Skip to main content

Frank Buchman: a life

Author(s):
The first major biography of Frank Buchman, the American Lutheran minister who started MRA.

Frank Buchman was the initiator of the Oxford Group also known as Moral Re-Armament.

This is the story of a man who set out to remake the world and it is only possible to understand Frank Buchman in the context of that aim. Everything he did in his adult life was a part of it, and scarcely anything he did could, in his eyes, be separated from it. That aim conditioned where and how he lived, how he approached people and situations, and what he did from hour to hour.

Buchman was always - and still is - a controversial figure. ln the thirties Archbishop Lang of Canterbury stated that he was being ‘used to bring multitudes of human lives in all parts of the world under the transforming power of Christ’, while Bishop Henson of Durham accused him of ‘megalomaniacal self-confidence’. The author and Member of Parliament for Oxford University; A. P Herbert, called him a ‘canting cheat’ in the House of Commons, and Tom Driberg, later to be Chairman of the Labour Party; attacked the Home Secretary for allowing a man who had never denounced Hitler to re-enter Britain in 1946. ln 1961 Robert Schuman said that Buchman’s death was an ‘irreparable loss to the world’.

Such a variety of opinions calls for a more thorough investigation than has yet appeared. This is the first full-length biography of Buchman which attempts to present the man with the greatest degree of objectivity and to analyse the fascination he had for people, from such varied backgrounds and countries.

Garth Lean is an author and journalist by profession. For ten years he was a political and general columnist for Time and Tide magazine. His previous books include The new morality (with Sir Arnold Lunn), John Wesley: Anglican and God's politician, a biographical study of William Wilberforce.

Read or download the whole publication below. (It can also be accessed and read on-line: http://www.frankbuchman.info/).

P.S: You can 'word-search' through the book. This is an important research tool.

Author(s)
Language

English

Publication
1985
Pages
590
Type
Publisher
Collins
ISBN
6272401
Publishing permission
Granted
Publishing permission refers to the rights of FANW to publish this text on this website.
Author(s)
Language

English

Publication
1985
Pages
590
Type
Publisher
Collins
ISBN
6272401
Publishing permission
Granted
Publishing permission refers to the rights of FANW to publish this text on this website.