The Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship was formally established in 1928 as the Inter Varsity Fellowship, having emerged informally as a body influenced by the
Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union earlier in the 1920s. CICCU had split from the broader
Student Christian Movement (SCM) in 1910, following tensions between the two throughout the first decade of the 1900s. With a stronger
conservative and evangelical presence than other Christian Unions, CICCU disagreed with SCM's move towards interdenominationalism and
modernism (including the endorsement of newly emerging methods of
Biblical criticism) and wanted a greater emphasis to be put on
evangelism. An attempted reconciliation between the two groups in 1919 was ultimately unsuccessful, owing to CICCU's insistence on the centrality of the atonement for Christian faith, which SCM would not agree to. Evangelical students in the
Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union subsequently seceded from the SCM and, following a two-year reaffiliation, permanently left the SCM in 1927. From 1919, under the influence of
Norman Grubb, conservative evangelical students from UK universities began meeting at an annual conference in London. The first meeting produced a declaration critical of the Student Christian Movement, in particular criticizing its basis of faith for not mentioning the
divinity of Christ and omitting any mention of sin, forgiveness, and salvation. In 1922, at the fourth annual meeting, it was decided to formally make the conference an annual event, as well as to appoint an executive committee and draft a constitution. The constitution of the Inter-Varsity Conference, which was accepted in 1923, included the group's doctrinal basis. The 1923 doctrinal basis included the "divine inspiration and infallibility of Scripture", the "universal sinfulness and guilt of human nature", and the "redemption from guilt, penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death... of Jesus Christ". Anyone who wanted to hold an official position in the running of the conferences had to sign the basis of faith, a requirement was created for prospective speakers to hold views in accordance with the basis, and the conference was prohibited from undertaking joint activities with groups that did not doctrinally align with the conference. By 1928, the Inter-Varsity Conference became a permanent fellowship of evangelical Christian Unions and rival organisation to the SCM. After becoming the secretary of the Inter-Varsity Conference in 1924,
King's College alumnus
Douglas Johnson was chosen as the first and founding General Secretary of the
Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions (
IVF) by delegates of the 1928 conference. He remained in this role until 1964. In 1997, UCCF-affiliated Christian Unions at universities on the
island of Ireland formed an independent movement called IFES Ireland (later renamed Christian Unions Ireland). Owing to the increasing number of IVF-affiliated Christian Unions in non-university
colleges, the Inter-Varsity Fellowship changed its name to the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship in 1974. Until 2007 UCCF continued to act as the umbrella organization for Christian Unions in institutions within both the
higher education and
further education sectors. In that year, UCCF, in co-operation with
Scripture Union, launched Festive, an independent initiative focused on supporting Christian Union groups in further education and
sixth form colleges.
Key staff •
Douglas Johnson, Secretary, 1928–64 • Richard Cunningham, Director, 2004–2024 • Matt Lillicrap, Chief Executive Officer, 2024-
Research UCCF supports biblical research through
Tyndale House,
Cambridge, which opened in 1945 and became independent in 2015. From the late 1980s and into this century, support for those involved in Christian ethics was provided through the Whitefield Institute,
Oxford, founded by
E. David Cook. In 2006, this was reconstituted to become the
Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, now the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. ==Theology==