Sam Shoemaker
Samuel Moor Shoemaker III DD, STD was an American priest in the Episcopal Church and a founding influence of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Samuel Shoemaker was considered one of the best preachers of his era, whose sermons were syndicated for distribution by tape and radio networks for decades. He founded Faith At Work magazine in 1926. He served as the rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City from 1925 to 1952. He was the head of the United States headquarters of the Oxford Group and later of the Moral Re-Armament which the Oxford Group became in 1938, from circa 1927 until circa 1941. From 1952 to 1962, he served as the rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He retired in 1962 and died the following year.
Sam Shoemaker's interdenominational focus and the Oxford Group were significant influences for the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous who met through the Oxford Group. Bill Wilson attended Oxford Group meetings at Calvary Church from late 1934 to circa 1939. Sam Shoemaker helped start an Oxford Group chapter in Akron, Ohio, where Dr. Bob Smith became involved.
Serious disagreements with Oxford Group founder Frank Buchman led Shoemaker to separate from Buchman in 1941 after he had detached from the early AA for a while, before working with AA again later on.
Shoemaker's contributions and service to Alcoholics Anonymous had a worldwide effect. The program that Bill W. codified, in conjunction with Shoemaker, is used in almost every country around the world to not only treat alcoholism but also help relatives of alcoholics, and treat people suffering with other addictions such as drug addiction, sex and/or love addiction etc.
Early life
Shoemaker was born in a rented house on Read Street in Baltimore, Maryland on December 27, 1893, to Samuel Moor Shoemaker Jr. and Nellie Whitridge, who had met at Emmanuel Church in Baltimore, where his uncle was rector.Two years later, in 1896, the young family moved to his late paternal grandfather's property, 'Burnside', about 10 miles north of Baltimore at the entrance to the Green Spring Valley. In 1898, his father turned Burnside into a dairy farm, with a prize herd of Guernsey cattle, though his grandfather had preferred Jerseys. Sam Shoemaker was well aware of his privileged upbringing: Mennonites, some Schumachers had moved from Germany, Holland and Switzerland hundreds of years earlier, converted to Quakerism under the influence of William Penn's missionaries and Anglicised their surname as they moved to Germantown, which became a Philadelphia neighborhood. One of his ancestors of the same name had twice served as Philadelphia's mayor, and his paternal grandfather, although born in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, made his fortune organizing the Great Western Express transportation line between Philadelphia and Baltimore. His paternal grandmother, the Victorian matriarch who raised him as an Episcopalian, was Augusta Chambers Eccleston, of Chestertown, Maryland, daughter of Maryland Court of Appeals Judge John Bowers Eccleston and sister of the Rev. John H. E. Eccleston, whose Emmanuel Episcopal Church was decorated with flowers from the family's greenhouses. A more distant John C. Eccleston served as a priest in Richmond County, New York. Sam's maternal grandfather, John Augustus Whitridge, had a fleet of clipper ships, although he died when Sam was 13. Shoemaker later became known for a slight southern inflection in his speech, which he attributed not to these relatives, but to his lifelong friend Hen Bodley, and to James, a longtime family servant, who had been born in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
In 1908, when Sam was 14, he was sent to St. George's School, Rhode Island, an Episcopal boarding school founded and run by the Rev. John Byron Diman, who later converted to Roman Catholicism and founded the Portsmouth Priory near the school. Sam, homesick, initially did not feel comfortable among the "Yankees." He also did not consider himself a good student, but did hold several positions during his years at the school, including as president of the missionary society.
Upon graduating in 1912, Shoemaker attended Princeton University as had his father. A fan of President Woodrow Wilson, Shoemaker became acquainted with the political controversies of the day, and after his sophomore year, circa 1914, traveled to Europe. Upon returning, Shoemaker and three other students protested war propaganda and military drills at the university. At Princeton, Shoemaker had met Robert Speer, John Mott and Sherwood Eddy through the World Student Christian Federation. He became interested in personal evangelism and missionary work, as well as the relatively new ecumenical movement. He graduated from Princeton in 1916.
From 1917 until 1919, with the blessing of the Rt. Reverend John Gardner Murray, bishop of Maryland, Sam Shoemaker went to China to start a branch of the YMCA and teach business courses at the Princeton-in-China Program. Shoemaker spent several years in China. In January 1918 he met there Frank Buchman, founder of the First Century Christian Fellowship, later known as the Oxford Group. A follower of John Mott as well, and a leader of Penn State's YMCA group, Buchman advised Shoemaker to look inside himself, and to talk about his personal experiences. Buchman also told Shoemaker about the essence of the Sermon on the Mount being four absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. After contemplating his own inadequacy compared to those absolutes, Shoemaker decided to let God guide his life. He returned to Princeton in 1919 to head the Philadelphian Society, a campus Christian organization which he had led during his senior year.
Calvary Church in New York
On June 20, 1920, bishop Murray ordained Shoemaker a deacon in the Episcopal Church. On June 12, 1921, he was ordained a priest. Shoemaker then returned to his earlier post at Princeton through the school year, 1922-23. There, he maintained his ties with the First Century Christian Fellowship; Buchman also made frequent visits to Princeton. However, by the time Shoemaker returned to Princeton, the movement's personal evangelism had begun to gather both friends and foes in England as well as America.After completing his missionary year at Princeton, Shoemaker entered General Theological Seminary in New York. During his second year, Dr. Charles Lewis Slattery, rector of Grace Church, at Broadway and Tenth Street, appointed him as a part-time assistant. After graduation and ordination, with his bishop's approval, Shoemaker and two British university graduates traveled with Buchman through Europe and the Middle East, exploring the meaning of Christian discipleship in missions and hospitals as they had in Beijing. Between Egypt and India, in 1924, Shoemaker received a cable and letter from the vestry at Calvary Church, a then-dwindling but storied missionary congregation in a once-fashionable but changing neighborhood that wanted the energetic youth to become their rector.
Bishop William T. Manning of New York approved of the First Century Christian Fellowship and Shoemaker's taking the helm at Calvary Church in the Gramercy Park neighborhood. At Calvary, where he became rector after a successful two-year trial term, Shoemaker constantly balanced both the institutional and sacramental aspects of the church's life, as well as his personal faith as influenced by Buchman and the First Century Christian Fellowship. He held outdoor services in nearby Madison Square beginning in the summer of 1927, attracting new parishioners through music as well as his sermons, and began transforming the church school that winter term.
For the next eleven years, Sam and his wife Helen managed to combine the diverse interests of Calvary Church with the life style and program of the First Century Christian Fellowship soon to be known as the Oxford Group. The church's ministry grew rapidly, by about 100 parishioners at the Sunday morning service in his first year, and another 100 during the second. However, not all of Calvary's members congregation were committed to the radical life style and "hot gospelling" of the Oxford Group. Selling some church lots on 22nd Street to build a new seven-story Calvary House in place of the old rectory also caused controversy.
At a different location, the church also owned and operated the Calvary Mission, or Calvary Rescue Mission, an
outreach project to serve the disadvantaged. The facility could house up to 57 homeless
men, and served over 200,000 meals in its 10 years of operation.
In 1926, Shoemaker founded the Faith at Work movement. On Thursday evenings through approximately 1936, lay persons both presented their witness of their life as Christians in the workaday world and were trained to witness to that world.
In 1927, after his two years trial as a rector, Shoemaker gradually set the United States headquarters of Frank Buchman's First Century Christian Fellowship soon to be named Oxford Group at Calvary House adjacent to the church.
However, when the Great Depression hit in 1929 and continued, controversy had grown around Shoemaker.
In 1932, the Calvary vestry granted him an extended leave of absence to bring his ideas to a wider audience.
"We must all realize that the work which has been characteristic of Calvary Parish for the past few years is part of a much larger movement which is making a tremendous spiritual contribution in many countries today: A First Century Christian Fellowship or the Oxford Group has been called by Archbishop William Temple of York "one of the main movements of the Spirit in our time".
"The evident need of our country in the world of spiritual awakening lays a special obligation upon us all at Calvary to share with others what has helped us.
"When therefore the Rector asked us to come to a special meeting of the vestry on June 15, and proposed to us that he be released for a six month sabbatical leave during which time he would devote himself entirely to the furtherance of this important work, throughout America, we felt that this was a call which neither he nor we should disregard. Further we wanted him to go as our representative."
Around 1938, Buchman transformed The Oxford Groups into Moral Re-Armament. Controversy grew because the latter dissociated from Christian churches and New Testament orientation. Moral Re-Armament also took an increasing share of Shoemaker's time and the facilities of Calvary House in New York. Shoemaker re-evaluated his priorities, including with Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group, as well as his commitment to evangelism, devotion to the Church of Christ in general and to the Episcopal Church. Efforts to work through these concerns in 1940 and 1941 proved fruitless. Shoemaker detached from Buchman and in the closing months of 1941, Calvarly Church's vestry formally asked Moral Re Armament to stop using Calvary House.
Shoemaker soon reactivated the Faith at Work program and meetings resumed at New-York's Calvary Church.
He became involved in radio preaching, and in 1946, Dr. Frank Goodman of the Federal Council of Churches offered Shoemaker a daily five-minute spot on station WJZ. That proved successful, leading to a Sunday half hour broadcast on station WOR, and another half-hour program called "Faith in our Time".
He was an awarded Doctor of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary and Berkeley Divinity School, ca 1948.
He founded the Calvary Clergy School, ca. 1948.