The Oxford Group Movement: An Appraisal

I

IT is always with the utmost hesitancy that I attempt to describe and appraise the Oxford Group Movement. This is not at all because the facts are difficult to ascertain and report. On the contrary, anyone passingly familiar with the history of religion who has watched this Movement’s extraordinary advance over the past ten years can readily detail its principal features and its underlying assumptions, and suggest their parallels in earlier phenomena of religion. But the most faithful recountal of the facts must fail lamentably to convey a true impression of the Movement’s extraordinary character and power to one who has not felt its temper personally. And any estimate of its significance, however honest, will be finally determined by the presuppositions which the appraiser brings to his inquiry.

The protagonists of the Groups are quite right in their contention that the inquirer may come into an adequate understanding of them in only one way — by intimate acquaintance with their life from within. And they would be further justified in contending that, after such acquaintance, one’s final attitude will largely reflect prior valuejudgments on such basic issues as these: the inner character of true religion, the needs of the human soul, the state of religion in our day, the malaise of civilization and the possibilities for its cure — and what shortcomings may be forgiven in a spiritual strategy of searching criticism and overwhelming vitality. This Movement thrusts itself upon us with a radical and drastic critique of the unchallenged assumptions of most of the readers of these words; not until its critique has been squarely faced is one entitled to give a verdict concerning the Movement.

Thus is suggested the first affirmation about the Oxford Group Movement which I should like to underscore. Any facile and categorical judgment of its importance, whether favorable or unfavorable, is to be dismissed at once as superficial and misleading. Much current comment is either extravagantly laudatory or sharply contemptuous. Neither attitude is sound. The plain truth is that there is probably no spiritual force in the world to-day which is bringing to the lives of hundreds such light and power and freedom and happiness and spiritual certainty — gifts quite beyond the measurement of any human calculus. And there is no contemporary religious movement of similar proportions which, in the judgment of many wise and consecrated persons, is so freighted with danger, self-deception, and even perversion of authentic Christian experience. Just when one has determined to dismiss it from consideration because of its excesses or its perils or its self-righteousness, one is confronted with a concrete instance of the liberation and empowerment of a defeated and despairing soul, like as not someone within one’s own acquaintance. Criticism is silenced, gratitude wells spontaneously, one wonders whether even friendly questioning of so magnificent a work can be justified. Just when one is moved to lend cordial support, one meets an example of bumptious impertinence or pitiable pharisaism or tragic mishandling of a human personality so flagrant that the most tolerant sympathy cannot forgive. Doubts return, sympathy shrivels, one questions whether even qualified approval of the Movement can honestly be given. Clearly we are here face to face with something which eludes easy generalization.

In brief, the Oxford Group Movement is the most baffling religious phenomenon of our time. Nor is this a personal opinion only. Many of the foremost leaders of the Church on both sides of the Atlantic have, in personal conversation, voiced their bewilderment. Never have they encountered a movement which so defied final estimate. Never have they felt themselves so puzzled in deciding their own relationship to a vital religious work.

Our purpose in this paper will be to confront something of the Movement’s life-transforming influence, to discover its underlying premises, to enumerate the strictures most frequently brought against it, to review its undeniable points of strength; and then, not to reach a final judgment, but to suggest considerations in terms of which each reader may make his own appraisal.

II

In a moment we shall turn to examine the basic presuppositions and principles of the Groups’ work. But our examination would be in quite false perspective unless we had vividly before us, throughout our inquiry, the pictures of individual persons in whom those principles have wrought a miracle of change. The Movement has its distinctive convictions. But, to win acceptance for them, it depends not at all on argument, but on evidence. And upon one kind of evidence only — lives which have been radically, drastically, gloriously transformed through its influence. Let me mention four or five — those which happen to have come to my attention most recently.

A Southern belle of eight or ten years ago, high-strung as a race horse, undisciplined as the wind, headstrong, selfish, egoistic, the spoiled favorite of an indulgent upbringing, is married to one of the country’s powerful business leaders. But life with her has become well-nigh unendurable. Their marriage hangs on the brink of divorce. She comes under the sway of the Groups, largely in the persons of two or three young couples still in their late twenties. She is changed. Not completely changed, to be sure; lifelong habits of unchecked selfishness can be brought fully under control only by years of submission to the Groups’ patient but inexorable discipline. But she is a quite different woman. Friends and casual acquaintances cannot fail to note a new gentleness, winsomeness, radiance. For the husband, marriage has become tolerable. He has not been won to the Groups; at least, not yet. But he is happy to have his wife give bountifully from her allowance in support of their work. A tempestuous, moody, unhappy soul has found life. The Movement has won a grateful adherent and generous supporter. There are dozens like her in every circle of fashion in the land.

The minister of a small country parish in northern New England hustles about his usual busy round of preaching, calling, visiting. To everyone, including two or three fellow clergymen of national prominence who are visitors in his summer congregation, he appears to be the embodiment of energy and buoyancy — an efficient and successful ‘small-town preacher.’ Four or five youthful members of the Groups, also on summer holiday, come to his village. They hold one informal meeting to which the local minister is naturally invited. The next day he goes about his work as usual. But to a friend he confides that he had been on the point of chucking the whole business. Unknown to everyone, his inner life had been harried to the verge of despair by some secret difficulty — quite probably a problem of sex or of self-consciousness or of marital tension. One brief contact with the message of these young Groupers has altered the whole outlook. He believes he can now go on.

A charming boy and girl in near-by colleges are engaged. They are deeply devoted. But across the lad’s spirit hovers a shadow of some secret worry which he cannot reveal to his fiancée. She is deeply troubled and confides her anxiety to the president of her college and other faculty friends. They share her concern, but are impotent to help her. The boy meets a younger leader of the Groups. From a Group meeting he comes to his fiancée to lay bare to her the loathsome experience or habit which his conscience could not shake. She is horrified, as are her spinster advisors. But the two lovers return to the Group, and within that warm, understanding, healing fellowship the past is purged and forgiven, and the two discover together hitherto unknown depths of unity and certainty.

A spoiled son of a wealthy and fashionable Middle Western family is rapidly becoming a drunken sot. Everything to rid him of the habit has been tried — rest, change, cures, psychiatry. Family and friends have practically surrendered hope. Somehow or other he comes in touch with a Group. The grip of drink falls from him like a foul garment. He walks in and out of the familiar streets and associations a liberated, exultant freeman — ‘a new creature.’ To relatives and friends he writes unaffectedly to tell of his release and to share with them this good thing which he has found.

A distinguished professor in a woman’s college is a solitary figure in the community — aloof, sophisticated, bitingly cynical, apparently completely self-satisfied. As he walks across the campus he seldom notices either colleagues or students. One morning they are astounded to meet a gay, friendly, radiant, though boyishly shy, man. In an hour the word has gone through the campus that Professor B— is a ‘new person.’ The preceding week-end he had been enticed to a house party of the Oxford Group Movement. He has been ‘changed.’ Life from that day has been entirely different.

An eager young college graduate conies up to theological seminary. He has a sense for the reality of vital religion, but no personal possession of it. Here he expects to discover quintessential religion, not only in theory, but in incarnation. If the seminary is to prepare him to introduce others to religion’s beauty and power all his life long, surely its first responsibility is to aid living religion to come to birth within his own experience. Slowly a mood of disillusionment overtakes him. He is face to face with that hiatus between profession and practice, between affirmation and apprehension, between past certainty and present experience, which is the despair of sincere spiritual leadership. Much of the religion about him is musty with familiar repetition; it speaks habitually in the past tense; it is illumined by the dim twilight of a fading memory rather than by the brilliance of a living flame. Then he visits a meeting of the Groups. He knows of the Movement as a strange fanatic religion to be observed by all objective students of religious phenomena. He is repelled by its naïve ideology, its crude confidences, its easy familiarity with the sacred and profound. But he is driven to recognize an undertone of reality; here is something which he had expected as the first gift of his own training, and has not found. He returns for further exposure. Slowly, as his prejudices are overcome, he discovers ‘real religion’ coming to life within his own soul. He does not join the Movement. But he confesses candidly that its contribution to his life is of more importance than all his studies.

One type of Group influence has been omitted from our illustrations. But in my judgment one of the most remarkable things the Movement is accomplishing is its ministry to families. Some families have been sadly rifted on the issue of loyalty to the Groups; here the parallel to Christian Science is striking. But in many families one after another of the members has been won to allegiance, until a wholly new understanding and unity have taken possession of the household. The outcome is not merely changed individuals, but changed homes.

These instances have been selected quite at random, just as they have been reported to me as I have traveled about in the course of the past twelvemonth. Similar examples could be multiplied many times over, and in much more striking circumstances. Here they are, in almost every city in America and in almost every country in the world — dozens, hundreds, almost thousands of them, all sorts and conditions and ages of men and women, who would rise up to declare that their contact with the Oxford Group Movement has meant to them the difference between futility, harrowing psychic suffering, despair, and a new existence of freedom, gladness, comradeship, spiritual exaltation. These are the evidences to which the leaders of the Movement would point in vindication of their premises and their principles. These are the grounds of their certainty that they may yet effect the spiritual rehabilitation of our generation and even of our ailing civilization.

III

The distinguishing characteristics of the Oxford Group Movement, both its message and its methods, are by now widely known.¹

The fundamental premise which determines every aspect of its emphasis and work is this conviction — that in the modern world the overwhelming majority of folk have sadly missed the way. Many of them are consciously unhappy, inwardly defeated, and insulated from their fellows by secret barriers of sham, impurity, or fear. Others are pitiably superficial, selfish, and futile. A very few are sincere, but palpably inadequate. For all alike, the need is for a radical and revolutionary experience of personal religion. For all alike, there is possible a new life of hitherto unknown power and unbelievable satisfaction.

But there is only one avenue of access to that higher life. It is through a radical purging of inner unreality and the full and final surrender of one’s whole self, all that one is and all that one possesses, to the imperious command of the Living God. From that surrender, when complete and unreserved, will follow release from defeat or ennui and the gift of utterly new joy and strength. The old life will be cast away; the old harrowing problems will dissolve; one will stand free from the shackles of temptation, self-consciousness, selfishness; for the first time in one’s life, one will know the meaning of spiritual freedom. All that one has heard with the hearing of the ears about the life of religion, all that one has dismissed as the familiar exaggeration of religious propagandists or a naive faith no longer possible for intelligent moderns — all this will come vividly alive within one’s own soul. One now knows, with a certainty for which there is no parallel, the truth of religion’s claims — the absolutely unique character of the dedicated life, the vivid and continuous awareness of God’s presence, the priceless worth of complete fellowship with Him, the service which is perfect freedom.

Together with these results, surrender will also bring two quite definite gifts — direct and specific instructions from God Himself for every detail of daily speech and life (what the Groups term ‘guidance’); and the ability to bring others into the same transforming experience. Indeed, just as the only way of entrance into the new life is through complete surrender, so there is one way and one way only by which that new life may be maintained vivid and growing. It is through revealing one’s own discoveries in intimate disclosure to others and thus winning them to similar surrender and rebirth. Finally, the matrix within which this whole process of life transformation in its three phases — surrender of self, continuance in complete commitment, the winning of others — can best take place is an intimate comradeship of completely like-minded and like-dedicated persons.

There is little distinctively novel in all this. But there is something distinctly unusual in the incisive, searching, and exacting meaning which is put into the familiar Christian call to ‘surrender.’ Half-concealed and wholly unrecognized areas of selfishness and willfulness, as well as the grosser sins, are laid bare. There is no relaxation of insistent pressure until every one of these is confessed and abjured, and the human spirit stands at last chastened and naked before the greater Purpose of God with no desire or claim on life other than ‘Thy will be done.’ Moreover, in contrast to most evangelistic emphases, ‘surrender’ with the Group Movement is not a condition achieved in one cataclysmic experience. As acquaintance with the Movement deepens, more and more unsurrendered territory in one’s life is discovered. The Will of God is revealed as increasingly exacting in its demand for unconditioned self-giving. During the early months, at least, the experience of surrender is repeated over and over again. Sometimes recessions from first enthusiasm occur as the new member is unwilling to face these further and more demanding commitments. No one, no matter how long or seasoned or ‘eminent’ in the Christian experience, is immune from the necessity of completely new self-surrenders. And so it happens that not a few middle-aged ministers, even bishops, have found their lives transformed through the ministry of the Oxford Groups. Is it cause for wonder that forth from its testing discipline comes an everincreasing succession of indomitable evangelists ?

Here, then, is the first mark which distinguishes the Oxford Group Movement from familiar Christianity. It takes with intense seriousness what every good Christian professes. And, by the same token, it actually produces in experience the fruits which every minister promises but seldom expects to see realized.

Thirty leaders of the Canadian Church who have followed closely the recent campaigns there have summarized the central assumptions of the Groups’ work in these six points: —

1. Men are sinners.

2. Men can be changed.

3. Confession is prerequisite to change.

4. The changed soul has direct access to God.

5. The Age of Miracles has returned.

6. Those who have been ‘changed’ must ‘change’ others.²

This summary demands supplementation at only one point. But it is the point which many observers regard as the greatest single secret of the Movement’s effectiveness — the absolutely central place which ‘the Group’ holds in its mediation of religion. The function of ‘the Group’ is threefold. It is the school for effective training of those newly come into the Movement. It is the means for the continuous discipline and nurture of every member, experienced and novitiate alike. It is the organ of strategy through which all the Movement’s work of public propaganda is done.

The Groups have no formal membership and no fixed conditions for admission. But their fellowship far surpasses in intimacy, in frankness, in mutual understanding and devotion, in unshakable loyalty, any other communities of which I know — the Salvation Army, a social fraternity, a secret cult, a monastic order of the most exacting requirements. Many adherents would declare that the greatest single gift which has come to them from their contact with the Movement is this unique human comradeship.

Central reliance upon the influence of ‘the Group’ is part of the Movement’s conscious philosophy. Most people, it is said, are spiritually lonely and disheartened. Typical Protestantism is hopelessly individualistic, while Anglicanism and Romanism provide artificial and inadequate fellowships. In these times of spiritual aridity, at least, it is quite impossible for the average person, especially one new to the life of religion, to maintain a vigorous, healthy, and growing Christian experience without the continuous support of a closely welded and intimate communion. To each member, the life of the Group supplies two things, discipline and inspiration — a severe and unremitting check upon the carelessness, the cowardice, the selfexcuse, the unrestrained impulse of the individual; and constant and unfailing encouragement in the face of one’s own faithlessness and for the winning of others.

But the genius of ‘the Group’ is not merely in its gifts of discipline and inspiration to the individual member. The group itself is the key factor in the Movement’s programme of expansion. It is a matter of principle that a member of the Movement almost never appears to represent it alone. If he is requested to present the message of the Groups, he will insist on bringing several colleagues even though they be given no opportunity to speak. If he is invited to an entirely informal gathering where there is to be no speech making, he will ask the privilege of being accompanied by several fellow members, preferably as many as the number of the other guests expected. The tactics of this are obvious. If one representative is ‘off form,’ others will strike the effective note; the support of comrades strengthens each and holds him to his best; the experience is good training for the newer members; the presence of several facilitates the breaking of the larger gathering into the individual conferences which are the main objective. Of course this strategy is merely multiplied in the ‘teams’ of from a dozen to a hundred who visit a city or tour a continent. It is one of the most important elements in the power of the Movement.

Until recently this, in summary, has been the message which the Oxford Group Movement has been bringing into the life of the modern world. It has been a message directed to individual men and women, a promise of salvage for individual souls. Latterly a quite new emphasis has been evident. The propaganda is now invariably set in a world reference. The analysis has been widened from individual need to humanity’s need. It is the ills of society, the threatened disintegration of our civilization, which are the talking points in enlisting initial interest. ‘The modern world — disillusioned, chaotic, feverish — demands a solution adequate to its disorder.’ And it is the salvage of civilization, nothing less, which the Movement now believes it may be the instrument to effect.

This change of emphasis is undoubtedly in part a direct rejoinder to criticisms of blindness to social issues. In part it is an accommodation to a changed focus of popular attention — from longing for personal self-fulfillment to concern for society’s fate. In part it indicates a growing consciousness of power and significance. It has always been Dr. Buchman’s conviction that the Movement would ultimately remake the Church and society.

But, though the setting of the message has altered, its content and central stress are essentially the same. It is ‘changed lives’ which are to be ‘the raw material of the new world order.’ ‘A changed social order depends upon changed individuals. As men and women are turned from self-centredness born of selfishness to God-centredness based on faith, social ills are drastically dealt with and eradicated.’

Thus the avowed purpose of this Movement is to reproduce in twentiethcentury life what is conceived to have been the essential experience of original Christianity. Until recently the American adherents have called themselves the ‘First Century Christian Fellowship ’ — a far happier title than the misleading, if not dishonest, name, ‘Oxford Group Movement.’

Christianity is known as, above all, a religion of power. It commands power to free the most dispirited and defeated men and women from failure and impotence and the tethering shackles of self-consciousness or sin. Here lies its strongest appeal to the increasing thousands who skirt the fringes of modern life, overshadowed by nervous disorders, morbidity, inferiority, fear, moral defeat. For such lives it can do what no other contemporary influence with which I am familiar seems able to accomplish. It has taken dozens of shattered spirits for whom the Church and psychiatry could do nothing, and has restored them to health and selfmastery and usefulness. But it would be a serious misinterpretation to conceive its mission as directed solely to the spiritually ill. Equally vigorous is its proclamation that Christianity has power to lift quite average and reasonably happy men and women into rare beauty of life and exceptional force of leadership. Here lies, perhaps, the Movement’s most striking contribution to the Christian cause in our day — the remarkable stream of young and attractive persons, steeled in self-discipline and afire with vital and contagious faith, whom it has thrust forth into the desperation of these times.

IV

What are the misgivings most frequently voiced about a work which is bringing such obvious benefit to hundreds?

1. The Movement is accused of emotionalism and an exaggerated and unwholesome emphasis upon the problems of sex.

On the last point it is important that a clear word be said. Let me state, from rather intimate knowledge of its work over fifteen years, that in the early days of the Movement the charge had some justification. Sex difficulty was often the first, and sometimes almost the central, emphasis in its message. Furthermore, the attitude of some of the leaders on the question was not, and is not to-day, as completely sound and healthy as one might wish. It is well known how subtle are the powerful basic emotions in achieving expression. It is doubtful whether those who have themselves been delivered from acute emotional difficulty in any area are well equipped to aid others to the most normal view of, and adjustment to, that problem. On the other hand, latterly a determined effort has brought this element in the Groups’ message into much better balance, has largely eliminated confessions of sex difficulties from public meetings, and has attained a much sounder attitude in the whole matter.

Let me add emphatically that in my judgment the Oxford Group Movement is much less open to criticism in its handling of sex than most schools of contemporary psychiatry and psychology. It is ironical that these two powerful agencies of psychic healing which tend to regard each other with deep suspicion — psychiatry and the Oxford Group Movement — should be at one in at least two regards: their correct understanding of the enormous part which sex plays in the personal difficulties of most people, and their tendency to intensify these problems for many by disproportionate emphasis upon them.

On the more general charge of emotionalism, it is more difficult to give a clear judgment. That there is a rich undercurrent of strong, sometimes intense, emotion in the meetings of the Groups and in the daily life of their members cannot be denied. That this is unhealthy or undesirable is a very different question. It is organic to the gayety, the buoyant good humor, the exuberant vitality, which are other marked features. Intense emotion has usually been an accompaniment of religious conversion, as indeed of most other human experiences of profound meaning. Radical transformations of life habits are not effected without drastic interior readjustments; introduction to a wholly new realm of experience is hardly to be expected without vivid spiritual elation.

But there is a deeper issue here. The Groups are in conscious and deliberate reaction from the dominant mood of the passing era — the arid intellectualism, the cheap sophistication, the withering and throttling self-centredness and self-consciousness, the futile lust for self-expression and self-realization, which have cursed the modern temper, and, they would claim, have brought on well-nigh universal maladjustment. In this reaction the Oxford Group Movement is but one current in a vast wave which, in very varied forms, is overwhelming the ‘modern mood’ (psychiatry again, Fascism, and Communism).³ This is an issue on which one’s final attitude will be determined by underlying presuppositions — in this instance, one’s view of the place of emotion in life and its proper expression.

2. It is said that the Movement’s understanding of Christianity is partial and deficient.

This criticism is, of course, in direct contradiction to the Groups’ own claim to reproduce in our time the life of original Christianity. As a matter of fact, it is open to serious question how far the Movement is faithful to characteristic early Christianity. It has taken the Book of the Acts as its principal guide. The religion it aims to reproduce is that there described. This suggests the inspiration and authority for a number of its most distinctive features — its practice of ‘guidance’ (an element in early Christian experience which is prominent in the Acts but appears in such startling form nowhere else in the New Testament); its programme of peripatetic evangelism; its tense apocalypticism. One misses from this Movement the intellectual rigor, the common-sense practicality, the broad catholicity, the rugged realism of Paul, the profound wisdom of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the homely ethics of the Book of James, the inclusive sympathy of the Gospel according to Luke — all authentic elements in the first-century Christian fellowship. But that the Movement has recovered and caught into its inmost experience much of the power and faith of the early Christians cannot be questioned.

3. The Movement is held to be onesided, childish, and inadequate in its ideology.

Here it finds itself buffeted between Scylla and Charybdis. To enthusiasts for social transformation it talks too much of God and individual need, too little of the pressing social demands upon religion. To European divines it speaks too little of God, the Cross, the Church, too much of man’s interior desires and satisfactions and achievements. To Philadelphia Presbyterians its theology is too meagre, too tainted with Modernism. (Who, save the Angel Gabriel, could hope to satisfy Philadelphia Presbyterianism!) To ‘intellectuals’ its whole point of view is superstitious, jejune, absurd.

Amid such a welter of opinion, it is not easy to disengage truth. The fairest statement would seem to be somewhat as follows: —

First, with respect to theology. The Movement conceives its primary task to be to introduce men and women to the life of religion. At first, at least, it does not profess to thrust its complete message before them. Meat in its proper time, but for babes spiritual milk. Moreover, until quite lately, the Movement has not been greatly interested in theology;⁴ thus it has been able to embrace persons of fairly diverse views. Nevertheless it is tremendously concerned about God and people’s recognition of Him. Beneath its every practice there is a very large measure of theological presupposition which can readily be discovered and displayed — a theological position, if you wall. That position may fairly be defined as catholic Protestant conservatism. With the single exception of the distinctive doctrine of ‘guidance,’ there is almost nothing in its belief or message to which exception would have been taken by any of the great evangelistic efforts of Protestantism, or which is not assumed in almost every conservative pulpit in the land to-day — the sovereignty and power of God, the reality of sin, the necessity of complete individual surrender, the transforming power of Christ, the atoning efficacy of His Cross, the freedom and radiance of the transformed fife, the sustenance of prayer, the obligation to witness for Christ. The Groups would seek fresh wordings, but the content would be akin. The contrast is not in the content of the assumptions, but in the practical meaning which is poured into them, the insistence with which they are driven home, and the actual realization of the promised rewards.

Recently, as noted above, the Movement has been at great pains to refute the allegation that it occupies itself exclusively with the intricacies of personal experience to the neglect of social evil and sin. As proof of its power to heal social ills at their very roots, attention is called to the quite astounding impact upon racial attitudes in that miasma of racial antagonism — South Africa. On the larger issues of economic and social reconstruction, the Movement has never given a hint of its ideal. Indeed, it would make no claim to have one. It proposes to deal with that problem, like all others, through converted individuals ‘under the guidance of God.’ However, it is not presumptuous to hazard that the social order toward which it would be ‘guided’ would be worked out in terms of a benevolent paternalism and the generous stewardship of possessions, not in terms of a radical reconstruction of the social structure or a sacrificial redistribution of wealth.

Here, likewise, one’s estimate of the adequacy of its social message will reflect one’s premises. What the Movement is insisting is that there is no hope for escape from civilization’s t hreatened disintegration along any road, unless it be preceded by radical personal conversion altering to their foundations men’s controlling attitudes toward the whole problem. No intelligent student of public affairs is naive enough to believe, as many of the Group do, that spiritual revival in itself will save our society. But there is a growing number who wonder whether, without the preparation of spiritual revival, anything else can.

To many critics, far more damning than anything said or left unsaid about social theory is the actual social practice of the Groups and especially of their peripatetic leadership. A Movement which appears to revel in luxury, to live comfortably on the largesse of great wealth, and to take delight in good food, smart dress, fashionable appointments, social prestige, and the extravagances of unthinking privilege can hardly expect to deal adequately with the clamant injustices of existing society, or to speak with sincerity and power to the dispossessed. Much is made of the reproduction of first-century Christianity; apparently it is not felt necessary to take note of the manner of fife of those early Christians.

We come finally to the mooted question of ‘guidance.’ Four statements about it I should like to make, summarily and dogmatically.

(а) Belief that God may and does give specific directions for detailed decisions in individual lives is not novel to the Group Movement. It has marked vital Christianity throughout its history. I cite a single illustration from as recently as fifty years ago. Recounting the habitual practice of New England Friends in his boyhood, Rufus Jones says, ‘Everybody at home, as well as many of our visitors, believed implicitly in immediate divine guidance. Those who went out from our meeting to do extended religious service always seemed as directly selected for these momentous missions as were prophets of an earlier time. . . . The most wonderful thing was the way in which God took care of them and told them what to do and say in every place where they went.’

(b) ‘Guidance’ as it is actually practised by members of the Group Movement, even its most influential leaders, is often a travesty on the truest Christian tradition and a discredit of worthy religion. The formal expositions of the Movement’s belief are usually sane and persuasive;⁵ the employment of the belief is sometimes childish and absurd. While sound logic indicates that the divine attention envisions all that concerns each life’s welfare, it does not follow that God desires to give explicit direction for each decision and action. Indeed it is clearly part of the divine intention that men should develop selfachieved discretion which shall prepare them to become fellow workmen, not robots, in the divine undertakings. The key in the whole matter of guidance is to take with utmost seriousness Jesus’ designation of God as ‘Father’ — with its implication of a gracious restraint in the divine interference and a parental wisdom in the divine assistance, as well as its assurance of an unfailing divine concern.

(c) There is great value in the technique of personal meditation which the Groups have cultivated, without acceptance of their supernatural interpretation, In any event, it is quite possible that in the Groups’ practice of ‘guidance’ at its best — an eager mind, purified by rigorous religious discipline, relaxed yet alert, expectantly open to the most delicate suggestion of the highest — the divine direction for human life may be more surely known than in any other way.

(d) But here, once more, deeper issues are involved than appear in most arguments about ‘ guidance.’ This practice is the Movement’s most striking proclamation of a living and regnant God. However misguided may be the detailed application, in the main contention — that God is a living, guiding Power who knows intimately every human life in its every experience, who holds for each life at every moment a vision and a hope which are its highest possibility and His Purpose, and who is prepared to reveal that Purpose to those who earnestly desire it — in this the clear logic of the matter is with the Oxford Groups. The plain truth is that the God of practical faith in our modern churches, even the God of the clergy, is no such Power, but a pitiful travesty upon the Majestic Sovereign of profound religion. This the Groups fully understand. Their confidence in divine guidance is working faith in a living Divine Reality. In comparison with the prevailing religion which they are seeking to displace, they are more right than wrong.

4.It is claimed that the Movement is inexcusably blind to its own shortcomings, and that it encourages dishonest thinking, Pharisaism, and spiritual arrogance in those long under its influence. In brief, its failings are less in doctrine or method than in personal ethical sensitivity.

Of these charges I have said something in an earlier paper. It is unnecessary to reconsider them at length here.

That there is truth, too much truth, in these allegations, it would be futile to deny. A very good example of questionable honesty is the adoption of the Movement’s present name, deeply and justly resented as it is by many Oxford men. The Movement is, of course, American in origin. But from the beginning Dr. Buchman had cherished a determined desire to link it with one of the great British universities, with the obvious accession of prestige and general appeal. He had established its British headquarters in Oxford, but it had little grip and less recognition in the life of the university. A team of followers that happened to be composed largely of Oxford men working in South Africa were referred to as ‘ the Oxford group.’ It was a quite casual designation. The inappropriateness of the title and the inevitable confusion with the great Oxford Movement, if this name should become attached to the new work, were obvious enough. Common decency would have dictated a studied effort to discountenance its use. On the contrary the Movement seized upon it, fostered reference to it on every possible occasion in spite of indignant protest from a united Oxford, quietly buried the previously chosen title, the ‘ First Century Christian Fellowship,’ and gradually assumed ‘the Oxford Group’ or ‘the Oxford Group Movement’ as its official title.

About much of the functioning of the Movement there is opportunism, the sacrifice of complete candor to expediency, subtle scheming under the guise of sound strategy, an exaggerated self-importance and tendency to highhanded practice because of that importance — characteristics aptly described as ‘Jesuitical.’ Of one of the foremost leaders, a youthful admirer once said, ‘He is the most powerful personality I have ever met; but he never reminds me of Jesus Christ.’ An Oxford don who has observed the work there sympathetically over ten years gives it as his judgment that the first impact of the Groups upon any life is almost always helpful and desirable; but that long association almost always induces highly regrettable qualities of spiritual pride, narrowness, hypersensitiveness, self-concern. His is, I think, an acute observation.

It is because of these defects that many persons, otherwise sympathetic, find it impossible to give wholehearted support to this work.

V

So much for the debit account. What, in briefest summary, are its indisputable points of strength? Here I can hardly do better than beg leave to rephrase what I wrote some five years ago; these features still represent its great challenge.

The Group Movement introduces men to real religion. I shall not try to explain that statement more fully. For, as Dean Sperry says, none of us ever loses the childlike capacity to recognize real religion in a fellow human being when we meet it. The Groups do introduce men to real religion. In part, this is due to the fact that, in contrast to most liberal Christianity, their God is a Living God — One with whom each man may have intimate personal relation and who is the most certain active force in a living universe. For real religion has always stood for the certainty that God is not the final postulate of philosophy reached by straining thought to its uttermost belief, but the central and primal fact of the world and of our experience.

It faces the facts of personal life courageously. It is a true claim that the leaders of this movement probably know better and understand better the inner lives of men and women of all types and backgrounds than any similar group within the Christian Church. And it is a knowledge coupled to a definite rationale of how these lives may be changed.

Its challenge is to absolute consecration. This, I am convinced, is the main source of its real and great power. It faces men with a greater challenge than they have ever known elsewhere. It lifts before them a more romantic and alluring conception of life than any other contemporary religious movement. It holds men to their highest and best more rigorously and mercilessly than any Christian group I know. No man ever comes into intimate contact with it or its followers when they are in its best spirit without a searching challenge to his own life. I think I may safely add that most of those of my acquaintance who have been intimately associated with the Group Movement, many of them now definitely outside its ranks, would be inclined to say that the highest vision of the Christian life and the most inspiring incidents of Christian experience which they have known came to them through the Groups. That is no mean tribute.

It has tremendous practical power to transform and redirect life. This is the final fact — and it is a fact — for which any interpretation of the Oxford Group must render an account. One concludes, confronting that steadily increasing company of liberated, joyous, and confident crusaders for vital religion who would wish to record their simple testimony, that most of life’s richest and holiest meaning has been the gift to them of this work.

VI

We said that one’s final estimate of the Oxford Group Movement would be largely determined by certain underlying presuppositions. Some of these have emerged in the course of the discussion. It is now time to try to state these presuppositions. They are, mainly, three.

1.Regarding the needs of the human soul and the character of true religion. Is it true, as the Groups maintain, that vast numbers of people in to-day’s life are morally ill and spiritually famished, and that the only satisfaction of their need is through vital personal religion? Is it true that most of what passes for religion in our day is a travesty, and that the prevailing religion of the churches is sterile and unreal — unsound in its working belief in God, insincere in the hiatus between what it professes and what it really attempts to live, and pitifully inadequate to the spiritual demands of the age? Is it true that vital religion invariably demands absolute sovereignty over life, displacing all lesser loyalties and drawing them under its command? Is it true that the life to which Christianity should introduce men is utterly different from all ordinary experience, and that in it alone is life’s fulfillment for Everyman ?

2. Regarding the state of contemporary society and the possibilities of its salvage. Is it true that our civilization is tottering in imminent peril of mortal collapse, and that its illness is, fundamentally, not political and economic, but spiritual? Is it true that we have been brought into our present unhappy distress by the whole character of ‘modern life’ — its false goals, its pitiable pretense of human self-sufficiency, its willful egotism, selfishness, and self-destructive follies? Is it true that there is no promise of escape from our threatened fate except through radical social ‘ conversion’ — that is, a complete about-face from the character and habits of ‘modern life’ — and unless the way be prepared by world-wide spiritual revival? Is it true that there is no organized force abroad to-day which gives hope of the needed deliverance save the Oxford Group Movement?

3. Regarding the shortcomings which may be overlooked and forgiven in a work with such daring purpose and such desperately difficult mission. Here each person, deeply concerned for the destiny of our society, must form his own judgment. The final, and possibly the most important, question is: Is there reasonable expectation that the present failings of the Movement — in message, in method, and in personal character — will be corrected through deepening experience and the influence of older and wiser leaders lately drawn within its fellowship? Only the future can answer that question.