Buchman felt dissatisfied, too, with the spiritual progress of many of his closest fellow workers. 'I feel Mike has blinkers,' he once said to a group of them with typical, if infuriating, frankness. 'I wish he would throw them into the sea and shake the nation. John is wonderful - but hopeless if he has to change the children's diapers. He's born to feed on ambrosia. Lovable Jimmy - he's got fears, bundles of fears. Ken is still too smooth - let's have the rough side of the nutmeg.' 'I wish you had fifteen children,' he said to another. 'It would make you less of a pedant.'

Sometimes his approach was even more abrasive. After a day when some letters had missed the mail, his secretary notes, 'Frank dressed Mike and me down thoroughly. It was one of those occasions when everything brought up in evidence is unjust, wrong and irrelevant, yet the charge is correct and thoroughly deserved. There is a gigantic, Olympian quality in F's wrath that is something to be experienced to be believed. It certainly produces change. When he is most irritated it is with people who he feels should know better. He suffers fools astonishingly gladly, but is intolerant of sloppiness in those around him.'13

Gradually Buchman became convinced that an adequate plan for their work in America would only come to birth if his team found deeper spiritual roots. So, in July 1940, he stopped all the diverse activities in which they were engaged and gathered them in a group of holiday cottages and shacks beside Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It began, typically, when he was offered a five-room cottage in which to take a few days' rest. Within ten days he had fifty people with him, and as neighbours got to know him and saw the numbers growing they offered more cottages, cabins and beds. A former bootlegger called Globin lent his disused casino for meetings and later a whole floor of his near-empty hotel. Off-duty sailors found themselves in hammocks slung between trees, and Boston and New York ladies slept on camp beds, sometimes five to a garage. It finally turned into a three-month training exercise for several hundred people.

Buchman deliberately set about welding these already committed people into a united force. The perspective of the war in Europe sharpened their thinking and dedication. Alan Thornhill, for instance, although a clergyman and one who had undergone a great enriching of his spiritual experience during ten years with the Oxford Group, had never systematically studied his life in order to allow God to clean out every last corner. 'I had a good friend, a Scot called George Marjoribanks, and felt I should tell him all the murky details. They would not have made a lurid book, but I found it terribly hard on my pride, and it turned out to be very important for me. It was painful and I felt utterly rotten and told George so. It was the death of self. Though I had valued what I had learnt from Buchman, I had never till then felt wholly committed to God and to work at Buchman's side. God focused it around my longing to return to Britain. The decision to stay in America was the hardest I'd ever taken - but I knew it was God's will.'

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