Once when about to leave the island for Europe with a hundred people Buchman surprised Kenaston Twitchell, who was engaged with a thousand details of the departure, by asking him to drop everything and come with him. He had had the sudden thought to 'go to Gladys Hubbard's house'. Mrs Hubbard was a black woman who often helped with the cooking for the conferences. After several months in hospital she had just returned to her home at the centre of the island. They found she had been praying to see Buchman. She was carried out into the sun to greet him. 'I only wanted one thing,' she said, 'that you pray with me before you go.'

In 1954 land on the south-east corner of the island became available and was purchased by a group of business men who gave it to Moral Re-Armament. Buchman's dream of a properly designed centre began to take shape. Characteristically, the first building he erected was not a residence, nor even a conference hall, but a theatre. The foundations were blasted out of the rock, the construction done in the bitter winter, and the first play performed in it was The Vanishing Island before it left for Washington and Asia.

The response to the World Mission with The Vanishing Island brought still greater demands on Mackinac Island as a training centre. A complex of buildings was designed to harmonise with traditional island style and materials, and during the winter of 1955 large-scale construction was begun. Buchman was in Europe and was soon to leave for Australasia and Asia. Before he sailed from Genoa he received a letter from Gilbert Harris who was administering the financing of the building. Money had been coming in - a Canadian industrialist had sold his business and made a sum of money available - gifts of timber, building materials, promises of furnishings, but it was not enough. One hundred and fifteen paid islanders were hard at work, as well as forty-five volunteers from Moral Re-Armament, and the weekly wage bill was heavy. Harris urged a more cautious tempo in construction.

Buchman replied, 'I know how many difficulties there are in getting money for that stupendous work at Mackinac but God has many ready helpers. I assure you He has people who will make it possible. I greatly sympathize with you and feel at times the burden is too much for anyone; then the unexpected happens. It is by faith and prayer our money comes. ... I am grateful for your business caution but I want you to move with me and the people of America in the dimension of what needs to be done, not what we think we can do. I want you to help me always to live at the place where I rely not on what I have, but on what God gives. It is such freedom and it works.'1

At each stage in the building, accommodation was no sooner up than it was filled. When Buchman had met leaders of the Seinendan in Tokyo in 1956, he had invited them to his assemblies abroad. Early in the spring of 1957 Sontuku Ninomiya, the Director of the 4,300,000-strong youth organisation, told Buchman's friends in Tokyo that he had received an invitation to send 500 delegates to the International Youth Festival in Moscow that summer. His organisation, which was officially non-political, its aim being to promote the cultural life of Japan, had become an arena of ideological conflict, and the Communists on the National Executive had seized on the invitation as a chance to influence much of the movement's leadership. Ninomiya wanted to know whether Moral Re-Armament could make a counter-proposal. Soon a letter was on its way to Buchman suggesting that one hundred of the prefectural leaders be invited to Mackinac. Buchman immediately replied guaranteeing return travel and a month's stay although, at the time, he did not know where the money would come from.

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