THE CAMBRIDGE SEVENTY:
A Missionary Movement in 20th-century Britain.
By Ian M. Randall
Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide.
80 pages. £5
ISBN 978 1 526 201 997
In 1885, six students from Cambridge and one from the Royal Military Academy decided to become missionaries in China and became known as The Cambridge Seven. The most well-known was the England cricketer, C.T. Studd, who later worked in India and Africa and was the founder of Worldwide Evangelisation for Christ, now WEC International.
This short book tells the story of how nearly 70 years later CICCU (The Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union) prayed that 70 members would commit themselves to missionary service – hence the title The Cambridge Seventy.
Opened doors
Much had happened and changed in the 1950s since the 1880s. Two world wars had had devastating effects on the moral and spiritual health of the nation. War made it difficult for people to move to live where they felt called to work. Within CICCU missionary fervour had declined. But dramatic change occurred in the 1950s. Doors that had been closed to missionaries were now open. National Service enabled many men posted abroad to see both the need and the opportunities for missionary service. In the early 1950s approximately half of undergraduates went straight from school to university and the other half after National Service. There was probably a greater seriousness about students’ view of life. In a university of approximately 8,000, CICCU membership was over 400 – the largest university society.
Distinctive in the life of CICCU in the early 1950s was a revival of missionary concern seen, for example, in regular and well-attended missionary breakfasts. A further important difference was the growth of women’s colleges, and Girton College supplied more members of the Seventy than any other. Two Cambridge university missions – those of John Stott in 1952 and Billy Graham in 1954 – had lasting effects. This invaluable book charts where God’s call to missionary service led men and women of the Cambridge Seventy. Whereas the focus of the Cambridge Seven was China, it now became global. This is a unique record of missionary endeavour and just in time, because probably every member must now be in his or her eighties!
