Frank Buchman - Early Life

Early Life

Frank Buchman was born in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of a wholesale liquor salesman and restaurateur and a pious Lutheran mother. When he was sixteen he moved with his parents to Allentown. Buchman studied at Muhlenberg College and Mount Airy Seminary and was ordained a Lutheran minister in June 1902.

Buchman had hoped to be called to an important city church, but accepted a call to Overbrook, a growing Philadelphia suburb, which did not yet have a Lutheran church building. He arranged the rental of an old storefront for worship space, and lived upstairs. After a visit to Europe, he decided to establish a hostel (called a “hospice”) in Overbrook, along the lines of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh’s colony for the mentally ill in Bielefeld and inspired by Toynbee Hall. However, conflict developed with the hostel's board. In Buchman's recollection the dispute was due to the board's unwillingness to fund the hospice adequately. However, the Finance Committee of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania, which oversaw the budget, had no funds with which to make up an ongoing deficit and wanted the hospice to be self-supporting. Buchman resigned.

Exhausted and depressed, Buchman took his doctor's advice of a long holiday abroad. Still in turmoil over his hospice resignation, Buchman attended the 1908 Keswick Convention hoping to meet the renowned Quaker-influenced, Baptist evangelist F. B. Meyer (1847–1929) whom he believed might be able to help him. Meyer was not there, but in a small half-empty chapel he listened to Jessie Penn-Lewis preach on the Cross of Christ, which led to a religious experience.

"I thought of those six men back in Philadelphia who I felt had wronged me. They probably had, but I'd got so mixed up in the wrong that I was the seventh wrong man.... I began to see myself as God saw me, which was a very different picture than the one I had of myself. I don't know how you explain it, I can only tell you I sat there and realized how my sin, my pride, my selfishness and my ill-will, had eclipsed me from God in Christ.... I was the centre of my own life. That big "I" had to be crossed out. I saw my resentments against those men standing out like tombstones in my heart. I asked God to change me and He told me to put things right with them. It produced in me a vibrant feeling, as though a strong current of life had suddenly been poured into me and afterwards a dazed sense of a great spiritual shaking-up."

Buchman wrote six letters of apology to the board members asking their forgiveness for harboring ill will. Buchman regarded this as a foundation experience and in later years frequently referred to it with his followers.