The Early Years of the Christian Endeavour Movement: Innovation and Consolidation at a Local Level, 1881–1914

Abstract

From its American roots in the early 1880s, within twenty years the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour (YPSCE) had become a worldwide phenomenon. This article focuses on how the YPSCE developed at a local level, specifically within the English county of Hampshire. Here, as elsewhere, it touched a ‘spiritual nerve’. With its motto, ‘For Christ and the Church’, it quickly became established in the various denominations that constituted evangelical Nonconformity. Consideration is given to the spiritual, social and service attributes of the YPSCE, which inspired young people to become involved, together with the attendant institutional imperatives in the form of committees, combinations and conventions. Attention is also drawn to the challenges the YPSCE faced in seeking to consolidate its position as a central feature of church life. In so doing, the article contributes to the historiography of Christian youth movements in general, and of the YPSCE, which has attracted relatively little attention from historians, in particular.