A New Leadership through Moral Re-Armament

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  “Politics is the art of the possible.”  Perhaps this conventional wisdom explains why conventional politicians do little more than preserve the injustices of the status quo. 

  Leadership is the art of making the impossible possible.  A true leader faces injustices and inspires people to change themselves and the world around them.  By this definition, those with no political influence, economic power, or educational advantage can still be leaders.  Leadership springs from commitment to bring change.  Moral Re-Armament is a strategy for generating this kind of leadership.

  In 20 years of working with responsible people in my country and in other countries, I have been struck by the seeming impossibility of their tasks without the power of a moral and spiritual re-armament.

  The question is not whether there is a need for new institutions that can lead to a more just world.  The question is how to design and build them.  This question of commitment is the same whether at the deep-seated level of conflict between value systems, or at the intermediate level of institutional and structural change in society, or at the surface level of events, such as one faces in trying to reconcile members of a family, resolve a dock strike, prevent a race riot, or protect a tribe from exploitation.

  There is seldom one single answer to a problem.  But there is one very good approach to every problem.  This is the startlingly simple approach of Moral Re-Armament.

  There have been many definitions of Moral Re-Armament.  Probably the first was a compelling thought that came to Frank Buchman, the man who started MRA, as he walked through the Black Forest of Germany in 1938, contemplating the tide of hate that was about to erupt into World War II.  “The next great movement,” he said, “will be the moral and spiritual rearmament of all nations.”  Surely a humanly impossible task, but the idea in the Black Forest launched Moral Re-Armament on a global scale and still sustains it.

    Like all the great spiritual leaders, Frank Buchman, a Christian, was convinced that spiritual values must control our actions, or we will enslave ourselves and each other in fear, hate, and greed.

  Just as the nuclear age has focused people’s thoughts on the smallest unit in nature, so the ideological age has begun to focus on the smallest unit in society, the person.  Buchman believed that conflict results not so much from defective organization of the world, as from defective persons in the world.  In the oft-quoted words of the Qur’an: “God will not change the condition of a people, until they change what is in their hearts.”

The Bottom Line

  Even for those sincerely committed to justice and renewal in the halls of government, around the negotiating tables of labor and management, on the battlefields, and in the family, God too often is the forgotten factor.  Yet God surely is the “bottom line” in the search for power to change the world.

  Without genuine guidance from God, the pursuit of morality alone can degenerate into the imposition of one’s own selfish and narrow view of right and wrong on others.  The aim in trying to bring change has to be that people should do not what we want, but what God wants.  And only God can tell each person what this is.  In the words of the Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, “Since God alone possesses the secret of my identity, He alone can make me who I am.”

  Frank Buchman recommended that every person approach every day and every problem with a period of “quiet,” to allow preconceived ideas to drop out of view and let God replace them with His own.  Much has been written on this by spiritual leaders of all religions.  What perhaps is different in the approach of MRA is the use of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love, not merely as steps on a path to spiritual understanding, but to check the validity of the guidance one thinks God has given.

  Another decisive test of God’s guidance is to evaluate the practical results that have followed action.  “By their fruits ye shall know them.”  This is the acid test for Moral Re-Armament.  Its “fruits” are what gives it both legitimacy and promise as a constructive force in my own life, and throughout the world.

  Above all, the challenge that Moral Re-Armament is offering today’s world is absolute commitment.  Change in the person and in society will not come merely if people become more honest either with themselves or with others.  You cannot change just by deciding to be moral.  People with such limited objectives must always succumb to their own will and abandon the effort.  A person changes only if he decides to conform his life to the absoluteness of God’s demands.  This opens the way to God’s power.

  The basic conflict in the world is not between rival institutions or even rival ideas, but between rival wills, the will of man and the will of God.  The ultimate power is the will of God working through the individual person who loves Him.  It expresses itself in leadership, because leadership is the inescapable lot of the fully committed.

Note: Note: This article is reproduced from the author’s article, “A New Leadership,” published a quarter century ago in the June 1983 issue of the magazine, Moral Re-Armament: Vital for the Future, Mountain House, CH 1824, Caux, Switzerland.  Dr. Crane first worked with the organization, Moral Re-Armament, in 1948 when he was the first American student at a German university after World War II and had founded a student publication for dialogue among students in Europe and America.  The organization, Moral Re-Armament, is now known as “Initiatives of Change” (http://www.iofc.org), with American headquarters in Richmond, Virginia, and international headquarters in Caux, Switzerland.  Another organization, known as The Caux Roundtable ( http://www.cauxroundtable.org), with administrative headquarters in Washington, D.C., grew out of Moral Re-Armament but with narrower and more specific goals focused on ethics in business.