Stacey Woods

We have recently seen intense debates in the UK and the US about whether a student organisation may legitimately demand of members and speakers an adherence to a statement of faith.

C. Stacey Woods, a name not widely known, set in place the vital importance of credal definition for an evangelical university movement.

British graduates, and Howard Guinness in particular, established a sister movement of the British Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now UCCF) in Canada in 1928. Stacey Woods, an Australian, brought the Canadian Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) to the United States; he then served as first general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) for almost a quarter of a century.

If he were here today, Stacey Woods would say the present legal struggles to protect theological integrity in UCCF and its sister movements are foundational to their continued existence.

Defining moments

Two events stand out in those years. They both took place in Toronto. The first happened days after Stacey had arrived in the city in 1934 to take over a fledgling but already dying organisation as third general secretary. Just before his 25th birthday, this Auzzie bantam, five feet five inches tall, debated with Canon Leonard Dixon, the urbane and scholarly general secretary of the Student Christian Movement (SCM).

The question: could a second Christian organisation on the Canadian university campus be justified? It was a David and Goliath hour.

Stacey later recalled: ‘With fear and trembling I entered the hall of debate, but God in his grace was with me, and we were enabled to defend our position as an independent student movement that was not in essence schismatic but which stood for the tradition of the Christian church. We confessed that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, the foundation of our young movement.’

Stacey’s point was conceded by Leonard Dixon and from that moment the separate existence of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in Canada was never an issue.

Misused privilege

The next defining moment came 12 years later in 1946 with the opening of the first missionary conference (later known as Urbana). This time the confrontation was between John Burgon Bickersteth, much beloved chaplain to the University of Toronto and warden of Hart House, and scion of a leading English evangelical family (himself no longer an evangelical), and Harold John Ockenga of Park Street Church, Boston. Ockenga had been invited to Urbana but demurred because it would keep him out of his pulpit on Sunday. Stacey therefore rearranged the schedule and Ockenga found himself with the opening slot. Bickersteth rose to welcome the delegates, then bizarrely used his privilege to flail Inter-Varsity for being separatist. He urged that it disband and join the established and respected SCM and, if they were interested in missions, the Student Volunteer Movement. Ockenga threw away his prepared speech and (again to quote Stacey), ‘Smiting hip and thigh, he flayed liberalism and accommodation theology. He insisted on the right and necessity of Inter-Varsity to exist as an independent society’.

Holding to CICCU values

In his leadership of the young IVCF, Stacey Woods was only being true to the vision of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU). CICCU had been a founding member in 1893 of the Inter-University Christian Union (later SCM). In his The Story of Student Christian Movement, Tessington Tatlow describes CICCU as ‘having its roots deep in the Evangelical party of the Church of England ... Its members tended to have a traditional evangelical theology, which they did not examine very closely yet held with great tenacity. The verbal inspiration of the Bible was one of their most strongly held tenets.’

After growing tension, in March of 1910 (by a vote of 17 to 5), CICCU severed its links with SCM.

Coming centenary

All this might appear irrelevant today, but, in leading up to the 2010 centenary celebration of the great 1910 missionary conference in Edinburgh, the year 1910 has been revisited by Robin Boyd in a book released in January by SPCK, titled The Witness of the Student Christian Movement: Church ahead of the Church. It is the first definitive history of SCM since that of Tessington Tatlow almost 75 years ago.

Boyd, a lively octogenarian, joined SCM staff in 1951 but his roots in the movement go back a half century earlier when his missionary father committed himself to the ‘evangelisation of the world in this generation’ after reading a book by John R. Mott. Looking back over the past century, Boyd describes CICCU’s disaffiliation in 1910 as having global and long-term implications, describing it as ‘a sad event, and a foretaste of what would happen on a global scale in years to come’.

Robin Boyd takes issue with the agnostic sociologist Steve Bruce who attributes it to SCM’s ‘diffuse belief system’ and contrasts the movement in its terminal decline with ‘the much more focused and clear-cut beliefs of the IVF, with its specific doctrinal statement, strong senior leadership and strict conditions of membership involving adherence to the doctrinal statement’. He insists rather that, ‘The SCM had not moved away from the Bible: it was seeking to apply the highest standards of academic integrity and scholarly rigour to its understanding of the Bible’. Instead, he sees the decline of SCM as a result of its focus on a single issue, an uncritical endorsement of Marxism that made it an unwitting tool for Soviet imperialism.

Doctrinal basis

All of this Stacey Woods could see clearly from the ‘get go’. When he became Inter-Varsity Canada’s third General Secretary in 1934 he inherited a statement of faith that had been drafted the year before in the Vestry of Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto. At the suggestion of the then Senior Pastor, Jock Inkster, the beliefs affirmed by members of the China Inland Mission were adopted, as they were when IVCF Canada seeded the American movement. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was the chief influence in shaping the doctrinal basis of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in 1947.

The World Student Christian Fellowship noted disdainfully, a year later, that the new organisation insisted on ‘a personal test of membership which makes certain that those who join a fellowship are ‘real Christians’: membership of a Christian church not being considered a sufficient guarantee of orthodoxy.

Partnership with ML-J

Foundational to the theological self-awareness of IFES was the partnership between Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Stacey Woods. It began with Stacey’s first visit to the UK in 1946 and was cemented by Lloyd-Jones’s impact on the IFES founding assembly in Boston in 1947. In the early years of the movement, Lloyd-Jones’s influence cannot be overestimated. His statement in 1956 at the fourth IFES general committee in Glen Orchard, Ontario, echoes and re-echoes down the years:

‘If I understand the modern religious situation at all, this whole question of authority is one of the most important problems confronting us. As such it demands our careful study.’ After 24 years as general secretary of IFES, Stacey Woods invited Lloyd-Jones to his final general committee to speak on ‘What is an Evangelical?’ His final of the three talks focused on the IFES statement of faith and the difference between primary and secondary truths.

Addressing IFES for the final time, he predicted its future: ‘How then do we define the evangelical as distinct from the Christian in general? Here is the great question today, and I think you will find it to be the question you will have to face increasingly in these coming years.’ In his remaining decade, he never ventured out of the UK again. The talks were his final legacy to IFES as the meetings were the last will and testament of Stacey Woods to IFES.

Legacy through students

Stacey’s often misunderstood obsession (not too strong a word) about an IFES conference centre in Austria can be seen in the context of his concern that IFES not depart from its original doctrinal commitment. A statement of faith, he maintained, was only useful when it was understood, taught, and alive. Conference centres he had initiated in North America would ensure a lasting legacy, as the glorious truths embodied in the IFES statement of faith were passed on from generation to generation by godly scholars who could communicate enthusiasm for a dynamic theology rooted in essential orthodoxies. A study centre in the Austrian Tyrol would do this for the small but growing number of evangelical students emerging in Eastern Europe.

He did not have an easy end. He never quite came into stride when he retired from IFES at the end of November 1972. He was anxious and fearful about his legacy, as older people often are. As he wrote at the end of his Growth of a Work of God (1978), five years before he died: ‘In looking ahead we must never forget that Inter-Varsity is a confessional movement. In our doctrinal basis, certain relevant essential truths of the Bible are emphasised. Our staff must always be men and women of conviction who will emphasise these essentials.’

In life and in death, the legacy of C. Stacey Woods does endure. Here is one man who made it possible for IVF / UCCF / IFES to engage the university. Students would be trained and equipped not to compromise, for, as he maintained, student mission and the Christian mind must have running through them a pervasive theological commitment to truth, to the Church’s orthodox teaching over two millennia.

A. Donald MacLeod, Research Professor in Church History at Tyndale Seminary, Toronto, is author of C. Stacey Woods and the Evangelical Rediscovery of the University (IVP USA, 2007).

Based on an address given at the IFES World Assembly in July 2007.

A. Donald MacLeod reminds us of a large legacy