Guidance is a very leading feature of The Oxford Group Movement. "By 'guidance' is meant communion—communion with our Father, the Living God. Listening to God,' two-way prayer,' thinking. God's thoughts after Him,' are all phrases often used in speaking of this experience... In listening to God the general movement is from God to man—not from man to God... Guidance is simply the experience of God, flooding into a man's life, to give him direction and power" ("The Principles of the Group." Sherwood Sunderland Day). All this sounds very good on paper. For a Christian to have communion with God, the Father, is surely right.
But on inquiring further we find elements which arouse suspicion. The young converts are taught to have their " Quiet Time," to relax their bodies, and with pencils and note-books to await communications from God. Harold Begbie says of A Rugger Blue, "He told them that in these times of silence he had learned to relax his whole body, and that with so simple an invitation as, ' God, come into my soul, and help me,' evil thoughts drained clean out of him, and he really did become vitally conscious of invisible power " (" Life Changers," p. 88). Why should the whole body be relaxed? Where in Scripture do we get such instruction? We know that Spiritists are exhorted to let themselves go, relax their bodies, empty their minds of all thought and will, and listen in. We do not say that the Christian should not have a Quiet Time, we believe he should, but we do say emphatically that, with so little study of the Scriptures, so little knowledge of the true way of salvation, and in many cases, we fear, lives changed by auto-suggestion without any real conversion to God, and Christ known only as an Example and not as a Savior, to inculcate the experiment of the Quiet Time in the particular way the Movement advocates, is really fraught with terrible danger. There is more than danger of evil spirits taking possession of the relaxed bodies, simulating what is divine, but being in reality Satanic.
The following description of guidance only tends to emphasize our warning. We read:- "I asked one happily married man in the Group: 'How did you happen to marry Anne?'
"' Guidance,' was the answer. 'This was a new one for me, I knew that we had got beyond the stage where parents decided the question of their offspring. But my idea of nuptial bliss was catch-as-catch can.'
"You mean you fell in love and then God told you to go ahead?'
"' Heavens, no! There was more to it than that. I had known Anne for some time,' he explained. 'I knew she was the kind of person I wanted to marry. But one day during a Quiet Time on a railway these thoughts came to me: Would you like to marry Anne? Yes, I answered, if You think it's all right. Well, then, why don't you go ahead and try? came the clear but whimsical answer. I made up my mind I would. But before I committed myself I checked it with my friends, as people in the Group are wisely accustomed to do. Their guidance confirmed my own. Take the chance, and see what comes of it. I did. We were engaged before the week was out, and it has been glorious ever since.'
"That is the Group secret of marriage, where romance never fades" (" For Sinners Only," pp. 275, 276).
Does this commend itself to any sober-minded Christian as being of God? Not only did this "happily married man" seek guidance for himself, but a whole group got guidance for him. I can quite believe a Christian should earnestly seek guidance in such a serious matter as matrimony, but to expect a group to have guidance as well, is strange. Further, to describe God's answer as "whimsical" makes one doubt the whole affair.
Another extract is to the point:- " The weird and ridiculous messages such as are mentioned in an official publication of the Group, and written by Eleanor Napier Forde, where she tells of a three-year-old child receiving the guidance ' from God when He is alleged to have said to her, ' You must eat more porridge in the morning,' and again when a convert publicly testified that while seeking ' guidance ' she got the message, ' sausages,' by which she took it that God wanted her to get sausages for dinner that day. Without doubt this feature of the Oxford Movement is positively dangerous, and utterly at variance with the Scriptural doctrine of prayer and guidance " (" The Gospel Witness." Frazer).
That such messages should appear in " an official publication of the Group " speaks for itself. We fear the door is opened to an influence that is definitely not of God. The extracts, if descriptive of true Christian experience, which they are not, would tend to bring Christianity into contempt.
We would now describe the founder of the Movement.