History
The young English evangelist, Howard Guinness, toured Australia in 1930 to encourage university students in evangelism. He helped form campus student groups starting in Sydney, then Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart, including Sydney University Evangelical Union (SUEU) and Melbourne University Christian Union (MUCU - originally the Melbourne University Evangelical Union), which celebrated their 75th anniversaries in 2005. Guinness returned in 1933-1934 and founded groups in Perth and Adelaide.
These groups, led by the SUEU and the MUCU, joined together to form a network in 1936 as the Australian Intervarsity Fellowship or IVF, which later changed its name to the AFES in 1973. It had over 2000 members by 1959 and today has groups in over 50 campuses across the country in every state and territory, and employs over 100 staffworkers who look after the students on their various campuses.
In 2005, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first student groups in Australia, AFES ran a "Year of Tertiary Evangelism" involving coordinated events on university campuses throughout the country and the printing of 40000 copies of Mark's Gospel to be freely distributed throughout the year. The theme of the year was "For Christ's Sake", a phrase normally used in swearing, though used here to promote the Christian message itself. Besides the events on specific university campuses, the AFES ran various evangelistic rallies with many Christian groups from different universities attending.
Muriel Porter suggests that AFES is the "predominant student Christian organization across Australian universities," since the demise of the Student Christian Movement and the decline of diocesan-funded university chaplaincies.
Read more about this topic: Australian Fellowship Of Evangelical Students
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