Sam Shoemaker and Faith at Work

One of the young men who came into Frank Buchman's orbit, in the period just before the Oxford Group as such was born, was Samuel Moor Shoemaker. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, December 27, 1893, Sam was a student at Princeton University (1912-1916) when the activities at Northfield involving the Student Volunteers were still at full tide. Sam was at the Northfield Conferences the summers of 1911 and 1912. There he heard John R. Mott, Robert E. Speer, and Sherwood Eddy, whose names have already been mentioned. It is probable that through them he became aware of the significant evangelistic work that Frank Buchman was doing at Penn State.

In October 1917 , Sam Shoemaker accompanied Sherwood Eddy to China to work for the Princeton-in-Peking project. He was asked to teach the rudiments of insurance to the Chinese and to assist with the organization of a YMCA in the West City. He had been active in the Philadelphian Society at Princeton and served as president of the organization in his senior year, but how personal his faith was at this time is not clear. He was at least not yet ready to communicate his faith to others, according to his own testimony. Although he knew about Buchman's work at Penn State, its evangelistic character gave him difficulties.

But in January, 1918, just a few weeks after arriving in China, Sam met Frank Buchman and his team at a personal work campaign. Through Buchman he became aware of the four absolutes which as indicated earlier, were the heart of Buchman's message. Sam accepted the challenge thus presented, and after examining his life, in the light of the absolutes, found forgiveness and freedom in Christ.

His life and ministry now took a new turn and he began sharing his experience of "change" with the boys and young men with whom he had contacts. The following April he wrote, "I begin to think my mission in life is to be something like Frank Buchman's, to spread the gospel of personal evangelism. Would I might do it in my own church throughout every land where she is at work."

Sam saw his encounter with Buchman as the greatest turning point in his life. For the next year and a half, Frank Buchman and his team were helpful to young Sam Shoemaker in developing the principles and procedures of evangelism which made an impact on his entire life and ministry.

Upon his return to America, Sam was invited to become the Executive Secretary of the Philadelphian Society at Princeton of which he had once been the student president. Assisted by Henry Pitney van Dusen who served as his associate and by other dedicated young men, Sam developed a strong and effective program of student evangelism at the University. Frank Buchman's presence was felt in the role of enabler and mentor and the friendship of the two men was deepened and strengthened by this shared experience.

Sam was ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1920, then spent a year at General Theological Seminary. In June, 1921, he was ordained priest. After a year as assistant at Grace Church in New York, he returned to his earlier post at Princeton and stayed there through the school year, 1922-23. During this period he continued his close association with the Buchman Group, and Frank made frequent visits to Princeton.

The return of Sam to the Princeton campus seems not to have been an entirely happy experience for him. There was some hardening of opposition to the type of personal evangelism he represented and some growing fear of the implications of Frank Buchman's style and procedure. We recall that Buchman had started his "First Century Christian Fellowship" at Oxford and Cambridge in England in 1921. By the time Sam returned to Princeton in 1922, the movement had begun to gather both friends and foes in England well as America.

In late summer 1923, Sam went to Europe. He attended a conference in England of Oxford and Cambridge men, apparently those under the influence of Buchman, and during the winter of 1923-24, he traveled with the latter in Egypt.

It was during this tour that he received the call from Calvary Church in New York, which was to result in an innovative ministry of twenty six years.

During the period 1925-41, a period of sixteen years, much of Sam Shoemaker's ministry at Calvary was influenced directly by the dynamic and process of "A First Century Christian Fellowship," or the Oxford Group, as it came to be called. Sam was too balanced a churchman to ignore the institutional and sacramental aspects of the church's life, but he was too powerfully moved by his personal faith and by his association with the Oxford Group not to let that emphasis affect nearly all aspects of his ministry at Calvary.

In her account of those years in I Stand At the Door, Helen Shoemaker makes numerous references to contacts with the Oxford Group. She herself was involved in conference work with the Group both in England and in America in the late 1920's.

Sam Shoemaker came over to England on a similar errand, and Helen and he had a chance to develop a closer relationship. The friendship deepened into an engagement which was announced at an Oxford Group house party January 1, 1930. Members of the Group were also prominent among the guests at the Shoemaker-Smith wedding the following April.

It speaks well for Sam and Helen Shoemaker's churchmanship, charisma, devotion and flexibility that they managed so well to combine the diverse interests of Calvary Church with the life style and program of the Oxford Group for the next eleven years. For one senses that not all of Calvary's members could have been committed to the radical life style and "hot gospelling" of the Oxford Group.

There was nevertheless enough trust in the rector and his wife and enough awareness of the new life and strength pumped into the aging parish since Sam's coming to quiet most of the unrest. The Vestry was strongly behind their rector and evidenced their support of him and his involvement with the Oxford Group by allowing him an extended leave of absence in 1932, for the purpose of bringing the Group's ministry to ever widening circles. The Vestry's letter to the congregation on this question helps us to understand where matters lay in 1932:

"We must all realize that the work which has been characteristic of Calvary Parish for the past few years is part of a much larger movement which is making a tremendous spiritual contribution in many countries today. A First Century Christian Fellowship or the Oxford Group has been called by ArchbishopWilliam Temple of York one of the main movements of the Spirit in our time.

"The evident need of our country in the world of spiritual awakening lays a special obligation upon us all at Calvary to share with others what has helped us.

"When therefore the Rector asked us to come to a special meeting of the vestry on June 15, and proposed to us that he be released for a six month sabbatical leave during which time he would devote himself entirely to the furtherance of this important work, (with the International Team of the Oxford Group) throughout America, we felt that this was a call which neither he nor we should disregard. Further we wanted him to go as our representative."

Through Sam Shoemaker's ingenious fusion of orderly parish life with personal charisma as well as the dynamics of the Oxford Group, a whole range of new thrusts emerged both at Calvary Church, New York, and later at Calvary in Pittsburgh.

Faith at Work Begins

Faith at Work, as it is now known, seems to have begun as early as 1926 in a mission at Calvary in which lay persons both presented their witness of their life as Christians in the workaday world and were trained to witness to that world. These meetings, which were continued on Thursday evenings from 1926 to 1936 and were well attended, were resumed after the break with the Oxford Group in 1941.

In an earlier chapter we have indicated that the Oxford Group was to reach its peak just before World War Il. Encouraged by the strong response of intellectual and political leaders to his call for a new kind of revolution and troubled by the growing world crisis, Frank Buchman felt led to push his movement beyond the Christian limits within which it had functioned. The name of the Oxford Group was changed to Moral Re-Armament, probably in 1938.

Much in the new thrust for peace and justice seems to have spoken to Sam Shoemaker, and he participated publicly in the activities of the MRA down through 1939, although with increasing reservations. Two concerns helped to bring about the rupture:
 

• The first was the new direction which MRA was taking which seemed more and more to dissociate it from the Christian churches and a New Testament orientation.
• The second was a gradual take-over of the facilities of Calvary House in New York by MRA and the placing of major leadership responsibilities for the American operation on Sam Shoemaker. Both of these latter actions were not direct or in any way ill-mannered. They just happened and courtesy and good will and long friendly associations provided no effective counter-strategy.

The end of the matter was not happy, but it was inevitable. The final rupture came in the closing months of 1941 when Calvary Church asked MRA to vacate the premises of Calvary House.

The Thursday evening sessions already alluded to, which were devoted to lay witnesses, provided models for subsequent Faith at Work programs. In it can be traced the lineaments of the "witnesses," still a part of the Faith at Work Conference ministry and of the spate of personal witness articles which appeared in the Calvary Evangel, and the Evangel and have continued in the pages of Faith At Work magazine. The "Lay Witness Missions," now conducted under other auspices than Faith at Work, also had their beginnings in the Thursday evening meetings.

The Thursday night "witness" sessions were paralleled by an activity which began in the Calvary House boiler room when the janitor, Herbie Lantau, witnessed to a painter named Bill Levine. They were later joined by Ralston Young, Red Cap #42, from Grand Central Station. Ralston did his witnessing to the people whose baggage he handled and later to groups that gathered for prayer in a car placed in a siding, on Track 13, at Grand Central.

This small group joined some others who were disenfranchised when the split came with MRA in 1942. They and many others met with Irving Harris whose work at the Calvary Evangel and later with its successors covered a period of over three decades. Irving gave structure to the Thursday evening services and was later the enabler of the Monday groups. These were to continue in one form or another until Faith at Work moved to Columbia, Maryland, in 1971.

According to Helen Shoemaker, Sam believed that "small group action ... always started with personal counseling" and then continued in the group. This is probably a carry-over from Sam's work in the Oxford Group where conversion or change was the starting point and the group sharing followed. Sam's often repeated triad, "Get changed, get together, and get going" also reflects this order. We shall have occasion to return to the topic in a subsequent section.

An activity related to the Thursday night "witness" services was the work of "Alcoholics Anonymous." AA began under Sam's inspiration and meetings were held every Tuesday night in the Great Hall of Calvary House. The starting points of Faith at Work and AA were similar, although the latter obviously addressed itself to a more particular audience.

The first week-end conference of Faith at Work, the progenitor of hundreds of such conferences to be conducted all over the country, in subsequent years was held at Calvary House in 1943. The means and methods adopted for the conference included: 1) the Conversion of Individuals to Christ; 2) Listening to God; 3) Loyalty to the Church and the Bible; 4) Fellowship, Prayer, and Training Groups; 5) Literature; 6) Impact on Situations; 7) Cooperation between Christian Groups and People. Of these methods, the first, second, and fourth have strong affinities with the procedures of the Oxford Group.

A Meeting in Print

Faith at Work would probably never have come into existence as an independent movement if it had not been for the growing influence of The Calvary Evangel, later called The Evangel, a magazine of Faith at Work, and still later simply Faith at Work.

The Calvary Evangel started out as the monthly church publication of Calvary Church providing both parish information and fairly traditional inspiration from the time of its inception in 1888 until it was taken over by Sam Shoemaker and his friends in 1925. In 1930, Irving Harris became the editor of The Evangel on a part-time basis and from that time until Sam Shoemaker's departure for Pittsburgh at the end of 1951, it reflected faithfully the life style and point of view of its leadership.

In 1942, the editor spoke of The Evangel as "a magazine for life changing and spiritual continuance and a regular means of keeping in touch with one another."

A superficial analysis of the contents of The Evangel in the period 1925-51 suggests that in addition to serving as a newsletter, the magazine provided two kinds of input:
 

• stories or witnesses of particular personal experiences of Christ and His power to change lives, and
• practical but more general and professional input on how to live the Christian life in a more formal and practical way.

Faith at Work is not a popular "how to get ahead" manual. It is not concerned with offering faith as the key to wealth, popularity, and success. It makes no attempt to prove that through faith life can be made easy; rather it tries to make clear that through faith at work life can be made great. Faith at Work is a meeting in print."