‘Never was Evangelicalism weaker than in the 1920s – in vigour of leadership, intellectual capacity, or largeness of heart.’ Adrian Hastings’ damning verdict epitomises the conventional view of the period and summarises the master-narrative of Anglican evangelicalism in the twentieth century as a tale of decline and revival. Many historians of the twentieth-century Church of England have followed this line, and have thus neglected the history and ignored the influence of the liberal evangelicals, whose experience from the 1920s to the 1960s was the inverse of the familiar trajectory. Indeed, the anonymous author of The Looking-Glass of Lambeth (1928) suggested that the liberal evangelicals were ‘the most important party in the Church’. This chapter will explore the history of liberal evangelicalism through the rise and decline of the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement (AEGM) and will suggest that the vitality, influence and identity of twentieth-century evangelicalism were more varied than much of the historiography has assumed.

Origins: the Group Brotherhood

The AEGM became a public body in 1923, but its prehistory reached back to the concerns and challenges facing the evangelical school in 1900. As the new century dawned, evangelicals, although well represented in the parishes of the Church of England, were inclined to complain of exclusion from influence and preferment. They were anxious about the growing strength of Anglo-Catholicism and perplexed about the best way to respond to a range of issues often denominated ‘modern thought’: the ‘higher criticism’ of the Bible, Darwinian evolution, changing fashions in theology and shifting social mores.

The mood was captured by a correspondence which ran in The Record, the mainstream Anglican evangelical weekly, towards the end of 1902 on the topic ‘Is controversy justifiable?’. On 12 December a letter appeared from G. S. Streatfeild, vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead, describing the controversy with ritualism as ‘little more than the flogging of a dead horse,’ because