Prayer and Student Power

Take the liberal arts colleges in the USA in the late 1700's.  A poll taken at Harvard had discovered not one believer in the whole student body. They took a poll at Princeton, a much more evangelical place, where they discovered only two believers in the student body, and only five that did not belong to the filthy speech movement of that day. Students rioted. They held a mock communion at Williams College, and they put on antiChristian plays at Dartmouth. They burned down the Nassau Hall at Princeton. They forced the resignation of the president of Harvard. They took a Bible out of a local Presbyterian church in New Jersey, and they burnt it in a public bonfire. Christians were so few on campus in the 1790's that they met in secret, like a communist cell, and kept their minutes in code so that no one would know.

 

How did the situation change? It came through a concert of prayer. 

 

There was a Scottish Presbyterian minister in Edinburgh named John Erskine, who published a Memorial (as he called it) pleading with the people of Scotland and elsewhere to unite in prayer for the revival of religion. He sent one copy of this little book to Jonathan Edwards in New England. The great theologian was so moved he wrote a response which grew longer than a letter, so that finally he published it is a book entitled 'A Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of all God's People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth, pursuant to Scripture Promises and Prophecies...'

 

In answer to that prayer, along came Samuel J. Mills, Jr. (1783-1818). He was born in Connecticut as the son of a Congregational minister and was brought up in a godly home. His mother reportedly said of him, “I have consecrated this child to the service of God as a missionary.”1 This was a remarkable statement since missionary interest was practically unknown in the churches of that day, and no channels (such as mission boards) for overseas service existed in America.

 

Mills was converted at the age of seventeen as a part of the Great Awakening that began in 1798 and touched his father’s church. His commitment to world evangelism seemed to be an integral part of his conversion experience. From the moment of conversion, on through the years of his study and for the rest of his public ministry, he never lost sight of this purpose.

At the age of nineteen Mills remarked to his father that he could think of no course in life that would be more fulfilling to him than to “communicate the Gospel of Salvation to the poor heathen.”

One hundred years later on 16 July 1886, two hundred and fifty-one students from eighty-seven colleges, called to Mt Hermon, Massachusetts, by evangelist Dwight L. Moody for Bible study, were being addressed by Arthur T. Pierson on the proposition, 'All should go, and go to all.’ By the time the conference was over one hundred students had volunteered to go as missionaries. This was the actual beginning of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, of which Ruth Rouse judged, 'No voluntary movement has been more powerful in its effects in drawing the churches together than the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. After the conference at Mt. Hermon, Robert P. Wilder and John H. Forman of Princeton were sent as a deputation team to one hundred and seventy-six institutions. By the end of 1887 there were 2,200 volunteers from the colleges and universities’. Part of the significance of the movement is that it brought missions into the university world, and thus, at the proper time, missions became a serious subject for study and action among much of the younger generation.

 

Before and during World War II, so-called conservative churches in Japan were also concerned about overseas missions. The Holiness Church led by Juji Nakata is said to have had three steps of overseas ministries. The first step was the evangelistic ministry towards the Japanese people living overseas, such as those in Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan, and then towards those in Brazil and the United States. The second step was the direct ministry towards the people of the mission fields. Missionaries were sent to the tribal people in Taiwan and Indonesia. The third step was to accept foreign seminary students from Korea, Taiwan, Palau island, Russia, and Brazil for their biblical, theological, and practical training. After completing their training, these

students would return to their own countries for ministry there. The “non-church” group, led first by Kanzo Uchimura and then by Tadao Yanaibara, also had an enthusiasm towards overseas ministries. Though they did not send out missionaries, they had studied about and prayed together for missions, and they sent missionary funds for different missionary works such as

Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission, Inoue’s Taiwan tribal work, Schweitzer’s medical work in Africa, and other works in Korea, Manchuria, and the South Seas.

• 1746 - From Boston, Massachussets a call is issued to the Christians of the New World to enter into a seven-year "Concert of Prayer" for missionary work

• 1747 - Jonathan Edwards appeals for prayer for world missions; birth of Thomas Coke, the "Father of Methodist Missions

• 1806 - Haystack prayer meeting at Williams College; Andover Theological Seminary founded as a missionary training center; Protestant missionary work begins in earnest across southern Africa

• 1900 - American Friends open work in Cuba; Ecumenical Missionary Conference in Carnegie Hall, New York (162 mission boards represented); 189 missionaries and their children killed in Boxer Rebellion in China; South African Andrew Murray writes The Key to the Missionary Problem in which he challenges the church to hold weeks of prayer for the world