University Archives
Anglican Evangelical Group Movement
The AEGM started in 1906 as a small, informal grouping of discontented evangelicals within the Church of England. The Group Movement, as it was initially called, began in Liverpool, with FS Guy Warman, then vicar of Birkenhead, as secretary. Regional groups were quickly set up and a series of pamphlets produced under the title, English Church Manuals. The Group's heyday was during the 1920s and 1930s, when its message focused on freedom of religion and thought, and on the conversion power of the Gospel (known as 'Liberal evangelism'). In 1923 the Group Movement was renamed the AEGM and it began to hold a yearly meeting called the Cromer Convention. Bible readings at these conventions were often given by Canon Storr, who emerged as effective leader until his death in 1940. The organisation dissolved itself at its last annual conference in 1967 on the grounds that the job it originally set out to do had largely been achieved.
The surviving collection of 100 or so items includes minutes of annual general meetings (1930-1967), and of the Central Committee (1926-1967), as well as minute books of other committees, including the Liverpool Six (1907-1911). There are subject files, plus indexes and lists of members with related correspondence, and miscellaneous financial records. [DEM]