Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Priest & Renewer of Society
January 31 · d. 1963
also known as Samuel Shoemaker
Samuel Moor Shoemaker III (1893-1963) was an American Episcopal priest, rector of Calvary Church in New York and later of Calvary Church in Pittsburgh. He led the American work of the Oxford Group until he broke with its founder in 1941, founded Faith at Work and the Pittsburgh Experiment, and gave to Alcoholics Anonymous, through Bill Wilson, much of the language its Twelve Steps were built from. He is commemorated on January 31.
Samuel Shoemaker was a Baltimore boy raised on a dairy farm called Burnside, ten miles north of the city, the third of his name. He went to St George's School in Rhode Island and then to Princeton, his father's college, and when he graduated in 1916 he did not go into business, as the men of his family had. He went to China, with the blessing of his bishop, to teach and to start a branch of the YMCA.
There, in 1918, he met a man named Frank Buchman, who had begun a movement that would later be called the Oxford Group, and who taught him four things to hold onto: honesty, purity, unselfishness, love. Shoemaker came home changed. He was ordained deacon in 1920 and priest in 1921, and in 1925, after a trial term, he became rector of Calvary Church on Gramercy Park in Manhattan.
What he did there was simple and it was not respectable. He preached out of doors in Madison Square in the summer of 1927 to draw strangers in. He built a parish house, Calvary House, partly by selling off church land, and put the American headquarters of Buchman's movement inside it. He ran a rescue mission that slept fifty-seven homeless men at a time and served more than two hundred thousand meals. He gathered people on Thursday evenings to say out loud what God had done with them, and that gathering became a movement of its own, Faith at Work. Some in the parish were furious about all of it, and the Depression sharpened the fury.
Then a drunk came. Bill Wilson had been to Towns Hospital three times already when a friend of his, Ebby Thacher, who had got sober through the Oxford Group and stayed a while at Calvary House, came and told him what had happened to him. In December 1934 Wilson went into the hospital a fourth time and came out having had an experience of God, and he never drank again. Out of that came Alcoholics Anonymous, and out of Shoemaker's teaching came most of the Twelve Steps, which is Wilson's own account of it: "It was from Sam Shoemaker that we absorbed most of the Twelve Steps." Shoemaker himself refused the credit whenever it was offered.
The rest of the story is harder, and it is the part worth staying for. He and Wilson fell out in 1937, when Wilson and the alcoholics left the rescue mission, and it is not recorded whether they quit or were put out. They did not speak for five years. Meanwhile Buchman, in 1936, thanked heaven for Adolf Hitler in a New York newspaper, and the movement Shoemaker had housed in his own parish for fourteen years drifted after him. In November 1941 Shoemaker's vestry put it out of Calvary House, and he afterward called what Buchman had made a religious counterpart of the totalitarian movements. Then, in 1942, he wrote to Bill Wilson, and the letter was an apology: he had been wrong to oppose the decision to work with alcoholics alone.
He went to Pittsburgh in 1952 and told the steel city he meant to make it as famous for God as it was for steel, and the magazines came to write it up. He retired on the first day of 1962 and died at home in Baltimore County on the last day of October in 1963, after a long illness, on the eve of All Saints' Day. He had written a poem five years earlier and had it privately printed at Christmas. It says that he neither goes too far in nor stays too far out, because the door is the most important door in the world and people are still outside it looking for the handle. Its last line is what is carved on his memory: "I had rather be a doorkeeper, so I stand by the door."
Shoemaker told a story on himself that he could easily have kept quiet. Facing conversion, he found a resentment against someone in his own family standing in the way, and he told God the other man was nine-tenths responsible for it. What he heard back, by his own account, was a question about the one-tenth that was his. Notice that he did not report being told he was wrong about the arithmetic. The nine-tenths may well have been the other man's. He was simply given the only part of it he could actually do anything with, which is the part that is usually too small to feel worth the trouble. Where have you settled for being right about the proportion, when what is being asked of you is your tenth?
The documentary base for Shoemaker is thin in a way his fame does not suggest. Almost every dated fact about his life descends from one compilation, which in turn rests on two books: his widow Helen Smith Shoemaker's life of him, published by Harper & Row in 1967, and Irving Harris's account of Faith at Work, published by Seabury in 1978. Harris had worked beside him on the parish magazine for some thirty years. Neither book was consulted directly in preparing this page, and readers should treat the chronology below as one account rather than as several agreeing witnesses.
A few things stand on firmer ground. His death was reported in the New York Times two days after it happened, on November 2, 1963, and dated October 31. Four of his own texts have been checked word for word against their printed locations: two passages from a 1947 essay on personal evangelism in the Anglican Theological Review, the story of the nine-tenths and the one-tenth from "Twelve Steps to Power," and an address given to graduating nurses at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on May 19, 1949. The Pittsburgh Experiment's own history, kept by the organisation he founded in 1955, confirms the founding, the line about God and steel, and the Time profile.
Several particulars are contested or unresolved, and it is better to say so. Both ordination dates, June 20, 1920 and June 12, 1921, rest on a single reference work that could not be opened; the year 1921 is independently attested. The New York rectorship is dated 1925 by most sources and 1928 by the parish's own history, which probably reflects a two-year trial term rather than a real conflict. His place of death is not established by any source consulted: he had retired home to Burnside, and the county is all the record gives. His siblings are unknown, and his two daughters, both attested as married, are unnamed in every source. The date of the Buchman meeting in China rests on one book, cited at second hand. The most famous item associated with him, the poem, is the most weakly documented: its Christmas 1958 private printing by Calvary Church, Pittsburgh, is asserted by one researcher, and the original artifact has not been seen.
One error deserves its own paragraph, because it may have shaped the feast itself. He did not die on January 31. Two Church Publishing volumes, twelve years apart, give that date, including the very entry that establishes his commemoration; no source found offers any other positive reason for the choice of January 31. It is possible, though unproven, that the day the church keeps for him is the anniversary of a mistake.
There is no ancient devotion here, and there was none of any kind for forty-six years. Shoemaker was buried in the family plot in the churchyard of St Thomas's, Owings Mills, Maryland. Memorial services were held at his two Calvary parishes, the second on November 7, 1963. There is no shrine, no relic, and no pilgrimage.
The commemoration is a modern and dateable act. The Episcopal Church's General Convention of July 2009 ratified a body of new commemorations, Shoemaker among them, and he was given a full entry, the title Priest and Evangelist, and proper collects in A Great Cloud of Witnesses, which the church offers for devotional rather than liturgical use. He is not in Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2022, that church's currently authorized calendar, where January 31 belongs to Marcella of Rome. The Anglican Church in North America keeps him on January 31 as Samuel Shoemaker, Priest and Renewer of Society, in the Anglican column of its calendar, with the shared collect Of a Renewer of Society rather than one written for him.
What keeps the day alive most concretely is local. Calvary Church, Pittsburgh, where he was rector for a decade, still holds an annual commemoration on or near January 31, with speakers on his influence on Alcoholics Anonymous. And at Calvary-St George's in New York, AA meetings still gather on the ground where Bill Wilson first came.
Samuel Shoemaker, "Church Congress Syllabus 47: Personal Evangelism," Anglican Theological Review 29, no. 3 (July 1947): 137-144; reprinted in Anglican Theological Review 100, no. 3 (2018), with an introduction by Ian Markham. The passage on the touch of one life upon another is in the section headed "The Need," at p. 483 of the reprint; the passage on listening to God with the back of the mind is in the section headed "The Interviewer," at p. 485.
Samuel Shoemaker, "Twelve Steps to Power" (Faith at Work, Inc., reprint under the author's byline; original venue and date unresolved). The nine-tenths and one-tenth passage appears in the commentary on the eighth step.
Samuel Shoemaker, "Spiritual Relationship with Patients," an address at the graduation exercises of the St Luke's Hospital School of Nursing, Cathedral of St John the Divine, May 19, 1949; transcribed for Project Canterbury by Wayne Kempton, Archivist and Historiographer of the Diocese of New York, 2010.
Samuel Shoemaker, "What the Church Has to Learn from Alcoholics Anonymous," a retrospective address on the twentieth-anniversary convention of Alcoholics Anonymous held at St Louis in July 1955. The passages on desperation and on attraction sit in separate sections of the piece.
Samuel Shoemaker, "So I Stay Near the Door: An Apologia for My Life," privately printed by Calvary Church, Pittsburgh, at Christmas 1958, and circulating universally under the shortened title "I Stand by the Door." The closing line is quoted above from a modern reproduction, not from the 1958 printing, which has not been examined.
Bill Wilson's tributes to Shoemaker, including the statement that it was from him that Alcoholics Anonymous absorbed most of the Twelve Steps, are gathered in the standard accounts of the fellowship's origins; the wording quoted here is as reproduced in current reference literature rather than from a located first printing.
Frank Buchman's remark of August 25, 1936, thanking heaven for Adolf Hitler, was made to the New York World-Telegram. Shoemaker's later description of Buchmanism as a religious counterpart of the totalitarian movements is quoted by John F. Woolverton, "Evangelical Protestantism and Alcoholism 1933-1962: Episcopalian Samuel Shoemaker, the Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous," Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 52 (March 1983): 153-165.
Helen Smith Shoemaker, I Stand by the Door: The Life of Sam Shoemaker (Harper & Row, 1967), and Irving Harris, The Breeze of the Spirit: Sam Shoemaker and the Story of Faith at Work (Seabury, 1978), are the two books on which nearly all later accounts rest. His papers are Collection 269 in the Archives of Wheaton College, Illinois; the unrelated Samuel Shoemaker papers of 1821-1884 at the Maryland Center for History and Culture belong to a different man.
Almighty and everlasting God, you kindled the flame of your love in the heart of your servant Samuel Shoemaker to manifest your compassion and mercy to the poor and the persecuted: Grant to us, your humble servants, a like faith and power of love, that we who give thanks for his righteous zeal may profit by his example; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Renewer of Society
Exodus 3:7–12Psalm 145:1–13vRomans 12:9–21Luke 6:20–38