Inter-Varsity Fellowship

Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) is a UK-based charity that was founded in 1928 as the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions. UCCF's dual aims are:

To achieve its aims, UCCF undertakes three main areas of activity:

There are around 200 Christian Unions in the UK at present, with a total membership of approximately 20,000. The Christian Unions provide opportunities for fellowship, bible study and evangelism, with nearly 40,000 students attending outreach events each year.

UCCF employs about 80 staff, and has a further 80 or so volunteer "Relay Workers" on a one-year training programme. Many of these staff and volunteers are graduates who were involved in the CU as undergraduates. They support the student Christian Unions with training, advice and materials.

In the summer term of 1919 Norman Grubb (an evangelical student at Trinity College, Cambridge) and a friend met with ten representatives of the Student Christian Movement (SCM) to discuss their concerns that SCM was promoting an overly liberal view of Christianity in the British universities. Grubb posed the direct question, "Does the Student Christian Movement put the atoning blood of Christ central in its teaching?" After a little deliberation the answer came, "Well, we acknowledge it, but not necessarily [as] central."

Grubb and his friends at Cambridge decided that they could no longer work in partnership with SCM, saying that it had divorced a biblically-based, cross-centred emphasis. Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU) had been disaffiliated from national SCM since 1910, but only after talks in 1919 floundered did a permanent split look probable. Splits followed throughout the British and Irish university system, and two separate organisations emerged which went on to form the modern UCCF (initially known as the IVF) and SCM.

CICCU parted from SCM over two issues. For Grubb and his friends, the Bible had to be the central source of truth, but SCM could not affirm that its entire membership matched their view of Biblical infallibility. The second area of difference was the priority of evangelism; although the SCM had initially aimed at "the evangelisation of the world in this generation", CICCU members felt that this aim was not being sufficiently emphasised by 1922. SCM's official history also refers to differences over governance.

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