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Samuel Moor Shoemaker was born in 1893 and raised outside Baltimore, Maryland, on the picturesque estate of his well-to-do Episcopalian family. Shoemaker grew up in comfort, attended an Episcopalian private high school, and then went to Princeton University to begin undergraduate studies in 1912.

At school, he quickly demonstrated both his passion for Christian ministry and his potential for leadership. He joined, for instance, the Philadelphia Society, a Christian student organization on campus, and later became president of the group. He also participated in nationwide bodies like the Student Volunteer Movement and the Young Men's Christian Association.

Following graduation in 1916, he joined the YMCA for a two-year stint as a missionary in China. The experience profoundly influenced Shoemaker. Despite his extensive involvement in Christian organizations, he worried that he lacked an experiential understanding of the faith. While overseas Shoemaker underwent the conversion he had been seeking, and the experience impressed upon him the importance of personal evangelism, which became the hallmark of his later ministry.

Shoemaker returned to the United States in 1919 and soon began a long career in New York City. He first worked for a year at Princeton, then attended seminary for another year, and in 1921 was ordained into the Episcopal priesthood. Three years later, at the age of 31, he became rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City where he was pastor for the next twenty-six years.

Shoemaker revived the formerly wealthy church that had fallen on hard times by holding outdoor services in Madison Square, launching a radio show, and transforming the rectory into a rescue mission. His innovative leadership soon earned him a reputation throughout New York City. He also exercised significant influence beyond the city limits by traveling widely, often lecturing on college campuses, and by directing the national headquarters for the Oxford Group, an international, evangelical fellowship founded by Frank Buchman.

Through his involvement with the Oxford Group, Shoemaker began his most famous partnership in ministry. In addition to his administrative work for the Oxford Group, he also led a weekly small group meeting at Calvary Church. Since the gatherings were open to the public, a wide variety of people attended.

In 1934 an alcoholic named William Wilson decided to visit the group. Though skeptical of religion, Wilson responded well to the meeting and before long underwent a conversion. Following the experience, Wilson finally succeeded in a long effort to stop his drinking, and he credited his surrender to God as the start of his sober life. Wilson continued attending meetings and drew especially close to Shoemaker. This friendship, and the fellowship of the Oxford Group, provided Wilson with a foundation to begin to talk about his experience of sobriety. Wilson's efforts led to the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous.

A thoroughgoing pragmatist, Wilson worked to forge practical connections between Christian faith and sobriety for alcoholics. With the help of Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon from Ohio and a member of an Oxford Group in Akron, Wilson's pragmatic approach to religion and alcoholism developed into a support network for alcoholics which ultimately became AA.

In the late 1930s, Wilson distilled his experience with Smith and other alcoholics into a dozen practical rules for living beyond the addiction. These rules, now known as the Twelve Steps of AA, reflect not only Wilson's bout with alcoholism, but also his connection to Shoemaker and the Oxford Group. Wilson's emphasis throughout the Twelve Steps on surrendering to a Higher Power, for instance, mirrored Shoemaker's theological doctrine of conversion through surrender. Similarly, the Oxford Group's small group format that includedGroup Guidance, in which members submitted to the counsel of others, provided a model for the mutual accountability of AA meetings.

Wilson later commented on the importance of Shoemaker's role in the birth and development of AA, going so far as to call the priest a third co-founder of the movement. By the early fifties, AA was booming and Shoemaker had become a nationally recognized minister.

Given the success of his long tenure at Calvary Church in New York City, Shoemaker stunned his parish in 1952 when he accepted a position at Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. Shoemaker never made clear whether he longed for a new challenge or simply wanted a change of scenery. In any event, he resettled in Pittsburgh, where he spent the last ten years of his active ministry before retiring in 1962. In addition to providing dynamic leadership for his new church throughout those ten years, Shoemaker authored numerous books in which he expressed much of the vision that would serve as the foundation of Pittsburgh's evangelical network.

For instance, in his popular book, With the Holy Spirit and With Fire, Shoemaker stressed the importance of Christians becoming engaged in the world. He opened this book by urging Christians to attend to thegreat need of discovering how personal faith affectsthe world situation. For Shoemaker, this meant launchingself help programs in the third world while confronting thegreat American sin of consumerism at home. He insisted that Christianity was about material concerns and thus should influence business practices, housing conditions, and wage levels. But Christian engagement in the world, he warned, could not happen without personal spirituality. Indeed, he scolded the politically active, liberal Christian critics of Billy Graham for failing to appreciate the spiritual accomplishment of the evangelist's crusades. According to Shoemaker,there is no antithesis between personal religion and social conscience. Personal religion must growdeep enough to affect all of life, while social involvement must always be guided by spiritual motivation. If the two were properly combined, Christians would become productively engaged in the world.

Shoemaker also called for Christian unity.The best of previous evangelical movements, he observed,have been ecumenical in their aim, and not dogmatic about where their converts nurture their spiritual life and growth. Writing in the late fifties, he insisted that Christians in his day follow that model. He argued that they would do well to look generously on fellow believers of various stripes, even welcoming the contributions of Jews and Muslims, for theHoly Spirit surely is found in some measure in every religion. In a 1955 sermon, he underscored the ecumenical nature of his work in Pittsburgh by insisting that it would befolly for any one Church to think that by itself it can do what needs doing in a day like this. Too many churches, he observed, worried more about converting people to their ownspecial brand of Christianity than introducing them to a living faith. For Shoemaker, practical evangelism always came before ecclesiastical purity.

Just as Shoemaker stressed a practical view of ecumenism, he also emphasized a down-to-earth approach to presenting Christianity. He repeatedly advocated making the faith relevant to ordinary people. Wise Christians, he observed,know enough to begin where people are, and to build on their present interest, and to make faith relevant for that interest. Connecting Christian faith to people's lives meant far more to him than doctrinal sophistication.Never mind what the theological professors, or our theological peers, think of us, he wrote.Let us fit our talks to the people before us. Appealing to ordinary people meant using simple words and language. It also required the church to depend on the laity for evangelism since the laity understand the needs of other ordinary people. In 1958, he attempted to implement such a vision by sponsoring a lecture series at his church calledLaymen to Laymen, which intended to equip the laity for this evangelistic task.

Shoemaker not only wrote and preached about the importance of making Christianity relevant to people's everyday lives, he also practiced that commitment in his ministry. Much of his work centered around forming small groups of lay people who could share their experiences of faith with each other. The Oxford Group, for instance, gathered members to share the guidance they received from God, and Alcoholics Anonymous, similarly, held intimate meetings for mutual sharing and support.

In Pittsburgh, Shoemaker used the small group approach to reach businessmen, and in 1955 he formalized this work by founding the Pittsburgh Experiment. The Experiment became the first organization in the city's evangelical network, and it served as a model and an impetus for groups that followed.

The Experiment Emerges

The birth of the Pittsburgh Experiment can in large measure be credited to the ingenuity of Shoemaker himself. Soon after moving to the city, he introduced himself to a group of young professionals whom he convinced to join him for a series of conversations on becoming a Christian. A keen student of human nature, Shoemaker opened the first meeting with a shrewd pitch. Having understood that the group saw little relevance in Christianity for their lives, he peppered the men with questions about the foundation of the free-enterprise system. By the end of the evening, he had convinced them that only God could serve as that foundation and, therefore, God was probably relevant to them after all. They agreed and closed the evening with a request to meet again.

Shoemaker's pitch to the businessmen reveals a theme that can be found throughout his work--the linkage of Christian values and conservative American ideals. At the close of his ministry in Pittsburgh, for example, he gave a speech at Carnegie Hall in which he called himself anunreconstructed conservative who believed in the freedoms inherent in American capitalism. Hence, he argued that people should make money, provide for their families, andkeep the country moving forward.

There and elsewhere he also argued that in order to protect America for economic and religious freedom, Christians must oppose communism. He opened his book, How to Become a Christian (1953), for instance, with the sweeping claim thatthe world is now ranged into two vast camps--the camp of those controlled by the Communist Power, and the camp of the still free nations, led by America. Similarly, in the first chapter of With the Holy Spirit and With Fire, he warned thatthe most potent overall fact of our time surely is the confident dynamic of a marching communism. America offered an alternative to economic and political totalitarianism, he assured, but only if it recognized that its freedom was founded in God. He feared that Americans did not often recognize these spiritual moorings, and this concern tempered his patriotism, yet he insisted on celebrating the great potential of America to realize its ideals.

Shoemaker's message of freedom and faith hit home with the young businessmen in Pittsburgh. They gathered weekly in the familiar context of the Pittsburgh Golf Club and soon dubbed themselves thegolf club crowd. After six weeks with Shoemaker, they decided to commit to regular meetings in order to further explore links between their business lives and their newfound faith.

Prodded by Ben Moreell, chairman of the board of Jones and Laughlin Steel and a member of Calvary Church, Shoemaker decided to formalize the group. In 1955 the Pittsburgh Experiment was incorporated. Shoemaker formed an ecumenical advisory board for the Experiment composed of clergy from the five major downtown churches representing different denominations, and he launched a program modeled after the gatherings of thegolf crowd.

Small group discussions in which businessmen explored connections between their jobs and their faith became the hallmark of the new organization. By the end of its first year, the Experiment was sponsoring six groups that met downtown each week over the lunch hour. The meetings were informal, had rotating leadership, and were made up solely of laymen so that people outside the church would not feel intimidated. Discussions ranged from interpersonal friction at work to marital problems at home, and the goal was always to discover the relevance of Christianity to ordinary problems faced on the job and in the home. Members of the Experiment lamented thefalse view of religion to compartmentalize life, countering thatGod is Lord of a man's total life, includingfamily, work, community, and church. As the first annual report put it, small groups helpedmen and women in the work community apply their Christian faith realistically.

The primary means by which the Experiment offered to make faith relevant was the thirty-day prayer experiment, from which the group's name derived. First introduced by Shoemaker to thegolf club crowd, the prayer experiment simply asked members to make an appeal to God every day for a month to help them with a particular problem. Members were not required to follow any formulaic prayer or even believe the experiment would work--they simply had to pray.

The literature of the Experiment is filled with stories of success from these thirty-day vigils. One man testified that he worked more efficiently because his praying inspired him to criticize others less. Another talked about his new ability to handle matterscalmly and with dispatch, and warned that on days when he failed to pray,tempers flared and much wasted motion was evident. Don James, later executive director of the organization, recalled how his first prayer experiment in the mid-fifties smoothed out an adversarial relationship with his boss. He also noted in a 1963 newsletter that prayer had been helpful beyond the office, citing two labor disputes that were settled once both sides agreed to askthe Higher Power to aid them in the controversy. A simple prayer, he assured, could bring dramatic results.

As these accounts of success indicate, the Experiment focused primarily on personal transformation. Although the literature recounts numerous instances in which prayer experiments eased office or marital tensions, it rarely identifies examples in which prayer solved broad structural problems like racism or urban poverty. Even when Don James wrote about prayer settling labor strikes, he made no mention of the structural issues at hand, such as the injustice of wages or working conditions. Instead, he emphasized how invoking the Higher Power helped everyone to find a workable solution.

When those in the Experiment did talk about addressing social issues, moreover, they stressed personal over political strategies. Ben Moreell, an early leader of the Experiment, argued, for example, that social change came by reforming individuals, not by adjusting the environment according to some socialist concept. Rather than exerting power through the state, he maintained, the church should provide amoral influence in society that would help individuals act more responsibly.

Although the Experiment largely followed Moreell's advice to stick with the task of changing individuals, it did express sympathy for one political issue--anticommunism. The first promotional pamphlet of the Experiment, in 1955, placed communism at the top of its list of problems facing the contemporary world. The writer was heartened, though, by the idea that if Pittsburgh stood up for God, theCommunist Masters of Materialism could be made to shake in their shoes. Toward that end, the Experiment sponsored anticommunist speakers in 1955 (one of eight activities listed in its annual report), and again in 1961, when it supported a lecture by Alfred Ackenheil, a professor from the University of Pittsburgh. Ackenheil's lecture brought the Experiment publicity since both the Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the event. Additionally, the Experiment delivered its own anticommunist message on its weekly radio show. In an interview from the early sixties, for example, Ben Moreell echoed Shoemaker when he declared thatfreedom and faith must rise and fall together. Thus,it is no accident, he reasoned,that the Moscow dictatorship is dedicated to godlessness.

The Experiment's anticommunist rhetoric indicates two characteristics of the organization. First, it points to the essentially conservative political stance of the group. Composed largely of businessmen working in the downtown corporate marketplace, the Experiment never sought to upend the capitalist structures of American society. Instead, it tried to change individuals by bringingpersonalness into industry everywhere and, thereby, improvehuman relations.

The Experiment's anticommunist rhetoric also points to a second characteristic, namely, the continuing influence of Shoemaker. Because he was the founder of the Experiment, Shoemaker's anticommunism likely played an important role in establishing a similar concern within the organization. In other areas, Shoemaker's influence is even more apparent. In fact, on two pivotal occasions in the Experiment's history he helped to profoundly direct the course of the ministry.

The first occasion concerned a possible merger of the Experiment with the Pittsburgh Council of Churches. By 1958, the Experiment had three years under its belt, and was garnering some public notice. When William Cohea decided to leave his post as executive director, the board started exploring the possibility of merging with the Council, an umbrella organization for mainline denominations in the city. The issue quickly turned into a fierce debate. Those in favor saw a possible merger as an opportunity to expand the Experiment's influence. However, those opposed worried that linking with a bureaucracy like the Council would vitiate the group's ability to reach ordinary men in business who had little connection to the church.

Shoemaker felt this concern for those outside the church acutely. He dedicated much of his writing to telling people how they might attract others to the church. His suggestions reveal his genuine commitment to the outsider. He pleaded thatjudgment, accusation, [and] criticism were anathema to evangelism. When asked togive hell to a sinner mired in a sordid life, Shoemaker responded,I don't want to give him hell--he's got plenty of hell now--I want to give him heaven. Evangelists with harsh judgments proved ineffective, he warned, and they failed, moreover, to understand their solidarity with the outsider.We are as much sinners, he wrote,as anybody that we ever try to reach for Christ.

Shoemaker expressed his compassion for the outsider most profoundly in his poem,I Stand by the Door: An Apologia for My Life, in which he envisioned himself standing by thedoor through which men walk when they find God. From that poetically imagined vantage point, he empathized with the pain of those whocreep along the wall like blind men feeling for the door but needing a guide. He cried for those whobecome afraid of God once they have entered, discovering thatthe people inside only terrify them more. For all who are alienated from religion, he stood by the door totell them how much better it is inside.

For Shoemaker a primary achievement of the Pittsburgh Experiment was its existence as a Christian institution that invited rather than alienated people who did not identify with the church. So, when the proposed merger with the Council threatened to weaken that central calling, he marshaled his considerable strength to stop it. He wrote a letter to the leadership of the Experiment reminding it that the group's original purpose was toget men to live out their Christian convictions downtown and at the world level. He further argued that bybeing polite to the Council and bothering over bureaucratic matters the Experiment was wasting time it should have been directing tobuilding up strong groups. A merger, he warned, would be afatal mistake. Shoemaker was so thoroughly alarmed by the proposed merger that he went before the board of directors to plead his case. He begged the board to reject the offer, falling on his knees and weeping.

Shoemaker and those who supported him prevailed in the end, and the Experiment maintained its independent status. Soon after the proposed merger was rejected, the Experiment redoubled its efforts to reach those outside the church. That effort was spearheaded by Donald James, a dynamic new executive director who took his post in 1960 and led the group until the end of the decade. Although James was probably the most significant force that reshaped the Experiment throughout that decade, his very presence as leader of the Experiment owed a great deal to Shoemaker who, more than anyone else, was responsible for leading James to the Experiment and bringing him to the position of executive director. James's role as leader of the Experiment is thus the second instance of Shoemaker's profound influence on the direction of the ministry.