Frank Buchman - at Hartford and China

At Hartford and China

Buchman next took a part-time post at Hartford Theological Seminary. There he began to gather a group of men to assist in the conversion of China to Christianity. He was asked to lead missionary conferences at Kuling and Peitaiho, which he saw as an opportunity to train native Chinese leaders at a time when many missionaries held attitudes of white superiority. Through his friendship with Hsu Ch'ien (Xu Qian, Vice-Minister of Justice and later acting Prime Minister) he got to know Sun Yat-sen. However, his criticism of other missionaries in China, with an implication that sin, including homosexuality, was keeping some of them from being effective, led to conflict. Bishop Logan Roots was deluged with complaints, and in 1918 asked Buchman to leave China.

While still based at Hartford, Buchman spent much of his time travelling and forming groups of Christian students at Princeton University and Yale University, as well as Oxford. Sam Shoemaker, a Princeton graduate and one-time Secretary of the Philadelphian Society who had met Buchman in China, became one of his leading American disciples. In 1922, after a prolonged spell with students in Cambridge, Buchman resigned his position at Hartford, and thereafter relied on gifts from patrons such as Margaret Tjader.