Faith and the University: Oxford Student Evangelism Since the Second World War

The Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (OICCU) is one of the longest-established student societies within the University of Oxford. Its roots stretch back to the 1870s, though its modern history begins in 1928 when it was re-founded on an explicitly evangelical basis and affiliated to the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions. Its threefold aim, as succinctly expressed on its term cards, was ‘to present the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ to members of the University, to unite those who desire to serve Him, and to promote the work of Home and Foreign Missions’. Its regular activities included daily prayer meetings, Bible study circles, missionary breakfasts, open-air preaching, and weekly Bible expositions and evangelistic addresses. The OICCU provided a rigorous evangelical training ground for undergraduates and its postwar buoyancy reflected the national resurgence of evangelicalism in the British churches during the second half of the twentieth century. This chapter examines OICCU’s major triennial missions to undergraduates, which began in 1940 and continued into the 2010s, especially for what they reveal about the changing nature of evangelical student culture and witness within England’s oldest university, including theological tensions, experimental methodologies, and modern marketing techniques.