He graduated from Mount Airy in the summer of 1902, having meantime succeeded in reviving a chapter of the Pennsylvania Alpha Iota fraternity there, and was one of the three members of his class chosen to speak at the commencement ceremony. Florence Thayer came down from Woonsocket to attend it. By now, Buchman was a little sad to be leaving – ‘I shall miss these beautiful surroundings and the fellowship of the boys,’28 he wrote to his parents - but conscious, too, that he was about to take up his vocation.

His parents had already vetoed a number of notions about what he might do next - at one time he had wanted to go to India, at another to spend a year at university in Leipzig - but he still cherished the ambition that he might be called to an important city church. Therefore when, in August, he was asked to take over the Oliver Mission in the city, he promptly refused. Then he talked with an old college friend from Allentown, Bridges Stopp, the son of wealthy parents but crippled and often in ill health. Buchman spoke of his hope of being offered a place in a big city church. ‘You're going out to get a fat job,’ retorted Stopp, ‘but what am I going to get?’ The remark stung Buchman's pride and redirected his ambition - or, perhaps, determined him to prove his lack of it. When, on the day of his ordination,* he was asked to start a new church in one of Philadelphia's growing suburbs, he agreed.

(* 10 September 1902, at St John's Lutheran Church, Allentown.)

Overbrook, the charge which Buchman accepted, was an area embracing extremes of social class. There were mansions belonging to the city's prosperous business men and, on the other side of the railway tracks, the shacks and tenements of the poor. When he started work there was no church building, the room where he slept had no carpet on the floor, he was given a bed but no mattress. The letter appointing him said that he should begin work as soon as possible but added that the question of a salary ‘must for the present be left unstated’. It did not take long to discover what that implied. ‘They have just enough to pay their debts,’ wrote Buchman to his parents, ‘and nothing left for me.’29

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