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. In reflecting on the call of Ignatius Loyola to Francis Xavier at the University of Paris, Lightfoot asked, ‘Where else but in a famous university should the keenest and best instruments for a great religious movement be found?'14

10 Or on 14 May 1930. The secondary sources are in conflict, and the primary minutes seem to be lost. 11 John and Moyra Prince, Out of the Tower (Homebush: Anzea, 1987), 11 12 The Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union was formed at the Hoop Inn, Cambridge, on 18 November 1876. 13 Darrell Paproth, Failure is not Final: A Life of C. H Nash (Sydney: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, 1997), 128. 14 Quoted in Geoffrey R Treloar, Lightfoot the Historian (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 171.

3 The protestant churches created by the Reformation of the sixteenth century were not conspicuous for their evangelising and missionary zeal, but in the following century, concern for the propagation of the gospel grew dramatically. Its first manifestation was at Lubeck, a German town famous for its medieval Gothic churches and its 'hospital of the Holy Ghost'. There, seven law students resolved to carry the gospel overseas. Let us call them 'the Lubeck Seven'. At least three of them sailed for Africa. The most celebrated of them was Peter Heiling who went to Abyssinia in 1634. Abyssinia was then believed to have been the home of the lost Christian Kingdom of Prester John. Indeed, it was argued that missionary work to Africa was unnecessary because it contained forty kingdoms, which, while all were lost to the knowledge of Europeans, were not lost to God, who, in the divine providence, had made them all Christian. To embark on his missionary venture, therefore, Heiling had to overcome considerable anti-missionary rationalisation.

Universities seem to have been in the business of inventing and destroying rationalisations, and a perennial concern of student Christian societies has been to refute anti-evangelising rationalisations and to assert the primacy of evangelism. 'The 'Lubeck Seven' were perhaps the first Protestant student group to do that.

Another significant German contribution to the evangelical student tradition was known to its members as the 'Order of the Grain of the Mustard Seed'. Six students, including Count Nicolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1769), met between 1710 and 1716 at the Paedagogium in Halle, under the inspiration of August Hermann Francke, their teacher. Francke, who had been sacked from both Leipzig and Erfurt universities for believing conversion a prerequisite for the teaching of theology, was one of the great German Pietists. Halle was a new university, and his settlement there made it a nursery of missionaries: his 'universalism of intention' saw Halle send out 60 missionaries in the eighteenth century.15

Among admiring visitors to Zinzendorf's commune, Herrnhut ('The Lord's Watch'), was John Wesley. His visit was in the year of his conversion, 1738, but he had already been fashioned largely in another student group, 'the Holy Club', formed in 1729. There John joined his brother, Charles, and two others, at first to read the Greek New Testament together, but soon to engage in devotional exercises and then in social service activity, including prison visitation. In 1732 eleven students were assigned to Wesley and joined the Holy Club, so it could be called the 'Oxford Dozen'.

It was while he was ploughing fields in Connecticut in 1802 that Samuel J. Mills was called to preach the gospel to all nations. He entered Williams College, Massachusetts, to prepare for ordination. With five others, he formed a society known as the Society of Brethren, the first foreign missionary society in the USA. One day on their way to prayer they were caught in a thunderstorm and took shelter in the lee of a haystack. There they had their usual time of prayer, but the 'Haystack Meeting' as it has become known in missionary tradition, had an historic outcome. All six jumped to their feet as if galvanised into action by the one force, exclaimed 'We can do it if we will', and thereupon signed a pledge to devote their lives to missionary service. On graduation they went to Andover Seminary where, with three others, they formed in

15 Another great Christian graduate of Halle, George Muller, was to note that in his time, there were still only 8 Christian students among the 'wild, swearing, hard drinking' student body of 1200, but that they were 'brave, manly fellows' who won him to the Lord all the same; quoted in P. Lowman, The Day of His Power: A history of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (Leicester: Intervarsity Press, 1983), 14

4 1810 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The most celebrated of the 'Andover Nine' was Adoniram Judson, who began his remarkable missionary career in Burma in 1813.

Perhaps the most concentrated training for mission service ever given to university students was enjoyed by six students at St. Andrews University in Scotland in the 1820s. Together with their inspiring teacher, Thomas Chalmers, the leader of the Evangelical Party in the Church of Scotland, they have been labelled 'The St. Andrews Seven',16 and their number included Alexander Duff, the most celebrated of all Scottish missionaries to work in India. Together the St Andrews seven gave 141 years of service to India.

The 1880s, significantly, saw the rise of an energetic evangelistic and missionary thrust forever associated with 'the Cambridge Seven'. In 1882 the American evangelistic phenomenon, Dwight L. Moody, visited Cambridge. His evangelistic impact was great, surprising everyone including himself. Among those converted was Edward Studd, a wealthy Wiltshire landowner and horseracing fanatic. He sold his horses and concentrated on bringing his sons to the Lord. 'Everyone in the house,' said his son, C.T., 'had a dog's life of it until they were converted.' The Cambridge seven included C.T. Studd, captain of the Cambridge cricket team, and Stanley Smith, the stroke oar on the University rowing team. Before leaving for China the seven toured Britain and encouraged hundreds of students to volunteer for overseas missionary service. Their sporting prowess particularly appealed to younger students. They started a 'muscular student Christianity' approach, which was later spread throughout the Empire by Howard Guinness (himself helped in his conversion by his school cricket captain) and University of Sydney track star, Paul White, the Jungle Doctor.17 White applied a three-fold formula to student work: Entertain - Educate - Evangelise (or, less alliteratively: 'humour - cricket - souls'). He practised a programme of nurturing B.W.W.: 'Blokes Worth Watching'.

Anyway, C.T. Studd's brother, J.E.K. Studd, visited the USA in 1885 to share the vision which the Cambridge Seven had spread in Britain. He visited Cornell University and there deeply influenced the greatest student leader of his generation, John R. Mott. Studd and Mott, together with Robert Wilder of Princeton, prevailed on D.L. Moody to convene a conference at Mt. Herman, Massachusetts, at which (Wilder prayed) God would call one hundred missionaries. With that graciousness for which they are proverbial, the students gave the Lord a month to call the hundred. By day 30 he had called ninety-nine, and waited until the final day to call missionary number 100. So we could speak of the 'Mt Herman Hundred'. This movement, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), peaked in 1920 when 6,890 students attended its quadrennial convention.

The famous watchword of SVM was 'the evangelisation of the world in this generation'. It emphasised Bible Study, evangelism, decision for lifework, and a foreign missionary obligation tied to the membership form which declared, 'It is my

16 Stuart Piggin and John Roxborogh, The St. Andrews Seven (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1985). 17 White, with others was quite taken with Guinness when, first meeting, they were surprised to see him disappear almost immediately, to return dressed in his cricketing creams. It was also Guinness who projected White into University evangelistic work by telling him that he should be using his sporting skills to attract boys to the faith. This action of sporting camaraderie set the tone of schoolboy enthusiasm which typified much of the early IVF.

5 purpose, if God permit, to become a foreign missionary.'18 By the 1930s it had strayed from this platform, constraining evangelical students in 1938 to form a new group: the Student Foreign Missions Fellowship (SFMF). Two years later the Inter- Varsity Fellowship invaded the USA from Canada where it had been started by Howard Guinness, before he introduced the IVF to Australia. Coincidentally, the Canadian invasion was led by C. Stacey Woods, an Australian, and American Charles Troutman, later Australian IVF General Secretary. In 1945 the SFMF became the missionary arm of the American Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Today its missionary conventions at Urbana are regularly attended by 17,000 students.

From the Lubeck Seven to the Urbana 17,000. MUEU is part of a glorious tradition of evangelical student work. Let us move on to our second context, namely the MUEU in the context of Melbourne’s evangelical Christian culture.

2.2 Melbourne’s Christian culture and MUEU

At the end of the Second World War, the SCM at Melbourne University, was engaged in much social activism and was known as the Labor Party at prayer, It was then larger than the EU, which had been weakened by the War. By 1949 that was no longer true, and in 1951 Canon Bryan Green, the Anglican evangelist from Birmingham, reinforced the ascendency of EU. In 1951 he twice conducted missions in Melbourne. Time magazine hailed him as Britain’s ‘Billy Graham’, but his reputation as a highly effective evangelist dates back to the 1920s. He had been the boyhood friend of Max Warren, CMS Secretary, the finest missionary statesman of the twentieth century. Green was also the chief instrument in the conversion of Howard Guinness whom, for good measure, he had won over to evangelical Anglicanism. Green’s Moorhouse Lectures in Melbourne in 1951 on Practical Evangelism were published as the widely read The Practice of Evangelism. In the competition between EU and SCM, for competition is what it was, Canon Green well and truly tipped the balance in favour of the EU. Apparently it did not hurt, I am told by one, a member of the fair sex, who was an SCMer in 1951, that Green was strikingly handsome. Among the many quotable things that Green said was this:

Mass evangelism undoubtedly has its place; parochial missions can make their contribution; a specially gifted evangelist can proclaim his message; the specialist Christian can make his contribution in factory, in politics and in teaching; all these are genuine contributions to the evangelistic activity of the Christian Church: but in the last analysis it is the worshipping community, that part of the Body of Christ that worships, lives and proclaims the Gospel in all its activities in any given neighbourhood, which is the real evangelising agent used by the Spirit of God.19

From this I conclude that it is a law of student and indeed non-student Christian organisations that they never rise above the church culture of which they are part. If the churches are vital in any city, the evangelical unions in the universities of that city will also be vital. And it is true to say that Melbourne evangelicalism between about

18 Quoted in Margaret Holmes and David Garnsey (eds), Other Men Laboured: Fifty Years with the Student Christian Movement in Australia, 1896-1946 (Melbourne: Australian Student Christian Movement,1946), 10 19 www.worldofquotes.com/author/Bryan-Green/1/ accessed 10 May 2005

6 1870 and the beginning of the Second World War was so vital that even historians, habitually blind to such spiritual realities, can see it.

There was actually a highly if informally integrated infrastructure of evangelical organisations in Melbourne in the first half of this period: Prayer Bands, missionary societies, and conventions for the deepening of the spiritual life Keswick-style, the first of which was established by H. B. Macartney in 1875; the Bible Society, the YMCA and YWCA, Scripture Union established in Victoria in 1879, and the Evangelisation Society of Victoria formed in 1883. Late Victorian Victoria was inundated with evangelists, both indigenous and from overseas: Francis E. Clark, the founder of Christian Endeavour (1892 and 1904), Thomas Cook ('probably the greatest winner of souls England has produced since the days of John Wesley'20); Gipsy Smith21 (1894 and 1926) who wrote of his outstandingly successful mission in Melbourne where his preaching was regularly attended by over 2,000, that this was one of the 'Days of God's Right Hand',22 and who returned in 1926 to even bigger crowds; Charles H. Yatman from New York (1896), T. Champness of the Methodist Cliff College 1898 and the Australian evangelist, John MacNeil.

Then there was Reuben Torrey who was the chief evangelist at the 1902 Torrey- Alexander mission to Melbourne, which was described as ‘the big revival’. I don’t know if it was revival, but it was certainly big. It was actually a ‘Simultaneous Mission’. The evangelical churches of Melbourne combined to organise the event, dividing the city into 50 mission centres, where 50 missioners preached simultaneously. Every house in Melbourne was visited twice for the purpose of inviting its occupants to the mission. It is claimed that there were 16,000 prayer meetings for the mission being held throughout Melbourne, attended by 117,000 people. Attendances at the mission meetings totalled a quarter of a million each week when the population of the whole of Victoria was only one million. In 1907, 1909 and 1912 there were Chapman- Alexander Missions in Melbourne. The 1909 mission was characterised as 'a time of Pentecost for the whole Commonwealth'.23

Then, in the second half of this period - after the First World War - there developed in Melbourne the strongest, the best-organised, and the most determined network of lay evangelicals in Australian history. Names which come readily to mind include Edwin Lee Neil, managing director of the Myer Emporium, Hervey Perceval Smith, William Buck, Alex Eggleston, James and John Griffiths (tea importers), Horace John Hannah (a remarkable bibliophile), Dr John James Kitchen, Dr D Stewart MacColl, the Renshaws, Charles Alfred Sandland. It is invidious to name them, for there were many more, forming many more evangelical parachurch organisations: MBI, the City Men’s

20 Taylor, The Life Story of an Australian Evangelist (London: The Epworth Press, 1920), 333. T. Cook, Days of God's Right Hand: Our Mission Tour in Australasia and Ceylon, London, 1896, pp.113ff., 266f; V. Cook, Thomas Cook, Evangelist - Saint, London, 1913 21 Gipsy Smith, His Life and Work, by Himself, Revised Edition, National Free Church Council, London no date. 22 Gipsy Smith, His Life and Work, 247; W. W. Phillips, 'Gipsy Smith in Australia in 1926: The Commonwealth Evangelistic Campaign,' Mark Hutchinson & Stuart Piggin (eds.), Reviving Australia: Essays on the History and Experience of Revival and Revivalism in Australian Christianity (Sydney: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, 1994), 185-199; A.D. Deane, The Contribution of the New Evangelical Movements of the late Nineteenth Century to Evangelical Enterprise in Australia, 1870-1920, MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1983, 62. 23 Helen Alexander, Charles M. Alexander, London, n.d., 153

7 Bible Class, the Upwey Convention (later moved to Belgrave Heights), the Bible Union, the Melbourne Gospel Crusade dedicated to the proclamation of the three Rs: Ruin by the fall, Redemption by the Blood of Christ, and Regeneration by the Holy Ghost, the Keswick Book Depot, the Borneo Evangelical Mission (1928)24 the Australian Council of the Unevangelised Fields Mission (1931),25 and Campaigners for Christ through which the next generation were trained for leadership and evangelism.

The CMS League of Youth began in Melbourne in 1928. Max Warren said: 'From the League of Youth in Australia and New Zealand has come a stream of recruits for missionary service which has no parallel in the church life of those countries'.26 The intensification of spirituality encouraged in this evangelical world resulted in something of a mini-revival in the 1930s.27 Howard Mowll, evangelical Archbishop of Sydney from 1933, was overheard to remark that the weakness of the Diocese of Sydney in its commitment to Keswick spirituality compared with Melbourne was a great concern and disappointment.28 In Melbourne, too, the Methodist Local Preachers Branch was very vigorous and had an impact on evangelical life in Australia. Teams of these local preachers went all over Australia and New Zealand. For many years it held a Holiness Convention each King's Birthday weekend in Melbourne. It was conducted entirely by laymen. George Hall who had been trained in America under Reuban Torrey and Dr. Campbell Morgan, and who knew evangelical life in USA intimately, said that the Methodist Local Preachers Melbourne Branch Holiness Convention was the greatest spiritual force he had ever experienced.29

In such an environment, there was no way that Melbourne University could escape evangelical ministry. We read that yet another visiting evangelist, George Clark, preached at a meeting of the University of Melbourne Christian Allliance in 1888.30 In June 1896 the Australasian Student Christian Union (ASCU) and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), the latter an ‘organic part’ of the former, were formed at the Presbyterian Theological Hall at Ormond College, University of Melbourne, during a visit of J. R. Mott.31 When he returned to Australia seven years later (1903), Mott was delighted by the transformation in the student Christian scene. He claimed that in 1896 he uncovered only one Bible class for tertiary students in the whole of Australasia and that had only nine members and only five rather weak societies of university or college students of which the Melbourne University Christian Union must have been one. But now there were over 800 students in Bible classes

24 Shirley Lees, Drunk before Dawn (Sevenoaks: OMF, 1979). In particular look for the exciting story of Hudson Southwell and Francis Davidson mentioned to me by Michael Griffiths at Regent. 25 John and Moyra Prince, No Fading Vision: The First 50 Years of A.P.C.M., Asia Pacific Christian Mission, no place, 1981. 26 G. Cutler, The Torch, Lilydale, 1976, 7 27 Len Abbott to Margaret Lamb, 11 October 1990. 28 Len Abbott to Margaret Lamb, 11 October 1990. 29 Leonard Buck to Margaret Lamb, 14 December 1990 30 Southern Cross 20 April 1888, 315 31 Holmes and Garnsey (eds), Other Men Laboured: Fifty years with the Student Christian Movement in Australia 1896 to 1946; C. Howard Hopkins, John R. Mott 1865-1955, Grand Rapids, 1979; Basil Mathews, John R. Mott: World Citizen, New York, 1934; J.C. Pollock, A Cambridge Movement, London, 1953; J.C. Pollock, The Good Seed, London, 1960; Dana L Robert, 'The Origin of the Student Volunteer Watchword: 'The Evangelization of the World in This Generation', International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol.10, No.4, Oct. 1986.

8 and 45 Christian organisations in all Australian colleges and universities except Tasmania.32

Given the strength of evangelical witness in Melbourne in the two generations leading up to the formation of the EU, it could be argued that the EU did not break off from the SCM so much as the SCM departed from its own evangelical Protestant origins and that the EU was a return to the biblical orthodoxy and missionary and evangelistic zeal of the early days of SCM. It is interesting that when the SCM had a near monopoly in the field, it set a pattern for student work which owed everything to evangelical parachurch activities which would later be followed by the evangelical unions: annual conferences, systematic Bible study circles, missionary conferences, small group meetings, work in Christian Unions in private schools, and, later, camps and the use of the 'quiet time'. The record of the remarkable 1910 Daylesford SCM conference, for instance, is almost revivalist and evangelical in tone:

It had been put into the hearts of two men, Frank Paton and William Gillanders, to prepare for Daylesford, and to come there in the spirit of faithful and daring intercession. New experience of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit had come into their own lives. They ventured in expectation and faith. They asked that delegates at the conference should leave with lives committed to the guidance of the Spirit of Truth promised by our Lord to those who keep His commandments. . . To read the Intercollegian of 1910-11 is to read the record of a wonderful expansion of the Movement, and to enter again into an atmosphere of joyous confidence and achieving purpose like that reflected in the Book of Acts.33

The EU, then, may be understood as a product of the clash between liberalism and fundamentalism which became a marked feature of church life in the 1920s, with the SCM going off on a liberal tangent, and the EU struggling to hold to the old trajectory. It was not an easy course to navigate because there were evangelicals who were not deaf to the appeals of liberalism. Between 1920 and 1941 the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne was led by two liberal evangelical Archbishops, Harrington Lees and Frederick Head. They favoured social awareness and inclusiveness. Conservative evangelicals were not impressed. In 1933 the secretary of the Anglican Church League’s Melbourne branch said: ‘We in Melbourne are just a little tired of importing Evangelicals from England, who when they settle here, find that they left their backbone behind, and want to be all things to all men.’34 Such bluntness was and is more typical of brutish Sydney than refined Melbourne.

Which brings us to our third context:

2.3 The Relationship between MUEU and the IVF, especially SUEU

Any analysis of Melbourne’s Christian culture will reveal that it has always been different from Sydney’s. It is a difference found in all walks of life. For example, the Professors of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne for four decades from 1911 were W. R. Boyce Gibson and his son, ‘Sandy’. Harold McCracken tells us that Boyce

32 F. Engel, Australian Christians in Conflict and Unity (Melbourne: Joint Board of Christian Education, 1984), 133. 33 C.I. McLaren, in Holmes and Garnsey (eds), Other Men Laboured, pp.12-13 34 Thick to Corish, 1 May 1933. ACL records, MTC library

9 Gibson taught him psychology, rather than philosophy, and that he used to dip his fingers in the ink wells as he lectured. One can imagine a psychologist doing that as well as a philosopher so that does not in itself prove that McCracken was mistaken in his recollection. And indeed I am told that in the 1920s, the Professors of Philosophy at both Melbourne and Sydney lectured in Psychology as well as Philosophy.

Anyway, the Gibsons, father and son, were agreeable, constructive Christian idealists, supportive of tolerance, religion, and the welfare state. A Melbourne University critique of Sydney University’s philosophy department, headed by the atheistical empiricist, John Anderson, sounds like a typical Melbourne Anglican’s verdict on Sydney Anglicanism, that it was ‘not only inbred and impervious to outside developments, but narrow, doctrinaire and negative into the bargain.’35 Similarly, Melbourne was open to Catholic philosophy which inclined to the left, whereas in Sydney, the only Catholic philosophy accorded any recognition by Catholics themselves was scholasticism, which was inhospitable to modern thought.36 On the sporting field, Sydney favoured the brutality of Rugby to the refined elegance of Aussie rules. Not surprisingly then, Melbourne EU has struggled to keep itself focussed on the ‘one thing needful’, whereas Sydney EU has dealt swiftly and decisively with ‘wobblies’ as they are generously labelled.

Paul White, the Jungle Doctor, was a typical Sydney evangelical who never wobbled. His reaction to his undergraduate experience of SCM is indicative:

When I got up there to the University of Sydney the one Christian organisation that I heard about was the Student Christian Movement. I went along to a study circle, and the leader (a prominent Methodist minister) started to tear leaves out of the Bible, and tell me that I really needed to rethink the whole of my faith; that I had swallowed too much without thinking. I didn't like it, and I told him so. I was at the advanced age of nineteen, and perhaps I was a little bit gauche, because after three or four of those particular bible studies, it was suggested that perhaps they would go more smoothly if I didn't attend.37

In Sydney not all of the tension between SCM and EU was doctrinal, however. No doubt it was also true of Melbourne that there were questions of style and social class. As one SCMer of the 1930s noted in her choice of the SCM at Sydney University over the EU:

I had become very upset about the evangelical movement coming into my local church, because they used to all be 'saved', and they used to sing these most dreadful choruses, which I thought were infantile and not worthy of the Christian religion. So when I got to the university. . . I became very interested in the work of the SCM. I joined the study groups and used to go to all the meetings.38

35 James Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003), 134. 36 James Franklin, Corrupting the Youth, 149. 37 Interview, M Lamb with Dr Paul White, 3 March 1986, CHCTE Archives, Macquarie University 38 Interview, M Bottomley et al., with Margaret Rush, 30 November 1992, CHCTE Archives, Macquarie University

10 The Sydney University Evangelical Union was also born in early 1930, emerging out of the pre-existing University Bible League. If MUEU really was launched on 14 March, then it is technically two weeks older than the SUEU. We read in the Minutes the almost incidental comment: “it might be well to mention here that on Monday, 31st March, 1930 the name of the Sydney University Bible League was changed to the Sydney University Evangelical Union.” Paul White was not satisfied that the leadership of the infant unions could withstand a new spiritual power, Moral Rearmament. So he prevailed on Howard Guinness to return to strengthen his troops. It was in this his second visit to Australia in 1933 that Guinness presided over the establishment of IVF branches in every Australian University. Paul White recalled with admiration that, in the middle of the Depression, Guinness persuaded the students to support a staffworker.39

That it was not always easy to be a member of the EU in its early years is suggested by the debate held in June 1935 among members on the motion to change the name of the EU to the Sydney University Christian Fellowship. In supporting the motion it was argued that the name created confusion for students who thought SCM was what they were looking for whereas the EU was what they really wanted. It was also argued that the word 'evangelical' was used to describe a party in the Church of England, and this was what some students thought it meant. Finally, it was acknowledged that there was a 'natural dislike' to the name, 'especially in the colleges'. Those opposed to the motion argued that the name formed a reproach 'so necessary in keeping members up to the mark'. Thirty-five attended the meeting which debated the motion. The motion was lost very narrowly, by 17 to 15 with three abstentions.40

SUEU, like our Lord, was born into a very dangerous world, bent on its destruction. There was not only the militant atheism and secularism of Philosopher Professor, John Anderson, and the subtle modernism of accused heretic, Samuel Angus, who split the Presbyterians for a generation. There was also an assault from within far too problematical for the infant movement to handle with any maturity. This was the movement labelled by its opponents, but not its adherents, as sinless perfectionism. It took root not only in the IVF, but also in the Scripture Union, the Crusaders Union, and the CSSM. The last three had the structures to deal with it, and did so swiftly, but in the IVF it was a tenacious plant. Its leader was Lindsay Grant who was not only President of the SUEU, but from 1936 general secretary of IVF. Lindsay was always longing for a second blessing, always hankering after a deeper Christian life. One of his cousins is reported to have said to him, 'First it was the Oxford Group, now it is this sinless perfectionism. What will you go in for next? Mormonism?'

By 1939 the SUEU was divided down the middle over Grant's perfectionist teachings. It resolved its problem with a spill and an election for all committee positions. Harvey Carey, later Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of NSW, led the coup. He was astute, skilled in apologetics, and a clear thinker. He believed that there was a danger that the preoccupation with perfection would displace the more traditional commitment of the EU, namely evangelism, and that the EU would become a perfectionist coterie powerless to witness for the Gospel. He got himself elected President by just one vote. At the 1940 annual general meeting of the SUEU 86 members were present. The attendance was ominous, as the perfectionists were not popular and could not win elections. They attempted to limit the number of voters by

39 John and Moyra Prince, Out of the Tower, 5. 40 Minutes of the SUEU, 10 and 27 June 1935, Sydney University archives.

11 refusing to allow postal voting and disenfranchising evening students.41 They might have been perfect, but that did not put them above politics! It was a vain move. Though the perfectionists put up a full team, their ticket was defeated resoundingly. John Hercus was elected president and informed the Grant-dominated IVF executive that it had lost the confidence of the SUEU.

Meanwhile, the evangelical big-guns were trained on the sinless perfectionist position, and like all big guns, wounded some who longed to be holy as well as those who were convinced that they could be perfect. In Melbourne, C H Nash was clear in his conviction that sinlessness is not for this life, but he was gentle in his pastoral concern for the young men who were attracted to the movement. T. C. Hammond, principal of Moore College, was more robust in his opposition to the movement. In a typical display of withering logic, he destroyed the perfectionists' exegesis of Romans. Romans 7, he insisted, depicts the mature Christian life as a great struggle against sin. All Lindsay Grant could do was to look on helplessly and protest of Hammond: 'He's a fine man, but . . .'

As they searched the Scriptures, the anti-perfectionists developed a new insight on Scriptural interpretation, namely that 'no scripture is of its own interpretation'.42 They began to see that the weakness in the perfectionists' case was the very thing which they thought at first was its strength, namely its dependence on a few prominent verses of Scripture. In the heat of disputation, the young members of the EU were strengthening their dependence on the Word. But, it might be observed that they were also honing the weapons which conservative evangelicals thought legitimate in a just war and which the devil seems to admire, namely, political control, reducing spiritual aspirations to theological formulations, and pinning the tag of heresy on those who did not see things their way. It was therefore a costly battle, and divided not only evangelical societies, but also families. Grant and the perfectionists withdrew from their old friends. They dropped right out of, both their churches and all active Christian involvements. The Melbourne perfectionists, known to their critics as ‘the Royal Family’, were less extreme than their Sydney counterparts, and were at first less trouble to the MUEU. But they have also proved more tenacious, and continue to divide families to this day.

Altogether, the young movement faced tough challenges. But it was now ready for the long haul, supported by many old hands who came to its rescue, not only Nash, Hammond and Paul White, but also Principal Morling, Marcus Loane, Howard Guinness, who took up a parish in Sydney, Stuart Barton Babbage, and Leon Morris, and by the first IVF travelling staffworker, Basil Williams, from New Zealand, as were others who gave strong support to IVF: Frank Andersen, John Thompson, and John Laird. Basil Williams’ four years of service strengthened the movement all over Australia, and prepared it for its post-war responsibilities under the leadership of such able General Secretaries, as Charles Troutman and Ian Burnard. But their acts, and those of the other early saints of the MUEU, are they not written in the book Decisive Years: Experiences of Christian University Students, edited by David E. Angus, Melbourne 2005?

3. Conclusion: Focus on Jesus, evangelism, prayer and Bible study and for the rest remain totally pragmatic

41 SUEU Minute Book, 18 September 1940. 42 Interview with Ian Holt, 9 March 1987.

Donald Coggan, in his 1934 history of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, Christ and the Colleges, reflected this driving fear among evangelicals that the universities would be lost to the Christian cause:

Should the centres of learning entirely lose their faith (or even if they should become further subjected to the process of secularisation) they would cease to supply into the mainstream of national life these men and women of deep religious convictions which are essential to its well-being. The churches would cease to receive men who can combine their scholarship with a devout and reverent spirit; the schools would be supplied with masters whose instruction and influences would be entirely secular or even hostile to the faith; and every profession would be the poorer for the loss of these public-spirited men, who, with minds reverently observant of the precepts of Holy Scripture, have so frequently ignored them.43

It is surely one of the glories of the IVF/AFES that the universities have not been lost to the Christian cause, and that men and women of Christian character continue to be nurtured there. The history of the IVF in Australia from its difficult but joyful birth and its troubled but triumphant childhood to the present day is one of definite progress from the defensive, anti-modernist evangelicalism of the 1920s and 1930s to the strongly-reasoned, experienced and even socially-responsible, and prophetic evangelicalism of today. Still unchallenged, however, is the basic diet deemed essential to the growth of robust Christian student groups: focussed on Jesus, Bible study, prayer, evangelism and mission. It can be concluded with a fair degree of empirical validity that successful Christian student groups always possess four ingredients.

1. Evangelism as the primary goal. Any attempt to make it primarily an agent of social amelioration, as SCM would have wanted it to be at times, fails to understand its heart’s desire. An exclusive preoccupation with theology and apologetics, as excessive fear of secularisation dictates, shifts its power from the heart to the head. Conversely when it confines its concern to the spiritual health of the faithful, as the sinless perfectionists wanted to do, it saps the heart of its will. But when evangelism is emphasised as the primary goal, then the other three characteristics of successful student groups should fall into place: prayerfulness, courage, and pragmatism.

2. Great prayer discipline. All significant student movements have been initiated with what used to be called 'extraordinary prayer', by which was meant fervent, constant, united prayer.44 Zinzendorf's Herrnhut prayer meeting lasted for seventy years! Students influenced by the great revival which swept Britain in 1859 formed the Daily Prayer Meeting (DPM) at Cambridge in 1862. Some academics called it 'awful bosh', but out of it grew in 1877 the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU), out of which grew in turn the IVF. It was believed that through prayer D.L. Moody's 1882 mission to Cambridge was transformed from a debacle into 'the most immense gatherings in Cambridge for religion' in living memory. It was in the CICCU that Howard Mowll, evangelical statesman and Archbishop of Sydney, 'first ventured to pray audibly'. When he became the organising genius behind certainly the best

43 F.D. Coggan, Christ and the Colleges: A History of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions, (London: IVFEU, 1934), p.9 44 See S. Piggin, 'Extraordinary Prayer', Salt, Autumn 1986, pp.10-12.

13 organised and arguably the most successful mission ever held at Cambridge - the 1911 Torrey Mission - it was to extraordinary prayer that he looked for success. So, it was for good reason that the founders of MUEU spent a day in prayer before they did anything, and when Charles Troutman did a survey, asking what was the single most important thing which the EUs did, most answered the DPM.

3. Consecrated courage, or, what used to be called holy aggression. The pioneer of student Christian work in Australia, Howard Guinness, once advised students, 'live dangerously, love lavishly, serve humbly.' 'May God preserve us,' he wrote on another occasion, 'from playing for safety, or from giving ourselves to others in a niggardly fashion or from seeking for applause in our work. This is not worthy of the Crucified.' Another type of courage is required, perhaps much greater, namely the courage to take criticism. Guinness tells us of two blunt criticisms which he received early in his career which would probably have poleaxed the oversensitive: Douglas Johnson, England's IVF General Secretary, said, 'Howard, you are prostituting your gifts', while education lecturer, Dr. Bill Anderson (after a talk by Guinness) said, 'Howard, you must do better than that if you want to make a mark for God. That was poor stuff.' The EUs have been great training grounds for Christian ministry. It works best when the trainees are humble enough to accept advice, and the trainers courageous enough to give it. It is also evident that Christian students are more likely to develop this consecrated courage when they come from strong churches and receive encouragement from both denominational leaders and their university teachers.

4. Evangelical pragmatism. At their best, the EUs have been hot-houses of evangelistic experiments, particularly in the missions which have been the highest and lowest points in the history of the movement. While successful student Christian groups have been firmly evangelical in doctrine, and clearly focussed on mission, and faithfully persevering in prayer, they have been determinedly pragmatic in method, that is, they evolve a strategy that works through research and experimentation. So strong EUs have been not only Christ-focussed, Bible-based, Mission-minded and Prayer-dependent, but they have also been Market-sensitive.

But you know all that. It’s disgraceful of me to take so long to say it, and very gracious of you to sit there so long hearing what you already know. We have gathered today to encourage one another and our successors to keep doing what we and they already know, and to do it differently if necessary.

Stuart Piggin Director, Centre for the History of Christian Thought and Experience, Macquarie University