Experiment with God: Frank Buchman reconsidered

For thousands of people Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group are inseparably connected with a decisive personal experience, but in recent years comparatively little has been heard of them. This, according to Nils Gösta Ekman, one of the editors of the Stockholm daily Svenska Dagbladet, is partly due to a deliberate policy of silence by much of the mass media. Here he provides facts for a fresh evaluation of Dr. Buchman's personality and message, a message which he considers even more relevant today than when it was first given.

From Ekman's Foreword: "When the news of Frank Buchman's death on August 7th, 1961, reached the Swedish press, I was on the staff of a now defunct Stockholm daily and the editorial department gave

me the task of writing an obituary. I wrote a short article in which I brought out the fact that Frank Buchman had made a notable contribution to the spiritual life of Scandinavia in the thirties as leader of the Oxford Group movement. At the end I also noted that the movement, and its own publicity in particular, had come under some criticism in recent years.

"In my view it was a factual, balanced obituary and I turned it in to the editorial department in the normal way. I got the manuscript back at once with the word that the editor had turned it down. Nothing was to be written about Frank Buchman.

"After that first-hand experience of this deliberate policy of silence about a great life's work and about one of the most important moral and spiritual movements of our time, I have felt an urgent need to make a personal contribution towards a just evaluation of Frank Buchman's work and message which is, it seems to me, now more relevant than ever."