Discovering Frank Buchman

Long out of print in English, Professor Spoerri’s book Dynamic out of Silence was for a many years the first introduction by an international scholar to Frank Buchman. It is not so much a biography as a meditation, weaving together, as the title implies, two strands: a personal introspection, a search for a deepening understanding of self and of God’s purposes, and an active effort to make this faith relevant and effective in the world. As, Spoerri says in his introduction, the effect Buchman produced ‘was due more to quietness than to anything he said. His gift was to make the ordinary the basis of the extraordinary, the ordinary person the doer of extraordinary things.’ So Buchman was a charismatic of a rather unusual kind, leaving little by the way of writings other than his speeches, and the challenge facing Spoerri was all the more daunting. Lean, who wrote the foreword for the English edition of Dynamic out of Silence reports that Spoerri discarded five books on Buchman one after another, so difficult did he find the subject. We have the full text for you to read in several languages - visit the page Dynamic out of Silence and scroll down and you will find the other language versions.

Russian dissident and intellectual Grigory Pomerants wrote this essay, The spiritual movement from the West, after reading Dynamic out of Silence.