Changed by Grace

Book excerpt: Victor C. Kitchen was a New York City advertising executive who wrote one of the Oxford Group's most important books. He also went to the same Oxford Group meetings as Bill Wilson, who later became the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is a book about A. A.'s roots in the Oxford Group, as seen through the pages of Kitchen's work. It explains how the key ideas, which the two movements shared, arose out of the evolution of the modern evangelical movement. The author begins with John Wesley's Aldersgate experience in 1738 and traces this understanding of the healing power of grace down to Kitchen's and Bill W's time, traversing en route the world of nineteenth century revivalism, the Keswick holiness movement, and the early twentieth century foreign missionary effort. The great theme, around which all of this is centered, is that of God's grace as the power to change human character itself. This book shows what faith and grace are really about. It shows how even faith mixed with doubt can lead us into true spiritual awakening, and it explains the basic nuts and bolts required to obtain a constant conscious contact with a God of our understanding. "Each century produces a small handful of great spiritual books. I believe strongly that Changed by Grace is going to prove one of the greatest of our present century. The best way to describe it is to say that it does for us today what William James' Varieties of Religious Experience did for the world of a hundred years ago."-John Barleycorn in The Waynedale News.