What happened to The Oxford Group?
Does The Oxford Group still exist? What happened to it and can I still join?
In a way you can still join
The Oxford Group, in some fashion or another it has never stopped going.
AA grew in part out of
The Oxford Group, a Christian group founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran Minister around the year 1919. The first group was loosely called
A First Century Christian Fellowship and the Oxford Group name was later attached to the fellowship due to coincidental affiliation with Oxford, England.
In 1938, soon after the start of AA,
The Oxford Group in the USA was renamed to
Moral Re-Armament. It became more widely known as
MRA. In England,
Oxford Groups continue to exist and follow the original tenets of the movement more closely than the groups descendant from
MRA.
In 2001
MRA changed its name to
Initiatives of Change and can be found today on the Web at:
http://www.initiativesofchange.org. Today,
Initiatives of Change bears little resemblance to the original fellowship in structure, belief or practice.
The "About Us" section of their Web site reads:
Initiatives of Change is a diverse, global network committed to building trust across the world's divides. It comprises people of many cultures, nations, beliefs and backgrounds who are committed to transforming society through changes in individuals and relationships, starting in their own lives.
It was first known as The Oxford Group, arising from its work among university students in the late 1920s. In 1938, as European nations re-armed military, its originator, Frank Buchman, called for 'moral and spiritual rearmament' as the way to build a 'hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world'.
Following World War II, Moral Re-Armament (MRA), as it had become known, launched a programme of moral and spiritual reconstruction to foster change in private and public life based on a change in motivation and character. It worked for reconciliation between France and Germany, and between Japan and many other Asian neighbours. It was involved in the process of decolonisation, and in forging industrial teamwork and harmonious race relations. It was also active in inter-religious relations and in the struggle for the rights of indigenous peoples.
More recently, it has been involved in the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and in the quest of 'good governance'.
National bodies are financed by individual gifts and by foundations, and for certain specific programmes, by institutional grants.
In 2001, Moral Re-Armament changed its name to Initiatives of Change.
Reproduced under the Creative Commons License v3 from http://www.initiativesofchange.org/en/abt/
For more background on this please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Re-Armament
