Buchman, Frank Nathan Daniel

(1878–1961)

   Sect Founder.

   Buchman was born in Pennsylvania and as a young man he was ordained as a Lutheran pastor, but after an unhappy experience in the ministry, he resigned in 1908. Then, at a conference in Keswick, England, he experienced a religious conversion which led him to take up missionary work. In 1921 he founded the First Century Church Movement; this was followed by the Oxford Group in 1929 and Moral Rearmament in 1938. From 1929, he travelled widely bringing his message of moral and spiritual regeneration to Canada, the United States, Europe and the Near East. His movement had no regular meeting groups or hierarchy. People were brought in through personal contact or ‘house parties’ and great stress was laid on the ‘Four Absolute Standards’ – absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, absolute honesty and absolute love. Buchman’s ideas were immensely influential on the professional classes of the United States and the British Commonwealth and ‘Frank’, as he was always called, made several important converts including, for a time, the theologian Emil brunner.

   Frank Buchman, Remaking the World (1947);

   T.E.N. Driberg, The Mystery of Moral Rearmament (1946);

   J.P. Thornton-Duesbury, The Oxford Group (1947).