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Melbourne University Christian Union Celebrates Its 75Th Anniversary

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Melbourne University Christian Union Celebrates Its 75Th Anniversary The Challenging but Glorious Heritage, Difficult but Joyful birth, and Troubled but Triumphant Childhood of the Melbourne University Evangelical Union, 1930 to 1940.1 Melbourne University Christian Union celebrates its 75th anniversary 14 May 2005 1. Introduction: The Formation of Melbourne University Evangelical Union When Robert Gordon Menzies (1894-1978) was President of the Melbourne University Students’ Christian Union in 1916,2 he was at the same time editor of the student newspaper,3 and President of the SRC. To his presidency of the Christian Union as well as to his earlier attendance at Wesley College,4 has been attributed his later critical political support for church schools and church-run colleges in universities. While at Melbourne University, studying law, Menzies heard a lecture given by C H Nash, who was to become Principal of the Melbourne Bible Institute in 1920. Menzies later testified to Nash and to Leyland Wang, a visiting Indonesian Christian, that Nash held high a copy of the New Testament (it happened to be a Greek New Testament) and proclaimed ‘In this book is all I know of Jesus Christ and all I need to know of what God has in store for me’. Menzies testified that in consequence of this dramatic scene, he never gave up reading the Bible.5 Fourteen years later, we find C. H. Nash still holding his New Testament aloft at the University of Melbourne. He had been invited to give Bible Studies there by the Medical Branch of the same Melbourne University Christian Union, which was affiliated to the Student Christian Movement (SCM). Nash’s studies have been variously described in secondary sources as Bible studies on Romans which he had been taking for 18 months and as ‘a scholarly and helpful series on the origin, inspiration and authority of the Holy Scriptures’ which had just begun. Whichever it was, the Christian Union leadership did not like them and ordered them to cease forthwith on the grounds that ‘they were not in keeping with the union’s search for truth’.6 A similar argument was used to grant a monopoly to the SCM at the expense of evangelicals unions in Edmonton at the University of Alberta and in universities established after World War II in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and in 1 An alternative title might be ‘Melbourne’s West Wing’, named after the west wing of the Law Quadrangle where in ‘the Catacombs’ the early EU held its prayer meetings. 2 A. W. Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life, vol 1, 1894-1943 (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1993), 22. 3 Melbourne University Magazine 4 Ian Walker, ‘”Dare to be Wise”: Robert Gordon Menzies and the Value of Church Colleges,’ in Geoffrey R. Treloar and Robert D. Linder (eds.), Making History for God: Essays on Evangelicalism, Revival and Mission in Honour of Stuart Piggin, Master of Robert Menzies College, 1990-2004 (Sydney: Robert Menzies College, 2004) 64. 5 Darrell Paproth, Failure is not Final: A Life of C. H Nash (Sydney: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, 1997), 127f. 6 John and Moyra Prince, Out of the Tower (Homebush: Anzea, 1987), 7. 1 East Africa further south. At the foundation of Macquarie University in the mid-1960s an attempt was made to deny access to the IVF. This evangelical student group, it was observed, asserted that it had found the truth, and was therefore not open to inquiry. Its positive doctrinal affirmations were contrary to the whole ethos of the University. From their birth, then, evangelical unions have had to defend their right to exist. So to get us all in the frame of mind to be able to empathise with the founders of MUEU 75 years ago, let me ask, ‘how would you respond to that challenge?’ How would you answer the view that the university should be open to every view except a defined one to which people are committed? I asked two AFES supporters who are over 75 years of age, retired academics, how they would answer that challenge. They gave me six answers, each, I would have thought, conclusive in itself. First, critics of those who hold firm convictions always have their own (unconscious) commitments and their own unarticulated defined positions. Second, any intellectual position may be judged by its fruits, and the gospel has been an intellectually fruitful focus of study. Third, such opposition comes from those who esteem the cognitive to the exclusion of all practical and ethical considerations, and it is dogma to assert that a university must do that.7 Fourth, the university is most properly a place where people identify and find their own commitments, and that finding can be a higher intellectual achievement than seeking. Fifth, professing conviction is a matter of human integrity: our lives are made up of our commitments. Sixth, the grounds of Christian commitment should be understood since they form many of the ingredients of our culture: there would be no more important book to study in the university than the Bible, because no other book has so shaped our culture.8 Well, I do not know if the evangelical students of the Medical Branch of the CU had such thoughts 75 years ago, but we do know that they were aware that in England the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions had been formed in 1928, after a decade long struggle within SCM over modernism and liberalism. Now, on the banks of the Yarra, they were praying about whether or not they would do likewise. Among those at prayer were Les Griffiths, an engineer, who had decided to return to university to study medicine, and law graduate, Harold McCracken, who had been brought to a vital faith in Christ at the 1929 Upwey Convention. They were excited by the news that they were soon to be visited by Dr Howard Guinness, who had witnessed the birth of the IVF first in England, then in Canada and then in Sydney. From its inception, the IVF leaders, inspired by Norman Grubb of the Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade, were eager to establish Evangelical Christian Unions, not only in every British university, but in every university in the British Empire. They selected, as their first missionary, Hugh Gough, then IVF chairman and later Archbishop of Sydney, and charged him with the task of introducing the IVF to Canada. Gough was unable to accept, but the vice-chairman, the young medical student, Howard Guinness, accepted. It was an ideal appointment: Guinness was a pioneering, individualistic, maverick. He was striking in appearance9, forceful in personality, tireless in energy and adventurous in spirit. Cricket bat readily to hand, he was a magnet for young males. 7 Discussion with Dr Bill Andersen, 6 April 2005 8 Discussion with Professor Edwin Judge, 7 April 2005 9 I have heard it said he was required to tone down his physical presence to prevent women from responding to his message for purely earthly reasons! 2 It was Les Griffiths and Harold McCracken who picked up Howard Guinness from Spencer Street Station in Les’s Dodge early in March 1930. Dr Guinness invited the eager young evangelical students who packed into the Griffiths’ lounge room of their home, ‘Adeney’ in Kew to wait on the Lord for guidance in what they should now do in Melbourne. So they spent the whole day waiting on the Lord. MUEU was birthed in prayer. After Guinness met with the Executive of the SCM, it was decided to appoint a day, 14 March 1930, when the MUEU would be launched at a public meeting. So we read in the Minutes of that day,10 'the Evangelical Union was launched in utter dependence upon God'. 70 attended the meeting and 55 became members. Les Griffiths became chairman. In spite of the decisive break with the liberal SCM, however, heresy was still to be found in the student ranks of the infant society, for we are told that the first secretary, Norman Burns, was a Rugby lock11. That one can be converted to Christ and still prefer Rugby to Aussie Rules surely evidences a low level of sanctification. For his part, C. H. Nash was pleased. At the 1933 Upwey Christian Convention, he declared that he had been privileged to be connected with the MUEU from its inception, adding that in his teens he had been greatly blessed through the CICCU12, a similar evangelical body at Cambridge, and he rejoiced that the Evangelical Union was then growing throughout the world and touching all universities with ‘the same spirit of absolute unqualified and unashamed faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Saviour of mankind’.13 History was in the making. Now History, we are told, is the discipline of context, and in this our celebration of 75 years of life and witness through the MUEU, let us consider three contexts. The first is MUEU in the context of student Christian societies throughout the ages. The second is MUEU in the context of Melbourne’s evangelical Christian culture. The third is the MUEU in relationship with the Australia wide IVF and especially with SUEU. 2. MUEU’s Three Contexts 2.1 World student Christian movements and MUEU Ever since the Church gave birth to the Universities at Salerno, Bologna, and Paris in the Middle Ages, the University has been of immense benefit to its parent. Abelard, Aquinas, Ockam, Hus, Luther, Calvin, Ignatius were all university men. J.B. Lightfoot, scholar of Cambridge and Bishop of Durham in the 19th century, contended that the idea of the university as a source of spiritual renewal for society inspired much of the Christian thought of his own age.
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