Alcoholics Anonymous and the many other 12-steps programmes share common roots with Initiatives of Change. The two founders of AA, ‘Bill W.’ and ‘Doctor Bob’, both found sobriety through local chapters of the Oxford Group in New York and Akron Ohio, respectively. After their meeting in Akron in 1935 the two men developed a successful programme to help other alcoholics based on Oxford Group principles. In 1937 there was a parting of ways, with AA focussing on alcoholics and Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group looking to ‘remake the world’.

Picture of Frank Buchman (Photo: Unknown)

In 1938 as nations rearmed for war, Buchman launched a campaign for Moral and Spiritual Re-Armament, and over the next decades the movement was referred to as Moral Re-Armament (MRA) until 2001 when the name Initiatives of Change was adopted.

In August 2008, Father Bill Wigmore who is an Episcopal priest, CEO of Austin Recovery in Austin, Texas, and in long-term recovery from alcoholism himself attended the Tools for Change conference at the IofC centre in Caux, Switzerland.  He writes about his encounter with IofC from an AA persective in the October issue of Recovery Today.  You can download the article here.

Another exploration of the shared roots comes from Jay Stinnett in Los Angeles who writes about "The Apology that Launched a Thousand Amends" on the centenary of Frank Buchman's transformative experience in Keswick.

Many of the principles of what became the Oxford Group were worked out by Buchman during his time as YMCA secretary at Penn State College.  In 1948 Buchman told the story of how he helped an alcoholic, Bill Pickle, change his life - and how that was the key to a change in the whole college.  The story is available on the AA Bibliography website. You can read it here.

Over 80 years later, Bill's story is inspiring a new generation at Penn State. Jessica Turnbull, a senior student majoring in journalism, writes about him in The Daily Collegian.

A number of early publications of the Oxford Group are available online as free downloads. From the StepStudy.org website, which is dedicated to the 12-step history and practice, you can find the 1919 classic Soul Surgery, co-written by Buchman and Howard Walter and What is the Oxford Group - by A Layman with a Notebook which outlines the principles and practice of the movement.  From the AA Bibliography website, you can find several early Oxford Group pamphlets including Alan Thornhill's The Significance of the Life of Frank Buchman and The Guidance of God by Eleanor Napier Ford.

Stepstudy.org also plans to put online Philip Leon's book The Philosophy of Courage, first published in 1939. Leon was a British existentialist philosopher who found a living faith through the Oxford Group. In preparation for putting the book online, Stepstudy.org has commissioned and published an introduction to the book by Glenn F Chesnut describing how Leon puts what he had found in the Oxford Group into a philosophical and theological context.

Another excellent resource is the book Changed by Grace:  V. C. Kitchen, the Oxford Group, and A.A by Glenn F. Chesnut. You can order the book direct from the publisher the Hindsfoot Foundation, or sample the last chapter as a free download.