Lausanne World Pulse – Haystack Reloaded: Could a Haystack Change the World Again?
By Paul Van der Werf
Twice in the last two hundred years God has used a haystack to change the world.
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Haystack 1.0: The Haystack Prayer Meeting (1806)
In 1806 five students gathered in a field just outside the Williams College campus (Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA) for their weekly prayer meeting. Caught in a thunderstorm, the five found shelter under a large haystack and continued their prayers. Freshman Samuel Mills directed the discussion and prayer toward their missionary obligation. The students specifically discussed the needs in Asia; one of the men suggested that it was too dangerous, and that they should wait to go until Asia was safe and “civilized.” They decided to commit the matter to prayer and “willed that God should have their lives for service, wherever he needed them.” Seeing their own responsibility to reach their world and believing that the choice of what they would do with the Great Commission was in their hands, Mills catalyzed their faith and their prayers by exclaiming, “We can do this if we will!”
That self dedication gave birth to the first student mission society and within five years, through the influence of these and other students, the first mission sending organization in America was founded and seven student volunteers set sail for India in 1812. Over the next several years numerous mission societies were founded on campuses throughout the United States and more missionaries were sent out through new sending boards. Kenneth Scott Latourette, one of the foremost historians on Christian movements, notes, “It was from this haystack meeting that the foreign missionary movement of the churches in the United States had an initial main impulse.”
Haystack 2.0: The Student Volunteer Movement (1886)
About eighty years after the Haystack Prayer Meeting a young man in his twenties, Luther Wishard, learned of the story of these five men. Having just been appointed a leader within the newly developed Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), his role was to lead students in their Christian commitment. Wishard visited the Haystack Prayer monument (which had been erected in the exact spot where the five had prayed some sixty years after the meeting) and immediately recognized that what had happened among the students under the haystack was again happening in his generation. “What they had done was ours to complete,” he said. Kneeling in the snow by the monument, Wishard pleaded with God to do it again. “Where water once flowed, may it flow again,” he prayed. Recognizing that his own surrender to Christ must be the first step, Wishard prayed, “I am willing to go anywhere, at any time, to do anything for Jesus.”
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Paul Van der Werf is co-founder and director of operations of Student Volunteer Movement 2. He is also director of the Year of the Haystack initiative. |