Frank Buchman - YMCA Work

YMCA Work

From 1909 to 1915 Buchman was YMCA secretary at Penn State College. Despite quickly more than doubling the YMCA membership to 75% of the student body he was dissatisfied, questioning how deep the changes went. Alcohol consumption in the college, for example, was unaffected. During this time he began the practice of a daily "quiet time". Buchman finally got to meet F. B. Meyer, who when visiting the college asked Buchman, "Do you let the Holy Spirit guide you in all you are doing? Buchman replied that he did indeed pray and read the Bible in the morning. "But," persisted Meyer, "do you give God enough uninterrupted time really to tell you what to do?" Another decisive influence appears to have been Yale University theology professor Henry Burt Wright (1877–1923) and his 1909 book The Will of God and a Man's Lifework, which was itself influenced by F.B. Meyer and Henry Drummond, among others.

Buchman's devotion to personal evangelism, and his skill at re-framing the Christian message in contemporary terms, were admired by other campus ministry leaders. Maxwell Chaplin, YMCA secretary at Princeton University wrote: "In five years the permanent secretary at Penn State has entirely changed the tone of that one-time tough college," after attending one of the Buchman's annual "Y Week" campaigns. Lloyd Douglas, author of The Robe took part in the same campaign. "It was", he wrote afterwards, "the most remarkable event of its kind I ever witnessed.... One after another, prominent fraternity men ... stood up before their fellows and confessed that they had been living poor, low-grade lives and from henceforth meant to be good."

In 1915 Buchman's YMCA work took him to India with evangelist Sherwood Eddy. There he met, briefly, Mahatma Gandhi (the first of many meetings), and became friends with Rabindranath Tagore and Amy Carmichael, founder of the Dohnavur Fellowship. Despite speaking to audiences of up to 60,000, Buchman was critical of the large-scale approach, describing it as "like hunting rabbits with a brass band". From February to August 1916 Buchman worked with the YMCA mission in China, returning to Pennsylvania due to the increasing illness of his father.