MINISTER

Founder of the Oxford Group Movement.

A Pennsylvania-born Lutheran minister, Frank N. D. Buchman founded the Oxford Group Movement in 1921 in an effort to organize a "God-guided campaign to prevent war by moral and spiritual awakenings." In the following two decades he and his followers sought to change people through the use of home meetings where people came together to explore religious issues and make contact with God. The Oxford Group, as it came to be called, believed that those who experienced a conversion, the Change, would surrender their lives to God's control and that gradually the world would come under divine direction.

Controversy.

The Oxford Movement aroused much controversy as it attracted increased public attention in the 1930s. The house parties, the informal format Buchman used to spread his movement, were held in large homes and expensive hotels in the United States and Europe and...