Australian Student Christian Movement

), the group was established at a meeting in Wyselaski Hall, Ormond College, University of Melbourne, in 1896, 14 years before the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference that is commonly considered to have inaugurated the modern ecumenical movement.

Yet those who created the ASCM fervently believed that Christian students could be agents of change in the university, the nation and the world.

[1] The ASCM was involved in the formation of the National Union of Students, the Overseas Service Bureau and the Uniting Church in Australia.

This is reflected in the history of the ASCM with their explicit support for Gandhi, the equality of women and their activism for changes to the White Australia policy which reached its climax in the 1960s with the Sydney branch leading the way.

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.

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.