Our history

Christians in Science, CiS, is the current name of a group that started life in the early 1940s as a small group within the Graduates' Fellowship of the IVF (which is now called UCCF: the Christian Unions). The group operated under a variety of names ­ the Science Group, the Research Scientists' Section, and so on ­ but in 1950 it became the Research Scientists' Christian Fellowship, RSCF for short, and operated under that name till 1988. Interest in RSCF activities began to extend beyond the community of research scientists, and eventually it was decided to recognise this fact by changing the name to Christians in Science. CiS became financially independent from UCCF in 1996 but continues to be affiliated to that body.

Conferences

The first significant activity of the group was a residential conference held over a weekend in 1944, which was of course during the Second World War. A report of that conference was produced as a printed booklet of sixteen pages, which contains summaries of the papers read and of the discussions that followed. There were six papers: two by G C Steward and one each by O R Barclay, R E D Clark, R J C Harris and A E Bailey. In his book Evangelicalism in Britain 1935-1995 Oliver Barclay records that the participants at this conference were a dozen research students and just two university teachers. The early conferences were residential, extending over at least two days, which gave members of the group an opportunity to get to know one another better. The fifth conference, which was held in Birmingham in 1950, was a one-day affair, however, and before long it had become a tradition that the annual RSCF conference was held on a Saturday near the end of September, almost always in London. In some years there have also been additional smaller conferences for the benefit of people who cannot easily spend a day in London. Membership of the group grew from a few dozen In the 1940s to around 700 at the turn of the century. The number of people attending the annual day conferences has grown over the years. By the late 1980s an attendance of around 80 was typical. In the 1990s (not counting a large joint conference in 1998) attendances averaged around 95. In the last few years attendances at the main annual conference have averaged over 100. There have been a number of joint conferences; the partner for two of these (both residential, in 1985 in Oxford and in 1998 in Cambridge) was the American Scientific Affiliation, a body similar in many respects to CiS, which holds its conferences in many different places both within and outside the USA; the 1998 conference had an attendance of 271.

Publications

From the early days the members of the group were scattered across a wide area of the country and written communications were as important as meetings. The early conference reports, newsletters and other small publications grew in size and led to the launch in 1989 of a substantial academic journal published by Paternoster Periodicals. This has appeared in March and October each year since then. All members of the two sponsoring bodies (Christians in Science and The Victoria Institute) receive it automatically and many other individuals and libraries buy it directly from the publisher or in other ways.

A fuller version of this history is in preparation, and the editor of that would welcome reminiscences or documentary records of the early activities, such as the field courses that were run during the 1950s.

Bennet McInnes
Knockmahar (Lethendy Road)
Meikleour, PERTH, PH2 6EB

1 December 2005