3 Buchman in China

Frank Buchman arrived in China in 1917 at a decisive time in the country's history. Centuries-old traditions were breaking down. Western capitalism swept in. A new China was coming to birth.

A key figure was Sun Yat Sen. Through the revolution which he led, the ancient Manchu dynasty was forced to abdicate and Sun Yat Sen proclaimed the Republic of China. However there were still powerful disruptive factions in the country and the weak republic lay wide open to some idea which would fill the vacuum and bring cohesion.

Buchman, with two of his friends, was convinced that only a powerful change in people in leadership could provide the direction that was needed at that time. They drew up a list of fifteen of the most influential Chinese Christians in Peking. One of them was the Vice Minister of Justice, later acting Prime Minister Hsu Ch'ien, who believed passionately that Christianity alone could bring the unification of the country and 'national salvation'.

The strategy of reaching men who could quickly affect the nation began to unfold. Buchman met Chang Ling-Nan, a diplomat. The change in this man resulted in his inviting 80 of his friends to meet Buchman. What he said about his own change and about God's guidance deeply impressed all the guests among whom were several leading personalities.

Through Hsu, Buchman started a friendship with Sun who later said 'Buchman is the only man who tells me the truth about myself.'

Hsu gathered a group at Sun's headquarters - all revolutionary, mostly non-Christians, but all attracted to his conviction that 'the Christian faith will save China and the world.' Fearlessly he attacked the things that were undermining the nation morally - despotism, militarism, autocracy, opium, alcohol, concubinage and slavery.

Sherwood Eddy, a leading missionary, wrote, 'Buchman's work in China has developed by a growth of evolution into a movement of immense proportions, far more powerful and fruitful than any similar preparatory movement we have ever had in the past in any country.'

Buchman, who had gone to China to participate in a missionary conference was criticised by them for spending too much time with the Chinese. They began to spread malicious stories about him.

He however continued to develop the theme that Christianity has a moral backbone. 'If sin is the disease', he told an audience of missionaries, 'we must deal with sin. Sin first of all in ourselves, the little sins that rob us of power and keep us from being able to go out in deep sympathy to men in sin.' Personal work was the great need.

This bluntness did not make Buchman popular and he was forced to leave China. Six years later the truth came out. A prominent Christian leader who had been at the heart of the opposition to Buchman and who had cut off funds for his work had, although a married man, a weakness for Eurasian secretaries. One of them spoke publicly about their relationship. He was disgraced and left the Church to go into business. He admitted, 'Buchman faithfully warned me of my weakness.' In his trouble he turned to Buchman for help.

Meanwhile the situation had deteriorated in China. Hsu and his friends felt isolated from the man who had helped them so much. China's attitude to the Christian West began to change for the worse. Hsu however was one of those who stood fast. As a representative of the Canton Government he attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He stated, 'I stand for the principle, Christianity - the saving of the nation and Sun Yat Sen is fully in agreement with me. I hope that the foreign powers will not support the militarists of the North too far. I pray that God may save China and change the wrong policy of the allied powers.'

Not long after the allies recognised the Northern government, a wave of hatred of the West rolled across the country. China fell again into the tragedy of a civil war.

By 1923, Sun Yat Sen felt abandoned and grasped the only hand held out to him, that of the Soviet Union.

Lenin sent two of his best men, Michael Borodin, and the German General Blucher who was better known as Galin. Sun Yat Sen sent Chiang Kai Shek to Moscow. Hsu, seeing himself passed by, withdrew from public life.

Sun Yat Sen was stricken with cancer. As the illness developed he worked against time on a series of lectures which were to be his spiritual legacy. When he died his widow asked that he be given a Christian burial. Hsu gave the address and the press published a picture which carried the caption, 'The speaker showed Dr Sun was a follower, a revolutionary follower of Jesus Christ.'

Borodin was now free to pursue his plan. The revolution which Sun had launched took it's course. But the impulse behind it was Communism not Christianity.

© 1995 Rex Dilly.

4 Raising leadership in Oxford

The Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, took aside one of his students who was leaving and said, 'I want you to know that I think you have changed, for the better, the atmosphere of the college.'

This man was Kit Prescott, an audacious character. 'Beware of that man', one student warned a newly-arrived undergraduate, 'don't you go pious.' To which came the ready reply, 'Don't worry, nothing is less likely.' But try as he did to avoid him, he could not escape hearing of him.

Prescott was one of those, in the thirties, at the heart of a lively yet deeply penetrating awakening which was transforming the lives of students and faculty alike. It was the focus of national attention and had world-wide repercussions.

Around 80 met daily during the lunch break to exchange their latest discoveries in living under God's direction, to share news of its impact in their different colleges and make plans for extending its effect in all areas of university life.

Alan Thornhill, then Chaplain of Hertford College, says of these meetings, 'There was complete informality and you could say what you liked. People were blunt with themselves and each other. Absolute standards of honesty and unselfishness were applied not to some pleasant pipe-dream of the sweet by-and-by, but to details of the nasty now-and-now. What time do you get up these days? How about your times of prayer and listening? Are you winning your friends to this new way of life? Which comes first - ambition or God? These were the kind of questions flung out and fought out in these daily meetings.

Oxford of those days lived in the atmosphere of world crisis. Economic depression stalked the land, over three million were unemployed, with little social relief. Oxford, far from being immune to the ferment of revolutionary ideas - communism and fascism - became the battleground for them.

Garth Lean in his book Good God, It Works tells how the challenge of the Scottish Hunger Marchers camping in Oxford on the road to Westminster, 'powerfully focused our guilt at our own purposelessness.'

It was a picture that was to live with him, which added to a deep personal dissatisfaction in his own life. It made him realise that what he needed was an answer to both personal and social problems.

After some hesitation he followed the thought that he should meet Prescott who was in his own college.

Prescott told him in a simple and natural way how he found a faith that worked. It encouraged Lean to talk of his hopes and fears and failures.

Because Prescott spoke from experience, Lean tried the experiment of giving 'the little I knew of myself, to the near nothing I knew of God,' and at the same time adding, 'If You tell me what to do, I'll do it.'

Two thoughts came which involved honesty. He apologised to his two older brothers, for stealing a pound from one and reading the other's private letters.

Lean writes, 'That encounter was the beginning of my journey into faith. They have been years of adventure and still are, for the faith I seek - and in some measure attain - is not just a comfort, still less a refuge. It more often takes you into the eye of the storm than out of the swing of the sea.'

'It is a two-edged sword for the changing of world conditions, two-edged because that change must start with oneself.'

The hallmark of these days in Oxford was the growing number of men and women whose lives changed - sometimes the most unexpected, and took up the impossible task of changing the world.

There was the high-spirited trio who founded a University Motor Cycle Club. Their pastime was organising totally illegal races through Oxford roads in the early hours of the morning. They tended to live by the philosophy that 'a temptation resisted is a temptation wasted.' Their change was a sensation. They lost none of their dynamic.

A number of senior members of the University were greatly inspired by what was taking place and some completely identified themselves with it. Such a person was the Provost of Queen's College, Dr. B. H. Streeter, an outstanding New Testament scholar with a wide knowledge of world affairs.

Professor and Mrs BH Streeter (left) at an Oxford Group conference, Oxford 1937. Dr Buchman is on the right.

In 1934, at a meeting in Oxford Town Hall he declared, 'The reason that I have come tonight is to say publicly that I ought now to cease from an attitude of benevolent neutrality towards what I have come to believe is the most important religious movement today.'

'May I add', he concluded, 'that I come to the Oxford Group [later to become known as Moral Re-Armament], not as a person with some little reputation, in his own sphere of study, or as the head of an Oxford college; I come as one who has already learned something from the Group and hopes to learn more.'

© 1995 Rex Dilly.

Frank Buchman Man of the Century Mcall Magazine

Frank Buchman The Revolutionary Path Grosvenor Books April 1975

Frank Buchman Founder of Oxford Group Now Known as Moral Re Armament

Discovering Moral Re-Armament Rex Dilly 1995 digital version