35 Facts About Sam Shoemaker

Samuel Moor Shoemaker III DD, STD was a priest of the Episcopal Church.

Samuel Shoemaker was considered one of the best preachers of his era, whose sermons were syndicated for distribution by tape and radio networks for decades.

Sam Shoemaker served as the rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City from 1925 to 1952.

Sam Shoemaker was the head of the United States headquarters of the Oxford Group and later of the Moral Re-Armament which the Oxford Group became in 1938, from circa 1927 until circa 1941.

Sam Shoemaker retired in 1962 and died the following year.

Sam Shoemaker's interdenominational focus and the Oxford Group were significant influences for the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous who met through the Oxford Group.

Sam Shoemaker helped start an Oxford Group chapter in Akron, Ohio, where Dr Bob Smith became involved.

Sam Shoemaker was well aware of his privileged upbringing: Mennonites, some Schumachers had moved from Germany, Holland and Switzerland hundreds of years earlier, converted to Quakerism under the influence of William Penn's missionaries and Anglicised their surname as they moved to Germantown, which became a Philadelphia neighborhood.

Sam Shoemaker later became known for a slight southern inflection in his speech, which he attributed not to these relatives, but to his lifelong friend Hen Bodley, and to James, a longtime family servant, who had been born in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

In 1908, when Sam Shoemaker was 14, he was sent to St George's School, Rhode Island, an Episcopal boarding school founded and run by the Rev John Byron Diman, who later converted to Roman Catholicism and founded the Portsmouth Priory near the school.

At Princeton, Sam Shoemaker had met Robert Speer, John Mott and Sherwood Eddy through the World Student Christian Federation.

Sam Shoemaker became interested in personal evangelism and missionary work, as well as the relatively new ecumenical movement.

Reverend John Gardner Murray, bishop of Maryland, Sam Shoemaker went to China to start a branch of the YMCA and teach business courses at the Princeton-in-China Program.

Sam Shoemaker returned to Princeton in 1919 to head the Philadelphian Society, a campus Christian organization which he had led during his senior year.

However, by the time Sam Shoemaker returned to Princeton, the movement's personal evangelism had begun to gather both friends and foes in England as well as America.

Between Egypt and India, in 1924, Sam Shoemaker received a cable and letter from the vestry at Calvary Church, a then-dwindling but storied missionary congregation in a once-fashionable but changing neighborhood that wanted the energetic youth to become their rector.

Sam Shoemaker held outdoor services in nearby Madison Square beginning in the summer of 1927, attracting new parishioners through music as well as his sermons, and began transforming the church school that winter term.

In 1926, Sam Shoemaker founded the Faith at Work movement.

In 1927, after his two years trial as a rector, Sam Shoemaker gradually set the United States headquarters of Frank Buchman's First Century Christian Fellowship soon to be named Oxford Group at Calvary House adjacent to the church.

Sam Shoemaker re-evaluated his priorities, including with Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group, as well as his commitment to evangelism, devotion to the Church of Christ in general and to the Episcopal Church.

Sam Shoemaker soon reactivated the Faith at Work program and meetings resumed at New-York's Calvary Church.

Sam Shoemaker became involved in radio preaching, and in 1946, Dr Frank Goodman of the Federal Council of Churches offered Shoemaker a daily five-minute spot on station WJZ.

Sam Shoemaker was an awarded Doctor of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary and Berkeley Divinity School, ca 1948.

Sam Shoemaker had evangelized among young people and in the surrounding area of Pittsburgh, including setting up an Oxford Group meeting in Akron, Ohio circa 1930.

Sam Shoemaker's fame led him to receive a call to become Dean of San Francisco Cathedral in 1950, which he declined.

Sam Shoemaker had a half hour radio show called Faith that Works.

Sam Shoemaker's wife, Helen Smith Shoemaker, whom he met at Princeton and married in 1925, was an author and sculptor as well as fellow church leader.

Sam Shoemaker died after a prolonged illness on the eve of All Saints Day 1963, and was buried after a service at St Thomas Church in Owings Mills, Baltimore County.

Sam Shoemaker was interred in the family plot in the St Thomas churchyard, as was his wife who died in 1993.

Sam Shoemaker's prospects came through Towns Hospital and the Calvary Rescue Mission.

Dr Silkworth gave us the needed knowledge of our illness, but Sam Shoemaker had given us the concrete knowledge of what we could do about it.

Sam Shoemaker passed on the spiritual keys by which we were liberated.

Sam Shoemaker addressed an AA group in Charlotte, North Carolina, June 17,1962, saying:.

Sam Shoemaker's often repeated triad "Get changed, get together, and get going" reflects this order.

Sam Shoemaker's books were circulated in New York, Akron, and the Oxford Group.