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In 1935 God had ordered the founder of the Oxford Group (or First Century Christian Fellowship) to evangelize Denmark. Having just "set Norway ablaze for Christ" (TIME, May 20), Dr. Buchman and a team of 250 seasoned workers descended upon the dairy kingdom last spring. The groupers moved from town to town in Denmark, made allies of many a notable Dane. Among them: Dr. Hans Fuglsang Damgaard, Primate of the State Church (Lutheran); Dean Brodersen of Copenhagen's Cathedral; Director Gunnar Gregersen of the National Technological Institute, and Niels Bukh who some years ago brought to the U. S, 15 "perfect men" and 15 "perfect girls" to demonstrate the results of his physical culture. Though the Group's actual conversions were numerically small, Buchmanism found Danes receptive to its prime idea that the world needs "a moral and spiritual awakening" on the basis of Absolute Love. Last October, on the eve of an election, 25,000 people crowded Copenhagen's Forum and two nearby churches to hear Danish students, an engineer, a carpenter, a nurse, and a night club orchestra leader tell how the Group Movement had "changed" (i. e. converted) them.
Frank Buchman then massed his forces for a big putsch. From ten nations he summoned 500 more picked roundsmen. From the U.S. went Princenton's onetime Professor Philip Marshall Brown; James Newton, onetime New York manager of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.; John Roots, son of the Episcopal Bishop of Hankow, China. From England went retired Brigadier General Charles Trevor Caulfeild, retired Rear Admiral Horace George Summerford, a reformed Communist named James Watt, a Lady Gowers, a Lord Adington who frequently awakens his peers in the House of Lords by sounding off on the Group Movement. Also from England went the Group's ablest theological apologist, Canon Burnett Hillman Streeter, bearded, shcolarly Provost of The Queen's College (Oxford), who has shuttled to Denmark so often in the past year that his colleagues affectionately call him the "Flying Professor."
When the Buchmanite host descended on Copenhagen last fortnight, Dagens Nyheder, a conservative daily, resondingly announced the NATION'S GRATITUDE for the forthcoming Easter meeting. In Danish shop windows and railway stations, posters showed a beam of white Buchmanite light picking out the fortunate isles of Denmark on a darkened globe. At Ollerup, a torchlight parade ggreeted Frank Buchman when he arrived last week from Hamburg accompanied by a devoted German nurse who at the last minute had followed him by leaping aboard his boat. At a time when conventional Christians were taking their own religion without undue excitement, in one small corner of the world Evangelist Frank Buchman was stirring up what appeared to be a respectable spiritual revival.
Prophet's Pudding. In the U. S. the Oxford Group as a species of religious lining has influenced comparatively few people, left more dissenters than devotees in its wake. If the proof of a prophet's pudding is lack of honor in his own country, Frank Buchman qualifies in full measure.