DID YOU KNOW?
This week Did You Know is excerpted from a South Bend History professor’s book, “Changed by Grace:” The head of the NY Oxford Group was a man named Frank Buchman. His former assignments included being a missionary in India and the Far East in 1915 and 1917-1919, immediately before he started the Oxford Group (1920-1929). He was encouraged and supported by John R. Mott, and in 1917 traveled through China for three months with H. A. Walter doing missionary work.
Walter was a famous Protestant missionary (who did his work mainly among Muslim’s in India) who in 1919 wrote a widely read book titled, Soul Surgery. The title of Walter’s book automatically expresses the crucial point: the best way of producing true soul change or psychic change when doing missionary work was through working with each person individually.
His book spoke of the 5 C’s (which the Oxford Group adopted as important principles): Confidence, Confession, Conviction, Conversion and Conservation. We had to gain the other person’s confidence, which was often best done by confessing our own moral problems and telling them how God had removed them. We needed to get the other person to confess his or her own most deeply felt moral problems. We had to push that person to the point where he or she felt totally convinced of helplessness and hopelessness to solve those problems by his or her own intellect and will power. Only then could a real conversion (a genuine soul change) occur.
And then we had to continue working with that person through the days and weeks that followed, to conserve what had been accomplished, and to help that person avoid going back to his or her old ways once again.
Frank Buchman in 1920 simply adapted these ideas from the foreign missionary field and began using them to do evangelical work among university students, first at Cambridge University and then at Oxford University. By the time V.C. Kitchen became involved in the Oxford Group, Buchman had expanded his work to include, not just young students from elite universities, but older people, primarily men and women who were fairly affluent or who help important positions in government, the military, or the church.
The important thing to note is that his methods were based on personal evangelism, passing on the message by working one-on-one with individuals who needed it. That was part of what was later to make A.A. and the other 12-step programs work so well, the emphasis upon working with each individual on an immediate and intimate personal level, and the recognition that the only way we could “preach” the 12-step message was to first talk about our own personal experiences. If we did it right though, we could change people’s lives, and remake their moral character at the most fundamental level.
V.C. Kitchen, in his book, I Was a Pagan, describes in detail how he began observing in is own life, that grace did in fact give the power to produce the kind of change which the Oxford Group members had told him about and had witnessed to him about: This soul change commenced a few days after my return from the Oxford Group house-party. My business took me to New Haven, Connecticut and, while on the train, I had ample time for reflection. It was then that I made my first experiments in self-denial. The trip, for instance, was one I had always drowned in tobacco smoke, for I was an inveterate smoker and lit my pipe the first thing in the morning, putting it out the last thing at night. When, at times, I felt it threatening my heart and lungs, I made the effort to cut down on smoking. But that never lasted more than a few days.
To be continued in the next issue of The Waynedale News…
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