Mrs van Beuningen, who was in America during 1939 and early 1940, wanted to return to Holland immediately Norway and Denmark were invaded on 9 April 1940. He pointed out to her that the particular things she had had direction to try and do had not been completed; they listened, and she stayed. Meeting Buchman again in New York a little later, she told him that she now felt she should go home. He was silent. Then he said, 'Yes, it is time to go.' She wanted to go back via Rome and see the Pope, to whom she had excellent introductions. 'No. Not this time. Go straight home,' responded Buchman. She did so, and reached Holland on 9 May, the day the country was invaded. Her war-time work saved the lives of hundreds of prisoners of war.10

An American friend with him in Europe heard that her mother was ill but that there was no hurry to return. She talked it over with Buchman, and they listened together. 'Go,' said Buchman. 'Go immediately.' She did not go immediately, and she was too late.

Corderoy describes Buchman as 'a growing person - not perfect, but always growing'. The man who refused to be confined by his much-loved Pennsylvania Dutch origins and the traditional methods of the American missionary establishment in China, who did not arrive in Oxford until he was in his forties, launch Moral Re-Armament until he was sixty or speak in terms of a moral and spiritual ideology until he was sixty-five, was always looking for new insights and new impetus. 'We have not yet tapped the great creative sources in the Mind of God,' he said launching Moral Re-Armament at East Ham, and in the last year of his life he told a friend, 'I am learning more about moral re-armament every day.'

Most people thought of the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament as movements he had founded - a notion he strenuously denied. Of the Oxford Group, he used to say, 'You can't join it and you can't resign. You are in or out according to the quality of life you are living at any moment. Sometimes I am right outside it myself.'

When in 1948 the film star, Joel McCrea, asked, 'Well, Frank, how is MRA doing?' he replied thoughtfully, 'Oh, I think we are occasionally illustrating it.'

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