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A Century of Influence The Australian Student Christian Movement 1896-1996 by Renate Howe Published July 2009

Endorsements

Renate Howe makes a major contribution to Australia’s religious, intellectual and social history through her rigorous analysis, perceptive insights and graceful writing. She illuminates the ASCM’s ambitious foundations; its theological and political struggles and strengths; the evolution towards gender equality; the movement’s remarkable influence; and reasons for its decline. She tells an inspiring story of committed discipleship; and of the search for the common good in universities, schools and churches and for Australian and international society.

From the Cover quote by John Langmore, Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne

 

As an old SCMer, I read Renate Howe’s long-awaited history with keen interest. Her richly detailed study, based on extensive paper archives, wide reading in the history of religion, ecumenism, feminism, missions and welfare, her close relationships with surviving leaders of the movement, and an excellent series of interviews conducted with Jane Yule, is clearly a labour of love. It confirms my own conviction that a well-researched and critical history of the movement has the potential to illuminate much in Australian religious, academic and political life over the past century.

Renate writes about the SCM sympathetically, and the book may be read, at one level, as a defence of the liberal, socially-engaged Christianity that was the mainstream of the movement. However, she is also scrupulous in registering the views of those who were critical of it, both from without and within. I learned much from the book about figures and episodes I thought I knew about, and much more about earlier periods of which I knew little or nothing. While the book is arranged chronologically, Renate has astutely identified the themes and issues that dominate each period and is able to bring out the forces that shaped the overall trajectory of the movement from its evangelical and missionary origins, through the post WW1 ferment over questions of peace and war, the split with the EU, the rapprochement with the Left over Communism and the League of Nations, the postwar boom and the sudden decline of the movement from the late 1960s.

Professor Graeme Davison, Professor of History, Monash University

 

A Century of Influence explores the ASCM’s significance as Australia’s first national organisation of students; as a pioneering ecumenical association in an era of assertive denominationalism; as a conduit for liberal theological debates in Europe, Britain and North America to laity and clergy here; and as a formative element in the lives of graduates who were to occupy leading roles in politics, education, the churches and welfare agencies.

Ever-conscious of subtle shifts in Australian social history, Renate Howe identifies themes that illustrate the ASCM’s perennial dilemmas and debates.  Three of these themes stand out for me: the Movement’s recurrent battles over the Aims and Basis of Membership; the Movement’s awareness of our international setting; and the Movement’s preoccupation with issues of social justice. 

We are especially fortunate that this account is by a feminist social historian.   Renate is sensitive to the organisational experience of women in the Movement, at local and national levels, and as staff.  She is conscious of the individual and collective emotional history of how an ideal of gender equality was experienced.  In similar vein, she recounts sensitively the Movement’s recent coming to terms with inclusivity towards gay and lesbian members.

This history will do much to enable a fair assessment of recent decades.  Renate recounts their hopes and their stumbling, yet she is also alive to the momentous changes in the universities and the Church that profoundly altered the Movement’s context.  Her book documents very clearly for us how some of the changes arguably linked to the Movement’s decline are the unforeseen consequence of earlier action and advocacy by ASCM members.  The seeds of some of the Movement’s most serious difficulties were sown in the success of some of its key projects and concerns. 

For a subtler understanding of some formative influences and relationships in Australian politics and public policy through the twentieth century, as well as for clues to shifts in our national culture during that time – especially in the universities and the churches, A Century of Influence will be invaluable.

From the Foreword by Hugh Collins, Former Master of Ormond College and Professorial Fellow in Political Science, The University of Melbourne