It was his final declaration: the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament were not his creations, but God's gift to him and everyone prepared to receive them; they were, and must remain, God's property, not organisations but instruments of the Holy Spirit; he relied on those he left behind to be sensitive enough to God's spirit to find His plan for each new situation. Behind it was the same vision - faith-filled, optimistic, at times over-optimistic - which had animated him all his life.

How is one to describe Frank Buchman two decades and more after his death? Many referred to him as a statesman, a complete misnomer if the Oxford Dictionary definition - 'a person skilled or taking a leading part in the management of state affairs' - is accurate. Yet Kishi, in his last message, called him 'one of Asia's great statesmen', an even more striking description in view of the very limited time he spent in Asia, but one which illustrates the sense in which the word could justly be used. For, while never managing state affairs, Buchman was undoubtedly a catalyst of reconciliation between the states of Asia as he was elsewhere.

Some of his closer colleagues - and some like Brother Roger of Taize who never met him - have spoken of him as a saint. Donald Attwater in his introduction to The Penguin Dictionary of Saints writes, 'A saint is not faultless: he does not always think or behave well or wisely: one who has occasion to oppose him is not always wrong or foolish...He, or she, is canonized because his personal daily life was lived, not merely well, but at an heroic level of Christian faithfulness and integrity ...'2 If such heroic living is a qualification, it is hard to deny Buchman some degree of sainthood - a notion, incidentally, which he would not only have denied but rejected, as it would tend to set him apart and contradict his contention that the way he tried to live was merely ‘normal living’, open to anyone. For a man trying to change the world the appellation would, as Dietmar Lamprecht points out in his biography of St Francis, carry a double disadvantage: 'Just as one can avoid the challenge of an exemplary life by belittling it, seeking weaknesses and finally consoling oneself by saying "it is really nothing special",' he writes, 'so too can one turn from the call of a saint by raising him to something extraordinary, up among the altars and the stained-glass windows, taunting the challenge of his life by declaring it to be unattainable.'3

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