1. Franklin Nathaniel Daniel Buchman, best known as Frank Buchman, was an American Lutheran who founded the First Century Christian Fellowship in 1921, renamed as the Oxford Group in 1928, that was transformed under his leadership in 1938 into the Moral Re-Armament and became Initiatives of Change in 2001.
Frank Buchman then moved to Philadelphia to enter Mount Airy Lutheran Seminary and was ordained a Lutheran minister in June 1902.
Frank Buchman arranged the rental of an old storefront for worship space, settled upstairs, and opened the Church of the Good Shepherd.
Still in turmoil over his hospice resignation, Buchman attended the 1908 Keswick Convention in England hoping to meet the renowned Quaker-influenced, Baptist evangelist F B Meyer, who he believed might be able to help him.
Frank Buchman wrote letters of apology to the six board members asking their forgiveness for harboring ill will.
Frank Buchman regarded this as a foundation experience and in later years frequently referred to it with his followers.
From 1909 to 1915, Frank Buchman was YMCA secretary at Penn State College.
From February to August 1916 Frank Buchman worked with the YMCA mission in China, returning to Pennsylvania due to the increasing illness of his father.
Frank Buchman next took a part-time post at Hartford Theological Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, where he began to gather a group of men to assist in the conversion of China to Christianity.
Frank Buchman was asked to lead missionary conferences at Guling and Beidaihe, which he saw as an opportunity to train native Chinese leaders at a time when many missionaries held attitudes of white superiority.
Bishop Logan Roots, deluged with complaints, asked Frank Buchman to leave China in 1918.
In 1922, after a prolonged spell with students at the University of Cambridge, Frank Buchman resigned his position at Hartford, and thereafter relied on gifts from patrons such as Margaret Tjader.
In June 1924, shortly after arriving in Europe on the SS Paris, Frank Buchman accepted an invitation to meet with King George II of Greece and his family in Italy.
The king's mother, Sophie of Prussia, requested that Frank Buchman visit her daughter Helen, wife of Crown Prince Carol of Romania, the future Carol II of Romania, in Bucharest.
Carol's mother, Queen Marie of Romania, invited Frank Buchman to join her and her husband, King Ferdinand, at Peles Castle, where they were joined by Frank Buchman's close associate, Loudon Hamilton.
When Hamilton was asked by both Queen Marie and her daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Helen, if he would accept the position of tutor to Helen's young son Michael, the future King Michael, neither Hamilton or Frank Buchman felt that he should accept.
Correspondence with Buchman continued briefly, her last letter to him dated April 15,1927, and addressed to "Uncle Frank".
Frank Buchman designed a strategy of holding "house parties" at various locations, during which he hoped for Christian commitment to his First Century Christian Fellowship among those attending.
In Oxford, England, men trained by Buchman began holding regular lunchtime meetings in the study of J Thornton-Duesbery, then chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Frank Buchman liked the term, and launched a campaign for Moral and Spiritual Re-Armament in East London.
In Britain, novelist Daphne du Maurier wrote a best-selling book, which she titled Come Wind, Come Weather and dedicated to Frank Buchman, telling stories of how ordinary people affected by MRA were facing up to wartime conditions.
German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was a regular visitor to the MRA conferences in Caux, and Frank Buchman facilitated meetings between Robert Schuman, French Foreign Minister, and Adenauer.
Frank Buchman was awarded the Croix de Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur by the French government, and the German Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for this work.
Frank Buchman's contact with surviving anti-Nazi Germans, stemming from his pre-war work in Germany, was an important factor in facilitating this reconciliation.
In 1955, Frank Buchman suggested to a group of African leaders from several countries meeting in Caux that they put what they had learned of MRA into a play.
Frank Buchman felt that the most neglected "C" was "Continuance", the ongoing support of people who had decided to change.
Frank Buchman always stressed that "life changing" was not a matter of technique so much as the natural result of asking God for direction.
Foundational to Frank Buchman's spirituality was the practice of a daily "quiet time" during which, he claimed, anyone could search for, and receive, "divine guidance" on every aspect of their life.
Frank Buchman helped to show again that the power of silence is the power of God.
Frank Buchman had accepted the invitation of Dr Heinrich Kost, head of the German Coal Board, to send a team to the Ruhr.
For two years, Frank Buchman sustained over 100 MRA workers in the area.
An early criticism centered on the accusation that Frank Buchman had been expelled from Princeton University in the 1920s.
Frank Buchman said that Germany needed a new Christian spirit, yet one had to face the fact that Hitler had been a bulwark against Communism there - and you could at least thank heaven for that.
Gestapo documents released after the war showed that the Nazis believed that Frank Buchman was working for British intelligence, and referred to the Oxford Group as "a new and dangerous opponent of National Socialism".
The Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, who had frequently acknowledged his debt to Frank Buchman, tried to dissuade Frank Buchman from his efforts to convert the Nazi leadership on the basis that he was endangering the reputation of himself and his work.
Cardinal Franz Konig said that Frank Buchman was "a turning point in the history of the modern world through his ideas", and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, called Frank Buchman "a modern St Paul".