The First Intervarsity Conference
by Norman Grubb

Norman had the opportunity to attend Cambridge University and receive a degree under a special program for the soldiers whose education had been interrupted by World War 1.

When we went up for the Michaelmas Term, we carried on as at Keswick [a well-known Christian conference]. A few of us “prayer addicts” would meet in a man’s room for afternoon tea and then get down to it, often for three hours at a time on our knees, for God to break through at the University. In those days Cambridge was a men’s university, and the two women’s colleges were on the outskirts of the town—well away—Girton and Newnham. It was only about that time that Cambridge got far enough to grant degrees to women, even if they had passed all the exams! But we also voted against having women at our C.I.C.C.U. [Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union] prayer meetings. I shall surely be thought an anachronism when I still say I think it was good. It kept us down to what we were after without distractions!

There was one far-reaching answer I do know of personally, to our labours in prayer. Alfred Buxton, who had gone out with C.T. Studd to start the work in the heart of Africa, and had married Edith, his third daughter, was home on furlough and urging the need of immediate reinforcement for the exhausted little band of six who had stuck it out in Congo through the war. Should I go on now? I had only two more terms—from January to June of 1920—to get this pass degree offered on a platter by the University, and I knew I could easily do that; and then by the strange Cambridge custom, all you do in two or more years is to pay £30, and your B.A. becomes an M.A.! Not an easy decision.

It was attractive to wait the extra half year and get the degree. Sometimes in my human pride I still regret that I didn’t. But no. I know now that God had something bigger in store if I obeyed, and I decided to go at the year end. That meant leaving the University in November. And this was what God had in store.

I don’t know how it came to me like this, but I felt convinced that, before I left, I should go round all my friends or acquaintances with whom I had some links of friendship (though not the inner circle of my keen C.I.C.C.U. friends) and I should pull no punches. This was the last time I would see most of them, and I must tell them exactly what my inner convictions were about how they stood with God. To me it was something like Elisha suddenly equipped with the spirit of Elijah. Obviously not a thing you can do under ordinary circumstances, and normally it might be well considered presumptuous and judgemental. But I did it, and it was a breakthrough.

I had seen nothing like it before, for we had all found Cambridge with its sophisticated ex-officer caste tough to break into; but man after man, some sixteen of them, faced up to the need of accepting Christ, or getting something right which was a block. It was a revival on a small scale and the C.I.C.C.U. asked me to have a special meeting with them about it, which I did.

But the outcome which really mattered was a sudden flash which I can only call an inspiration. If God was working like this at Cambridge, and there was a small start at Oxford, should not every English university have a Christian Union, and then out to the universities of America and the world? Why not have an Inter-Varsity Conference in London as a start? I shared my vision with two friends, Clarence Foster, who in later years was the greatly loved and honoured Secretary of Keswick and head of the Scripture Union, and Leslie Sutton, who has had a major part in the founding and development of Lee Abbey, which has been such a spiritual power in the Church of England.

We agreed together that this was of God and we would get going in arranging this conference around Christmas. We gathered other interested men in to pray and plan it, using Charles Bradshaw’s large room in New Court, Trinity, close to the rooms now occupied by Prince Charles. The result was the first Inter-Varsity Conference (I.V.C.), with a good group from Cambridge and a few from Oxford, London and Durham. That was all. But it was the beginning of what has now actually spread to the ends of the earth.

The I.V.C. continued annually until, under the leadership for years of Dr. Douglas Johnson, who has really been God’s man in developing the I.V.C. to what it is today, it was changed to the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (I.V.F.). Howard Guinness carried the torch into Canada, Australia and New Zealand; Stacey Woods established I.V.F. throughout the U.S.A. but using the extended title of I.V.C.F., adding the word Christian; and in more recent years Stacey Woods has expanded the I.V.F. into the I.V.F.E.U. (Evangelical Unions) which has its unions, and groups, or chapters all round the world in hundreds of colleges and universities.

It is always a thrill to me that I was given a hand in the start of the I.V.F., and that it was the outcome of obedience in dropping the degree, which anyhow in real value was worthless!

–from Once Caught, No Escape