confucianist - all find they can change, where needed, and travel along this good road together." He never shied away from sharing his own faith with others, regardless of their own beliefs (or lack thereof), and repeatedly shared the story of finding his way back from depression during that sermon in Keswick, but never urged his listeners to change their own traditions or join a specific church.
Frank continued working for many years after suffering a stroke in 1942, despite growing blind. He never married and had no children. He died in 1961, but sources seem to vary a little on the specifics of his death. I read one that said he died on August 6th in Germany, while his FindAGrave profile says it was on August 7th in Switzerland. In any case, his body was returned to his native Pennsylvania, and he was interred in Allentown's Fairview Cemetery in the family plot with his parents and other Buchman relations.
As for the Moral Re-Armament movement, it still continues today, though in 2001 it was renamed Initiatives of Change. Its legal and administrative office is now headquartered in Caux, Switzerland; branches can be found under various names throughout many countries, including the United States (Hope in the Cities), India (the IC Centre for Governance), and Canada (Global Indigenous Dialogue). It was awarded the Ousseimi Prize for Tolerance in 2014, which I think would have made Frank pretty happy.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I would love to hear from you!