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Illustration · The YMCA secretary’s office at Penn State before dawn, about 1910: two chairs drawn up close, an alarm clock at five beside a notebook, and a beaver hat on the desk. Not drawn from a photograph.

State College to Oxford · 1909–1928

Soul surgery

Buchman learned to work with one person at a time, starting with the campus bootlegger, and twenty years on his way of working had a name he didn’t choose.

“I no longer thought in terms of numbers but in terms of people.”

Frank Buchman, on his years at Penn State · quoted in Garth Lean, Frank Buchman: A Life, 1985

One at a time

In January 1909 Buchman became the YMCA secretary at Pennsylvania State College, on six months’ trial at $100 a month. Liquor was plentiful on the campus, much of it sold by a hostler and college janitor named Gilliland, commonly known as Bill Pickle.

Buchman’s meetings drew crowds, and within two years the Y’s membership more than doubled. But a visiting preacher, almost certainly F. B. Meyer, Lean writes, told him to make personal, man-to-man interviews central rather than meetings. He asked, too, whether Buchman gave God enough uninterrupted time to tell him what to do. Buchman began keeping the hour from five to six in the morning, before the telephones rang, for what he called a quiet time.

Bill Pickle was one of the people. Buchman talked him into going to a student conference in Toronto; the price was Buchman’s cherished beaver hat, and a dean paid the fare as a dare. In Toronto Pickle decided to become a Christian, and asked Buchman to write out his letter of apology to his wife. He gave up both bootlegging and drinking, and drinking on the campus fell off.

Buchman left Penn State in 1915 for India and China, and from 1916 he lectured on personal evangelism at Hartford Seminary. On a ship bound for China in 1917, asked how he helped people one by one, he answered with a rough formula he called the five C’s. A YMCA man in India who had worked beside him, Howard Walter, wrote the method up as Soul-Surgery, published in 1919, after Walter’s death. From Henry Wright of Yale, Buchman took four absolutes, honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, which Wright had found in Robert Speer; Buchman put honesty first.

In the 1920s he worked among college students, at gatherings called house parties, part social weekend and part retreat. Princeton turned against the campus Christian society he worked with. A committee there found in 1926 no evidence for the complaints about it, only an “excess of zeal,” but the university’s president still wouldn’t have Buchman on the campus. He turned to Oxford.

In the summer of 1928 six Oxford men went to South Africa. A sleeping-car attendant, needing a name to put on their compartment, used the one thing they had in common, and the newspapers took it up: the Oxford Group. Buchman wasn’t enthusiastic. “If it’s got to be called something,” he said, “that’s as good as anything.”

Listen Soul surgery About 1 minute

Step by step

The five C’s

Walter set out Buchman’s method as five stages, using “the fuller nomenclature suggested by Mr. Buchman.” Here they are as he wrote them.

Quoted from Howard Walter’s Soul-Surgery (Calcutta, 1919; reprinted 1921). The stages, Walter wrote, often merge into one another.

First

Confidence

Win his trust as a friend, until you know how he sees his own case. In Walter’s words, “see him through his own eyes.”

Walter, Soul-Surgery, chapter 1

Second

Confession

He tells what is really wrong. “Through the avenue of confidence we win a man’s friendship. Through confession we may win his soul…”

Walter, chapter 2

Third

Conviction

Telling isn’t the same as feeling it. Walter warns that “confession of sin is not conviction of sin.”

Walter, chapter 3

Fourth

Conversion

Here the worker steps back: it is “a transaction that takes place altogether between the soul and God.”

Walter, chapter 4

Fifth, and longest

Conservation

Staying with the man afterward, so the change lasts. It is where the most can be done, Walter wrote, and where the personal worker “most frequently and lamentably falls down.”

Walter, chapter 5. Later tellings call it Continuance.

Later, Continuance

By the time Akron’s Oxford Groupers taught the five C’s, the fifth was Continuance, and Buchman called it “far the longest and most neglected part.” AA dropped the C’s but kept the long part: one member staying with another.

For a closer look

Go deeper

Where the four absolutes came from; what Princeton found in 1926; and who named the Oxford Group.

Four words

The four absolutes began as a summary of Christ’s moral teaching in Robert E. Speer’s The Principles of Jesus, in 1902. Henry Wright of Yale took them into The Will of God and a Man’s Life Work, in 1909, where Buchman found them. Wright listed purity first; Buchman put honesty first.

The order kept shifting. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers gives Akron’s as honesty, unselfishness, purity and love. In 1948 Dr. Bob called them “the only yardsticks” AA had in its early days; Secret drinker, in I Just Work Here, has more. Some groups taught them beside the Steps into the 1940s, as Four nights, in Suggestions Only, tells.

Princeton, 1926

Buchman had worked at Princeton through its campus Christian society, the Philadelphian Society, since the early 1920s. Opponents complained that he asked students highly personal questions. In 1926 the university set up an inquiry, and one newspaper interview quoted its president, John Grier Hibben, as saying “there is no place for Buchmanism in Princeton.”

The committee, chaired by a trustee, with faculty and students on it, looked into the society. Among the charges it weighed: that individual privacy had been invaded, and that “emphasis had been placed on confessions of sexual immorality.” It found no evidence for any of them. Hibben still wanted Buchman kept away, though he later insisted he had never said anything about him in public, and TIME reported it as a ban.

Who named it

The accounts don’t agree on where the name came from, or when:

  • 1980. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers dates the “Oxford Group Movement” to 1921.
  • 1984. Pass It On: it became the Oxford Group in 1928.
  • 1985. Lean: a sleeping-car attendant in South Africa in the summer of 1928, then the newspapers. He adds that a Durban paper later credited a journalist, John Geary of the Pretoria News, which first used the name on September 10, 1928.
  • 2009. Arthur S.’s timeline: a railway employee labeled the compartment of some Rhodes Scholars going home, probably in the summer of 1928. It also cites a 1997 book for Buchman dating the name himself to a meeting with Oxford undergraduates in 1921.

Before it had a name, Buchman and a few friends had called their circle A First Century Christian Fellowship, from 1922. Lean says it was never much more than a name; Dr. Bob and his Akron friends still called the movement that in the late 1930s.

Sources
  • Garth Lean, Frank Buchman: A Life. Constable, 1985. Chapters 5 (Penn State and Bill Pickle), 8 (the five C’s and the four absolutes), 9 (A First Century Christian Fellowship), 12 (Princeton) and 13 (South Africa and the name). Free to read at frankbuchman.info.
  • H. A. Walter, Soul-Surgery: Some Thoughts on Incisive Personal Work. Association Press, Calcutta, 1919; reprinted 1921. Chapters 1–5 (the five stages). Free at the Internet Archive.
  • Harold Begbie, Life Changers. Mills & Boon, 1923; new edition, Putnam, 1927 (Buchman as “F. B.,” the soul surgeon). Free at the Internet Archive.
  • Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter V, “The alcoholic in the Oxford Group” (the four absolutes, the five C’s, the name).
  • Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 6 (the Oxford Group’s name).
  • Bill W., “A Fragment of History: Origin of the Twelve Steps,” AA Grapevine, July 1953; in The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988.
  • Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History, 2009 (the name).