Samuel M. Shoemaker, III

Early life

Shoemaker was born in a rented house on Read Street in Baltimore, Maryland on December 27, 1893, to Samuel Moor Shoemaker Jr. (later chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of Maryland) and Nellie Whitridge (later president of the Women's Auxiliary of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland), 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 (who died in 1884 and for whom both Sam's father and young Sam were named), 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 (1794–1860) 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 (1828–1912) 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 (actually Richard Hugh Gwathney), 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.

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 (where Buchman had started his First Century Christian Fellowship at Oxford and Cambridge) 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 (Manhattan), 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 eight-story Calvary House in place of the old rectory also caused controversy.

Calvary Church in Pittsburgh

Shoemaker had evangelized among young people and in the surrounding area of Pittsburgh, including setting up an Oxford Group meeting in Akron, Ohio circa 1930.

Shoemaker's fame led him to receive a call to become Dean of San Francisco Cathedral in 1950, which he declined.

The following year, 1951, after celebrating his own quarter century of ministry at Calvary Church in New York, Calvary Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania called Shoemaker to serve as its rector. The Bishop of Pittsburgh called to urge him to accept, as did a group of Pittsburgers who called themselves the Golf Club crowd. He ultimately did.

In 1955, he launched what he called the Interdenominational Pittsburgh Experiment seeking to bring Christianity into everyday life, and about which he wrote The Experiment of Faith(1957). The Pittsburgh Jaycees named him their Man of the Year in 1956, and the previous year Newsweek named him among the country's ten best preachers.

While based in Pittsburgh, Shoemaker continued to tape his sermons as the "Episcopal Hour" (and during 1957-1958 the "Art of Living") for distribution by the National Council of the Churches of Christ.

Shoemaker also had a half hour radio show called Faith that Works.

Family life

His wife, Helen Smith Shoemaker, whom he met at Princeton and married in 1925, was an author and sculptor as well as fellow church leader. They had two daughters, one of whom married a missionary who served in Asia, and the other of whom also traveled extensively abroad as the wife of a State Department official.

Death and legacy

Declining health caused Shoemaker to retire from Pittsburgh Calvary Church and return home to Burnside; however, he continued to broadcast Sunday sermons on the "Faith That Works" radio program from WBAL in Baltimore. He died after a prolonged illness on the eve of All Saints Day 1963, and was buried after a service at St. Thomas Church in Owings Mills, Baltimore County. He was interred in the family plot in the St. Thomas churchyard, as was his wife who died in 1993.

On November 7, 1963, an additional memorial service was held in his honor at Calvary Church in Pittsburgh, and later another at Calvary Church in Manhattan, with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's contributing material for the commemorative edition of Faith at Work magazine.

Alcoholics Anonymous

As a rector of Calvary Church, Shoemaker ran Calvary Church Rescue Mission, a place for “the down-and-out,” which Bill Wilson co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous with Dr. Bob Smith from Akron, Ohio, had visited in 1934, near the end of his drinking. It was where Bill Wilson came to know Sam Shoemaker who would become a lifelong friend.

Bill Wilson was in his last relapse when he attended his first Oxford Group meeting for drunks, in Calvary Church Rescue Mission. That was after a visit by a friend, Ebby Thacher, who had just found sobriety in the Oxford Group. In keeping with the Oxford Group Teachings, Ebby Thacher needed to keep his own conversion experience real by carrying the Oxford Group message of salvation to others.

A couple of days later, Bill Wilson re-admitted himself to Charles B. Towns Hospital to sober up again. Wilson had been admitted to Towns hospital three times earlier between 1933 and 1934. This would be his fourth and last stay. This is when he had his “spiritual experience”, in December 1934. After Wilson left the hospital, he never drank again.

After his release from the Towns hospital, Wilson attended Oxford Group meetings for drunks at Calvary Rescue Mission and went on a mission to save other alcoholics. His prospects came through Towns Hospital and the Calvary Rescue Mission. Though he was not able to keep one alcoholic sober, he found that by engaging in the activity of trying to convert others he was able to keep himself sober. It was this realization, that he needed other alcoholics to work with, that brought him into contact with Bob Smith while on a business trip in Akron, Ohio. Earlier Bill Wilson had been advised by Dr Silkworth to change his approach and tell the alcoholics they suffered from an illness, one that could kill them, and afterward apply the Oxford Practices. The idea that alcoholism was an illness, not a moral failing, was different from the Oxford concept that drinking was a sin. This is what he brought to Bob Smith on their first meeting. Smith was the first alcoholic Wilson helped to sobriety.

In 1937, whether Bill Wilson and “his drunks” quit Calvary Church Rescue Mission to meet somewhere else, or were thrown out remains uncertain, but Shoemaker was upset and did not speak to Wilson again until after he detached from Buchman's Oxford group, in 1942. “He later wrote a letter of apology to Bill stating that he and other Oxford Group members were wrong to oppose Bill’s desire to work solely with alcoholics and to focus only on helping these individuals to stop drinking.” Dr. Shoemaker had helped early A.A. in fundamental ways. Physically, he provided refuge for alcoholics in New York though Calvary Mission Rescue Mission. Of greater importance was his spiritual aid, which directly influenced the Twelve Steps and the nature of A.A.’s program of recovery.

Faith at Work

The Manhattan Calvary Church Thursday evening sessions started in 1926 already alluded to, which were devoted to lay witnesses, provided models for subsequent Faith at Work programs.

In it can be traced the lineaments of the witnesses still a part of the Faith at Work Conference Ministry and of the spate of personal witness articles that appeared in the Calvary Evangel magazine and have continued in the pages of Faith at Work magazine. The Lay Witness Missions, now conducted under other auspices than Faith at Work, also had their beginnings in the Thursday evening meetings.

The Thursday night witness sessions were paralleled by an activity which began in the Calvary House boiler room when the janitor Herbie Lantau witnessed to a painter named Bill Levine. They later were joined by Ralston Young, Red Cap #42, from Grand Central Station. Ralston did his witnessing to the people whose baggage he handled and later to groups that gathered for prayer in a car placed in a siding, on Track 13, at Grand Central.

This small group joined some others who were disenfranchised when the split came with the Moral

Re-Armament (MRA) in 1942. They and many others met with Irving Harris whose work at the Calvary Evangel and later with its successors covered a period of over three decades. Harris gave structure to the Thursday evening services and was later the enabler of the Monday groups. These were to continue in one form or another until Faith at Work moved to Columbia, Maryland in 1971.

According to Helen Shoemaker, Sam believed that "small group action...always started with personal counseling" and then continued in the group. This is probably a carry-over from Sam's work in the Oxford Group where conversion or change was the starting point and the group sharing followed. Sam's often repeated triad "Get changed, get together, and get going" also reflects this order. We shall have occasion to return to the topic in a subsequent section.

An activity related to the Thursday night witness services was the work of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA began under Sam's inspiration and meetings were held every Tuesday night in the Great Hall of Calvary House. The starting points of Faith at Work and AA were similar, but the latter addressed itself to a more particular audience.

Books

Shoemaker wrote over 30 books, about half of which were circulating before A.A.’s 12 Steps were first published in the A.A. Big Book in 1939. Shoemaker's books were circulated in New York, Akron, and the Oxford Group.