Australian Student Christian Movement - Conflict

Conflict

There is at times conflict with conservative evangelical Christian groups on campus, such as the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (affiliated to the parachurch International Fellowship of Evangelical Students). While the formation of the ASCM was inspired by the charismatic American evangelical ecumenist, John R. Mott, from the beginning the Australian movement had a tense relationship with evangelicalism, deciding not to adopt Mott’s watchword of “the evangelisation of the world in this generation”. The ASCM refused to hold American-style university missions; encouraged liberal Biblical interpretation; and supported the modernist side in the modernist-fundamentalist controversy of the 1920s. In 1930 the Evangelical Union split off from the ASCM; a division that has never been healed. While this split was seen as a catastrophe, by no longer feeling the constraint of conservativism, ASCM had the flexibility to explore liberal issues in a more consistent and concise way. The areas of engagement included science, psychology, humanism and Communism amongst many others. In the early years of the ASCM's history, conflict was often over issues of theology and biblical interpretation. In later decades the conflict was often over social issues, including sexuality. Since the 1990s, the ASCM has promoted itself as queer- friendly and has supported gay, lesbian and bisexual Christians who had been hurt by their treatment within conservative Christian groups.