The Bishop was Vice-Chairman of the newly founded Social and Industrial Council of the Church of England, and at its fourth meeting on 26 February 1953, which he chaired, the Council decided it 'should consider publishing a report on Moral Re-Armament'. Three months earlier the Council 24 had asked Gerald Steel, Managing Director of the Sheffield-based United Steel Company and a member of the Council, to produce a short factual account of Moral Re-Armament's work in industry, which he now presented. In introducing it, he said 'he knew a number of people who were extremely critical of the Church who were saying MRA was first-class and that the Church, as far as they could make out, was sneering at it, and they did not think very much of the Church on that score.' He thought the Church should make its position clear. This was generally agreed and the matter was passed to the Council's Standing Committee. 25

The Standing Committee set up a Working Party. Canon Cyril Hudson of St Albans, who undertook to be both Convenor and Secretary, selected as Chairman, 'acting on his own initiative',26 the Bishop of Colchester, the Rt Revd F. D. V. Narborough, who had been a consistent critic of Buchman's work since the 1920s. Canon Wickham was co-opted. Another of those co-opted had shortly before expressed strong disapproval of Buchman's work in a conversation with MRA workers. None of those suggested in the Council or the Standing Committee who had recent association with Moral Re-Armament was included or consulted. The Revd Dennis Nineham* and Bishop Geoffrey Alien* were invited to draft the theological and psychological chapters of the report, while Canon Wickham was to be entrusted with the third and last chapter, 'The Social Thinking of MRA'.27

(* Professor of Biblical and Historical Theology, King's College, London, 1954-1958.)

(* Then Principal of Ripon Hall, Oxford, and later Bishop of Derby. In the early thirties as Chaplain of Lincoln College, Oxford, he had worked closely with the Oxford Group but by then, in his own words, 'had had no active association for many years'.)

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