Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: conversion, frank buchman, oxford group, speaker
A story told by Dr. Frank Buchman at the World Assembly for Moral Re-Armament, Riverside, California, June 1948
This afternoon I want to take you back forty years to the time when the then Chairman of the Democratic National Committee asked me to come to State College, Pennsylvania, and see whether I could do anything to settle the differences between the faculty and the students who did not seem to understand each other. He was on the Board of Trustees and he was worried. And he ought to have been worried. There was a strike on, a students’ strike. The atmosphere was antagonistic and he had an idea that I could find the solution. I had no such idea at all. I frankly told him I didn’t think it was my job. But he kept after me and finally I consented to go.
It was there that I found the laboratory that made what is happening here possible. The life of the students reflected the Godless-ness of the place. The first night I got there, there were nineteen liquor parties. Someone said it was so wet you could float a battleship… Continue reading
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: christianity, oxford group, sam shoemaker, speaker
from a speech given by Rev. Shoemaker at the twentieth anniversary convention of A.A. in St. Louis , Missouri .
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.
I Corinthians 1:26
During the weekend of the Fourth of July last, I attended one of the most remarkable conventions I ever expect to attend. It was a gathering in St. Louis of about five thousand members of the movement called Alcoholics Anonymous. The occasion was the celebration of their twentieth anniversary, and the turning over freely and voluntarily of the management and destiny of that great movement by the founders and “old timers” to a board which represents the fellowship as a whole.
As I lived and moved among these men and women for three days, I was moved as I have seldom been moved in my life. It happens that I have watched the unfolding of this movement with more than usual interest, for its real founder and guiding spirit, Bill-, found his initial spiritual answer at Calvary Church in New York , when I was rector there, in 1935. Having met two men unmistakable alcoholics, who had found release from their difficulty, he was moved to seek out the same answer for himself. But he went further. Being of a foraging and inquiring mind, he began to think there was some general law operating here, which could be made to work, not in two men’s lives only, but in two thousand or two million. He set to work to find out what it was. He consulted psychiatrists, doctors, clergy, and recovered alcoholics to discover what it was. Continue reading
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