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The Early Years of the Christian Endeavour Movement: Innovation and Consolidation at a Local Level, 1881–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2021

Roger Ottewill
Roger Ottewill*
Affiliation:
Southampton
*
*15 Atherley Court, Southampton, SO15 7NG. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

From its American roots in the early 1880s, within twenty years the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour (YPSCE) had become a worldwide phenomenon. This article focuses on how the YPSCE developed at a local level, specifically within the English county of Hampshire. Here, as elsewhere, it touched a ‘spiritual nerve’. With its motto, ‘For Christ and the Church’, it quickly became established in the various denominations that constituted evangelical Nonconformity. Consideration is given to the spiritual, social and service attributes of the YPSCE, which inspired young people to become involved, together with the attendant institutional imperatives in the form of committees, combinations and conventions. Attention is also drawn to the challenges the YPSCE faced in seeking to consolidate its position as a central feature of church life. In so doing, the article contributes to the historiography of Christian youth movements in general, and of the YPSCE, which has attracted relatively little attention from historians, in particular.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 57: INSPIRATION AND INSTITUTION IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY , June 2021 , pp. 300 - 317
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical History Society

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References

1 The Times, 19 July 1900, 12.

2 Hampshire Advertiser [hereafter: HA], 21 July 1900, 5.

3 From 1898 the Primitive Methodists required each circuit to complete a pro-forma giving details of their Christian Endeavour [hereafter: CE] societies. This was prompted by the establishment that year of a CE Department, which had a full-time secretary, and a secretary in each district of the connexion to oversee the work.

4 The Wesleyan Methodists established their own version of CE, the Wesley Guild, in 1896.

5 See Jordan, E. K. H., Free Church Unity: History of the Free Church Council Movement 1896–1941 (London, 1956)Google Scholar.

6 Clark, Francis E., ‘Christian Endeavour’, in Hastings, James, ed., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols (Edinburgh, 1908–26), 3: 573Google Scholar.

7 There are a number of documents on the internet that provide historical information about CE. See, for example, Francis E. Clark, World Wide Endeavour: The Story of the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor from the Beginning and in All Lands (Philadelphia, PA, 1895), online at: <https://archive.org/details/worldwideendeavo00clar>, accessed 27 December 2020; idem, Christian Endeavor in all Lands: A Record of Twenty-Five Years of Progress (n.pl., 1906), online at <https://archive.org/details/christianendeavo00clar>, accessed 27 December 2020. However, these tend to be somewhat triumphalist in tone and lack academic rigour.

8 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to 1980s (London, 1989), 129, 226.

9 Binfield, Clyde, So down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1780–1920 (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

10 Jones, Robert Tudur, Congregationalism in England 1662–1962 (London, 1962), 315–16Google Scholar.

11 Watts, Michael, The Dissenters, 3: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity (Oxford, 2015), especially 168–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Yalden, Peter, ‘Association, Community and the Origins of Secularisation: English and Welsh Nonconformity, c.1850–1930’, JEH 55 (2004), 293–324Google Scholar.

13 Clark, World Wide Endeavour, 92.

14 Andover Advertiser, 20 November 1903, unpaginated.

15 Hants and Berks Gazette [hereafter: HBG], 11 April 1908, 5.

16 Bournemouth Guardian [hereafter: BG], 17 December 1910, 6.

17 Watts, Dissenters, 3: 175; see also Yalden, ‘Origins’, 309.

18 Jones, Congregationalism, 315.

19 Tens of millions of copies of this religious novel have been sold.

20 World's Christian Endeavor Union, ‘The Christian Endeavor Pledge’, online at: <http://www.worldsceunion.org/files/the_christian_endeavor_pledge.pdf>, accessed 15 December 2020.

21 Hampshire Telegraph [hereafter: HT], 24 October 1908, 2.

22 Although the YPSCE was primarily an organization for younger people in their mid-teens to early twenties, events of this kind attracted people of all ages.

23 The proceeds were devoted to the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon fund: HBG, 21 February 1903, 5. In March 1904 the same society organised a concert: HBG, 26 March 1904, 6.

24 Portsmouth Evening News [hereafter: PEN], 26 March 1914, 3; about 80 attended.

25 HA, 21 July 1900, 5.

26 HT, 24 January 1903, 6 (emphasis mine).

27 HT, 12 April 1912, 2. The Revd Schofield Thomson was the minister of Immanuel Church (Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion) in Basingstoke from 1907 to 1915.

28 Ibid. The Revd David Lakie Ritchie was a prominent Congregational academic and between 1904 and 1919 was principal of Nottingham Congregational Institute.

29 Yalden, ‘Origins’, 312.

30 HT, 30 January 1892, 2.

31 HT, 6 February 1904, 2.

32 HBG, 17 February 1906, 5.

33 BG, 17 June 1905, 5.

34 Bournemouth Graphic, 1 March 1912, 14.

35 Between February and October 1912, YPSCEs in the Bournemouth area sent ‘250 hand written letters, 500 magazines, 290 papers, 50 New Testaments, 90 needle cases, 50 book bags, and £2 9s 6d in money’: BG, 22 February 1913, 9.

36 HT, 29 May 1909, 2.

37 Yalden, ‘Origins’, 312.

38 Ibid. 313.

39 Ibid. 314.

40 BG, 17 June 1905, 6.

41 MacFarland, Henry, ‘The Christian Endeavor Movement’, North American Review 182 (1906), 194–203Google Scholar, at 199.

42 Hampshire Chronicle [hereafter: HC], 22 March 1902, 5.

43 Yalden, ‘Origins’, 314.

44 BG, 17 June 1905, 6.

45 HC, 22 June 1895, 3.

46 Ibid.

47 Address by Sister Mary of the West London Mission at a convention of the Bournemouth and District CE Union: BG, 2 October 1897, 6.

48 A ‘very stirring address’ by the Revd J. D. Jones at the annual meetings of the Bournemouth and District CE Union: BG, 16 February 1901, 6.

49 Discussed at the annual meetings of the Portsmouth and District CE Union: HT, 14 January 1903, 6.

50 A paper delivered by A. C. Bunch of Winchester at the ninth annual convention of the Hants CE Union, in Winchester: BG, 17 June 1905, 6.

51 HC, 16 April 1904, 9.

52 Basingstoke Congregational Magazine 1/7 (1908), 2–4.

53 Yalden, ‘Origins’, 323.

54 Winchester, Hampshire RO, 96M72/NMS/B6, Andover Bridge Street Society (Wesleyan), Young Peoples’ Christian Endeavour Society minute book, 1898–1901.

55 Of the six districts which now constituted the union, three recorded increases: Andover (44), Basingstoke (15) and Gosport (69). Three recorded decreases: Bournemouth (221), Portsmouth (51) and Southampton (144): PEN, 14 April 1914, 3.

56 HT, 17 April 1914, 7.

57 Doyle, Barry, ‘Gender, Class and Congregational Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Norwich’, Journal of the United Reformed Church Historical Society 5 (1992–7), 317–35Google Scholar, at 325.

58 Watts, Dissenters, 3: 175.

59 HT, 19 October 1901, 11.

60 Yeo, Stephen, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976), 165Google Scholar.

61 MacFarland, ‘Christian Endeavor’, 195.

62 Ibid. 194.

63 HC, 16 April 1904, 9.

64 PEN, 14 April 1914, 3.

65 For example, Crusaders and Soul Survivor. Here, too, conferences and publications are used to further these ends.

66 ‘CE Online’, at: <http://www.ce-online.org/>, accessed 28 May 2019.