Student Volunteer Movement - Conservative and Liberal Confusion

Conservative and Liberal Confusion

Remedies for the philosophical questions confronting the Movement were not so easy to propose. The leadership of the Movement was clearly divided on the important issues. Special commissions established in 1925 and 1933 to evaluate the policies of the SVM came to some conclusions but did not solve any problems. It became increasingly difficult for the Movement to maintain its original blend of conservative and liberal elements in a time when conservatism and liberalism were rapidly drifting apart.

Executive Committee member E. Fay Campbell wrote to General Secretary Robert Wilder in 1925 expressing the fear that the Student Volunteer Movement was tending to become a conservative general Christian movement, a rival to the YMCA and YWCA on the conservative end of the spectrum. Wilder replied: "I may be wrong, but I believe that there is more danger of our Movement's losing conservative Volunteers than-liberal Volunteers. In two conservative institutions the Volunteers voted separation from the SVM on the ground that we are too liberal theologically." Wilder's concluding plea that theological controversy be avoided in Movement work reflected the failure of the SVM leadership to comprehend the inevitability of liberal /conservative conflict in the changing religious scene.

The correspondence and documents of the Student Volunteer Movement from this period of its history seem to point to a three layer, conservative/liberal/conservative distribution in the hierarchy of the organization. At the highest echelons of authority men like General Secretary Wilder and his chosen successor, Jesse R. Wilson, as well as various members of the Executive Committee, held to a basically conservative outlook throughout the period. They consistently called for deeper spiritual power in the Movement and emphasized the need for personal evangelical faith. In 1933 the Commission on Student Volunteer Movement Policy submitted a report which among other things questioned the entire "reservoir system" of missionary recruitment upon which the SVM was based. An interesting exchange of correspondence between two Commission members suggests that the higher echelons deliberately chose to disregard the proposals offered by the Commission:

"There is an obvious shelving of the evidence. To my mind that pamphlet is nothing short of an unintended but actual betrayal of trust to those who supplied facts and got only one man's opinion in return, or the opinion of his group. My real concern is not for the SVM but for the future of Mr. Wilson. I truly believe that unless he makes a complete turn in his methods of operation, he will be shelved by those demanding a larger vision than exists in the SVM at present."

By 1935 Jesse Wilson was considering resigning from the General Secretaryship. A letter from his friend E. Fay Campbell again suggests the extent to which the Movement was wracked by conservative/liberal dissension: "Your years as SVM secretary have been terribly hard due to the spirit of the times, R.P. Wilder's ineffective leadership and the situation in the General YMCA-YWCA. It was inevitable that your name and the name of the SVM should be identified with outworn ideas. I know it wasn't true that you didn't believe in social religion, but I also know that the fight for missions has antagonized certain People. You know I have talked on this point many times in YMCA group when you were accused of being only a personal gospel person."

Below the sphere of Wilder and Wilson there appears to have been a liberal contingent in the SVM which included educational secretaries and traveling secretaries as well as the most articulate and active portion of the actual student volunteers. The existence of this contingent explains the fact that many of the publications and convention themes of the period were rather far to the liberal side of the theological and missiological spectrum despite the SVM's leaders' conservative reputations. Many evidences of a liberal orientation in the Movement could be cited. Liberal missiologists Daniel Fleming and Oscar Buck were among those invited to speak at the 1924 Indianapolis convention. Fleming's book, Contacts with Non-Christian Cultures, was given a very laudatory review by SVM educational secretary Milton Stauffer in the October 1923 issue of Intercollegian. The 1930 issue of the SVM periodical Far Horizons were centered around the primarily social rather than personal gospel themes of l)How do foreign missions meet human suffering?; 2) How do foreign missions create world solidarity? and 3) How do foreign missions fill the hunger of men?

The liberal drift of the Student Volunteer Movement was accentuated by the gradual withdrawal of conservative elements from the Movement. By 1925, at least three local Volunteer Bands had disassociated themselves from the national Movement, groups which E. Fay Campbell dismissed as uncooperative "controversial fundamentalists." In 1928, when the Moody Bible Institute withdrew its support of the Movement, Campbell was a bit more concerned: "We need their point of view decidedly; in fact it would be nothing short of a major tragedy if they were to pull out of the Movement now and take with them some of our more conservative groups."

Campbell's cause for concern was real. Examination of the denominational preferences of sailed volunteers for the years 1910 to 1930 reveals that while in the earlier years the vast majority of the volunteers had sailed under appointment to mainline denominational boards, as the Movement progressed through the 1920s an increasing proportion of its volunteers were sailing under faith mission boards. This trend in the Student Volunteer Movement reflected a similar tendency in the general missionary movement. The Movement now found itself in danger of losing the support of the conservative core which was supplying an increasing proportion of its volunteers.

Faith mission boards, so-called because of their methods of securing personnel and financial support, had long been part of the American missions scene. One of the earliest, the China Inland Mission, had been established in 1865. These mission boards, generally characterized by theological conservatism, had participated wholeheartedly in the early years of the Student Volunteer Movement, though their programs were not nearly so large as those of the mainline denominations. As the gap between conservative and liberal missions theory opened and grew in the years following World War I, the Volunteer Movement found itself increasingly unable to cater simultaneously to the interests of the faith mission boards and the more liberal denominational boards.

As the 1930s approached, a growing proportion of missionaries going overseas were supported by faith mission boards. Reasons for this have been suggested by conservative missions historian Harold Lindsell: "Liberalism has never been noted for its missionary zeal. The inroads of scientist, behaviorism, and humanism may well have been the consequence of an uncertain theological note which carried no impelling conviction of the Gospel imperative for those without Christ." The theology of the faith missions, on the other hand, has had a compelling motivation for missions, asserting that no person can be saved from eternal damnation except through hearing and believing the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The expanding faith missions were not inclined toward ecumenical cooperation. They increasingly drew away from the SVM, draining off financial support as well as potential volunteers. In 1934, General Secretary Jesse Wilson reported to the SVM General Council that "Many friends, rightly or wrongly, have questioned the soundness, from an evangelical point of view, of the Movement's present position and have preferred to make their contributions to organizations concerning which no such questions have arisen." A direct rival to the Student Volunteer Movement's work was growing in the conservative wings during this period, although not emerging officially in the United States until 1940 as the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. In 1934, a year after the conservative Intervarsity Missionary Fellowship had been formed in Britain, E. Fay Campbell characterized the Volunteer Movement's position as follows:

The SV groups in the USA and Canada are in close contact with certain Christian groups which are not being reached very effectively by the General Movements...(but) I do want to remind you that there is a considerable movement of extremely reactionary students springing up in many parts of the world including Great Britain. We are simply crazy if we think that this movement is not going to make real headway in our American colleges.

In 1935, General Secretary Jesse Wilson and Vice Chairman of the Administrative Committee C. Darby Fulton resigned, essentially because of the increasingly liberal drift of the Student Volunteer Movement. However, while the official stance of the Movement was becoming defined as liberal, particularly because of its cooperation with the YMCA, the evidence also shows that a large portion of the Movement's student constituency continued to be of a rather more conservative cast. In 1928, Jesse Wilson had reported a revival of interest in missions on the campuses he had visited. The total number of outgoing missionaries for 1929 was a twenty-four percent increase over the total number sailing in 1928 and a forty-eight percent increase over the number sailing in 1927. In 1928, there were 252 new student volunteers, while in 1929 there were 609 new volunteers. Wilson thought that the SVM could survive and thrive by falling in with the growing conservative missions revival, but the majority of the Movement leadership was reluctant to see the Movement go in that direction. They were appalled by the fact that the Movement's membership was increasingly conservative. In 1936, reporting on a tour of American campuses, SVM secretary Wilmina Rowland wrote of the following conditions: "Some students confess that they have gotten wrong impressions of the missionary enterprise through the Student Volunteers on their campus, who in such cases enlist a pious group of the more dependent-minded students....In summary, it seems to me that the SVM across the country is quite definitely conservative."

Perusal of the correspondence between SVM headquarters and local Student Volunteer groups during this period confirms Rowland's analysis of the situation. While the Movement had once been a powerful force on prestigious campuses, the majority of Volunteer groups during the 1930s existed at small rural colleges and were propelled by local tradition rather than following closely the lead of the national Movement.