In the next weeks the undergraduates spent much time with the Metropolitan. He enjoyed their company and played a good game of tennis, but did not altogether like the idea that if one was not winning, one was sinning. After three days he made a speech about how 'the wheels of God grind slowly', how 'some sow and others reap' and how you never could know what effect you were having on people: all of which had truth in it. But Buchman said to the undergraduates, 'Be true friends to him. Carry on.' He also said, 'I had an hour yesterday when I was very much shaken and needed help. So I went to the Metropolitan, and he helped me. I am very grateful he was there and I could go to him.'

On the eighth day the Metropolitan spoke again. 'I've been like a fisherman who came home in the evening and said, "I did not catch any fish, but I influenced a good many."' He told how his own shyness and other people's flattery had diminished his effectiveness. 'There are always five or six dear old ladies to tell me how well I have preached,' he said. Now he wanted to learn more about how to win individuals for Christ. He had been brought up in a Christian home - his father was Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott of Durham - and had been through the finest theological colleges, but no one before had raised with him the subject of diagnosing and, by God's grace, curing people individually.

Before returning to India the Metropolitan stated to the press: 'For myself, these have been weeks of challenge. I have been twenty-eight years a Bishop of the Church of God, and have kept before me the promises made at the time of my consecration, but it was at the House Party of the Oxford Group Movement (sic) at Oxford last July that I realised that one might faithfully endeavour to carry out these promises and yet fail in that which is a fundamental duty, namely to be a life-changer.'14

Back in India he wrote to some of the Oxford undergraduates that, whereas on his many previous voyages he had never had a deep personal talk with anyone, this time nineteen people had talked with him and fourteen, including the kind of people he would never have approached before, had given their lives to Christ. Even before he had left Oxford he had found a new understanding with George West, just appointed Bishop of Rangoon, who had come to him admitting he had always been afraid of him: something of which Westcott had been wholly unaware.

It was this kind of contagious change which, Buchman believed, would revitalise the Church. He felt that many in the Church were determined to keep things as they were. This 'religious trust', as he called it, often caused him to feel frustrated. Thus a popular Methodist preacher who, returning from an Oxford house-party, astonished his invariably crowded congregation by telling them he felt a failure. He spoke of the impact on him personally of Christ's standards of absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, and continued, 'You come here each week and always praise my sermons. But we're just like whited sepulchres. None of you change and nor do I.' He said he saw in the congregation people who had also been at the house-party and suggested that anyone who wished could wait afterwards and hear their experiences there. More than 200 did so. For three weeks such groups met after each evening service, and many found a new or deeper commitment there. Then some church officials closed in and spoke of ultimatums. The preacher disbanded the groups rather than divide the church.

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