The narrative of Anglican evangelicalism in the twentieth century has become contested ground in recent years. The familiar story of decline from about 1868 to 1945 followed by the post-war recovery associated with John Stott and Billy Graham and symbolised by the Keele Congress has been problematised in a number of ways. David Bebbington, for example, has traced the roots of conservative resurgence in the lively Christian Unions and Public School Camps of the interwar period. Ian Randall and Martin Wellings have drawn attention to the spiritual vitality and evangelical credentials of much of liberal evangelicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Andrew Atherstone has questioned the significance of Keele in the post-war period. Yet though a more richly textured and brilliantly illuminated picture has begun to emerge from all this work, it does not, arguably, quite take us to the heart of Anglican evangelicalism. For that heart was to be found in the twentieth century, as it was in the nineteenth, not in the central councils of the Church, nor in University fellowships, nor even at Keswick or Cromer, but where most Anglican evangelicals were to be found most of the time – in the parish.

The story of Anglican parish ministry in the twentieth century has yet to be told. The outline provided in this chapter is therefore a preliminary sketch, from the turn of the century up to 1980. It does not aim to be comprehensive but instead illuminates some significant developments. It will cite a range of examples but seek to bring evangelical life into sharper focus by concentrating on two case studies in particular: neither of them especially famous but each representative in its own way of a particular situation and variety of evangelical parish ministry. The first is a working-class parish in the north – Christ Church, Chadderton – part of Oldham in Lancashire. Its congregation was drawn largely from workers in the surrounding mills and engineering works, and it had a continuous conservative evangelical tradition in this period. The second is a middle-class parish in Oxford –St Andrew’s, Linton Road – founded in 1906 by a coalition of evangelicals and Prayer Book Anglicans to provide an alternative to Anglo-Catholicism in North Oxford. St Andrew’s flirted with a variety of moderate and liberal evangelicalisms until the mid-1960s, when it settled into a more conservative direction.