New Meetings and Changes

The Any Lengths Group has had to change locations to the Progress Immanuel Presbyterian Church, and as a result other changes had to occur. The new meeting location is 3640 Ash Street (from the old location, go in Rt 22 for three blocks toward Harrisburg to Park Street  (BALLOONS  ALOT ON LEFT) Turn left onto Park Street, Church is 2 blocks on right). The group will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7:00PM and both are closed, non-smoking, discussion meetings.

Please support the Friday night Women's meeting at the Dauphin County Prison. For more information on how to do this important service work, call Sondra D at 566-7666.

The State Hospital was covered in September by the Out of the Dark Group, the Middletown Groups will cover October and There's More To Life will take this opportunity in November. The Big Book Study Group responded to cell phone calls in September. Groups volunteering to take the phone for October and beyond, Middletown (Oct), There's More To Life (Nov.), and Hershey (Dec.). Volunteers for the various county and state prison and Gaudenzia Juvenile facilities continue to carry the message to those who hope to change their lives through a more spiritual way of living; if you'd like to benefit from this 12^th Step opportunity, see your Intergroup Rep, or leave a message with the hot line at 234-5390.

Pearl Of The Month     (contributed by Charlotte F. from Alcoholics Anonymous page 84)
We have entered the world of the Spirit.  Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness,  This is not an overnight matter.  It should continue for a lifetime.  Continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear.  When these crop up, we ask God at once to remove them.

Traditions Checklist

After graduating from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Frank Buchman became a Lutheran minister.

While attending a worship service in England, he became convinced that God was calling him for something more.

He returned to America and became the secretary of the YMCA at Penn State and started converting campus hell-raisers left and right.

His evolvement into the leadership of the Oxford Group is well documented in this booklet.

The low point for the Oxford Group came in 1936 when Buchman made some favorable comments about Hitler, suggesting that the German dictator had done a service by stopping Communism and that a man with absolute power—if he became a Christian— could solve the world’s problems. Newspapers around the world made it sound as if Buchman wanted Germans to goose-step to God. In fact, he probably had little understanding of Hitler or Nazism.

Suffering a stroke in 1942, Buchman returned to Allentown, where he stayed until the end of World War II.

Information in this booklet, excluding the Buchman profile above, has been
checked for accuracy by AA in New York.

The Oxford Group Connection
by Ray R from The Find Yourself Group of Seminole, Fla.

    This article is an effort to put together in sequence the various events that took place in the years from 1908 to 1935 which made possible the meeting in Akron, Ohio, between the AA founders, Dr. Bob S. and Bill W., which resulted in the subsequent birth of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is an assemblage of facts gleaned from the following publications:.

Alcoholics Anonymous
AA Comes of Age  
Pass It On  
Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers 
Not God by Ernest Kurtz 
For Sinners Only by A.J. Russell 
On the Tail of a Comet by Garth Lean 
Akron Genesis of Alcoholics Anonymous by Dick B. 
The Oxford Group & Alcoholics Anonymous by Dick B.

    Do you know any of these names—Frank Buchman, Sam Shoemaker, Rowland Hazard, Jim Newton, Eleanor Forde, Ebby Thacher, Shepard Cornell, Henrietta Seiberling, Rev. Walter Tunks, Norman Shepherd, Russell Firestone, and T. Henry & Clarace Williams?

    All of these people were instrumental in a scenario that contributed to making possible that historic meeting between Bill W. and Doctor Bob at the Gate House of the Seiberling Estate in Akron, Ohio, on May 11, 1935.

    If it were not for them, that meeting could never have taken place, and the fellowship to which we all owe our lives today might never have been born.

    Where did the steps originate? In AA Comes of Age, Bill wrote ‘Early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgement of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Groups and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and nowhere else."

Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group

    We start this history with the story of Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group (See above.) You will see as we trace the paths of Dr. Bob and Bill W., in the years before they met, that the Oxford Group and the aforementioned cast of characters played a part in every twist and turn of the path that led Bill Wilson to Akron.

    In 1908, a YMCA secretary named Frank Buchman had a spiritual transformation that changed his life. Upon graduating in June of that year, he started a streetside church in Philadelphia (Church of the Good Shepherd) with a donation of seventeen dollars. The church flourished, and he started a young-men’s hospice which spread to other cities, and then he started a settlement house project.

    Frank had a violent argument with his trustee committee because they had cut the budget and the food allotment at the hospices. Frank resigned and went to Europe, ending up at a large religious convention in Keswick, England.

"And when we were wrong~"

    The spiritual transformation occurred when he heard a woman speaker talk simply about the cross of Christ. He felt the chasm separating him from Christ, and felt a will to surrender. He went back to his house and wrote these words to each of his six trustees in Philadelphia: "My dear friend. I have nursed ill feelings against you. I am sorry. Will you forgive me? Sincerely, Frank."

    Feeling an urge to share this experience, he went to nearby Oxford University and formed an evangelical group there among the student leaders and athletes. Later the movement spread, and groups formed over the next twenty years in England, Scotland, Holland, India, South Africa, China, Egypt, Switzerland, and North and South America.

Their principles are now ours.

    Many of the basic things they did have carried over directly into our program. They practiced absolute surrender, guidance by the Holy Spirit, bringing about true fellowship through sharing, and life changing faith and prayer. They aimed for absolute standards of love, purity, honesty, and unselfishness, which were an integral part of the first AA programs in Akron, Cleveland and New York.

    Above all the group was a fellowship— "A First Century Christian Fellowship." They carried the message aggressively to others. They met in churches, universities, and homes. The Oxford Group and their principles were carried to the United States so that in both New York City and Akron an Oxford Group was in place and functioning when Bill W. and Dr. Bob hit their respective bottoms. These groups taught their principles to our co-founders before they ever met.

Oxford Group Comes to America

    Here is how the Oxford Group came to the United States. One early member of Oxford, Ken Twitchell, had attended Princeton University and had a brother in New York City who was a mainstay in the Calvary Episcopal Church.

    This becomes one of several amazing coincidences. In 1918 during his travels, Frank Buchman met a young YMCA worker, Sam Shoemaker, in China and converted him to the Oxford Group principles. Years later, Sam became the minister of that same Calvary Church in New York, and that church became the titular American headquarters for the Oxford Group during the I930s. It was here in the church’s mission that Bill W.’s sponsor, Ebby Thacher, was living at the time of Bill’s last drunk. The name was changed in 1928 from "A First Century Christian Fellowship" to the "Oxford Group."

    The group’s popularity peaked during this period. There were 10,000 people at one meeting at Stockbridge in the Berkshire Mountains. Business teams began to have their "house parties~~* in various cities.

*Editor’s note: Many in the Oxford Movement made no bones about their animosity toward alcoholics and their preference for people of wealth at their so-called "house parties." These attitudes created a rift between the groups.