'NORWAY ABLAZE - DENMARK SHAKEN'

Next day the Bishop of Copenhagen, Dr F. Fuglsang-Damgaard, who had already publicly announced that the Oxford Group had taught him to listen to God, called on Buchman. He said that the row of clerics reported that the name of Christ had only been mentioned ten times in the meeting. Why was that?

'I was at your house for tea last week, Bishop,' replied Buchman, 'and you did not mention that you loved your wife.'

Silence fell. The Bishop saw Buchman's point. Later, the Bishop declared, 'The Oxford Group is teaching us to talk differently to pagans and atheists, sceptics, critics and agnostics. A new road to the old Gospel - that is my conception of the Oxford Group. It moves from the circumference to the centre. It stands inside the Church and not beside it.'41 *

(* Nearly twenty years later the Bishop said at the World Council of Churches in Evanston, USA, in August 1954: 'The visit of Frank Buchman to Denmark in 1935 was an historic experience in the story of the Danish Church. It will be written in letters of gold in the history of the Church and the nation. Whenever I visit Dr Buchman, our talk is all of the Cross of Christ, which is the centre of his heart, soul and faith.')

Over thirty thousand people attended meetings in the first six days in Copenhagen. The national broadcast had brought a swift response from the countryside and islands as well as from the Danish population across the Schleswig border. When an anti-Oxford Group meeting was held in the University, it was reported to be a 'colossal fiasco'. Planned by a theological student turned Marxist, who was supported by a brilliant array of Brandesque academics, it was invaded by militant factory workers. 'Something happened which had never happened before in Copenhagen,' reported Dagens Nyheder. 'Workers stood up one after another and witnessed to Christianity in a hall that consisted primarily of fanatical opponents of all religion.'42

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