Out of a New England Haystack

One summer day in 1806 a band of pious students at Williams College got caught in a thundershower, huddled under a haystack to keep dry and held a prayer meeting. By the time the downpour ceased they had vowed to carry the Christian message overseas. One of them eventually became a pioneer evangelist to India while others helped create the U.S.'s first two foreign mission boards.

From its unlikely beginning at what became known as the Haystack Prayer Meeting, the U.S. Protestant missionary movement has depended on collegiate enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm is increasing at a remarkable rate. Last week, as the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship held its eleventh triennial Missionary Convention, a record 16,000 vacationing collegians flocked to the frozen University of Illinois campus to investigate foreign mission careers. Inter-Varsity, an Evangelical group that began in England and now has chapters on 600 U.S. campuses, had to turn away thousands of others because the university's domed Assembly Hall could hold no more.

God's Hand. Though millions of people are "extremely hostile" to Christian missionary work, said John Stott, the best-known Evangelical preacher in the Church of England, it is "neither an unwarranted intrusion into other people's privacy, nor a regrettable Christian deviation, nor the hobby of a few eccentric enthusiasts, but a central feature of the historical purpose of God." After absorbing such inspirational addresses, the students visited recruiting booths set up by 125 Protestant mission boards and attended workshops ranging from "Trends in Linguistics" to "The Hand of God in Black History."

Inter-Varsity does not keep track of mission-minded students once they graduate from college, but it does ask those at its conventions to consider signing commitment cards. Within six months after the 1973 convention, 1,700 students had filed cards stating, "I believe it is God's will for me to serve abroad," and another 3,600 had pledged to "actively seek" God's guidance on whether to serve overseas. Such decisions are not made lightly. At last week's commitment service, Billy Graham said somberly that today's missionaries, like the New Testament disciples, may suffer ostracism, persecution, even death (an example four weeks ago: three Catholic missionaries in northwest Rhodesia, shot by a nationalist guerrilla).

There should be no job shortage for the volunteers of 1976. The Intercristo computer job-matching service offered 14,000 potential openings, mostly in the Third World, where opposition to missionary work in some areas is still intense. The new Mission Handbook, to be published by World Vision this month, reports that there are now an all-time high of 35,698 Protestant missionaries from the U.S. (v. 7,010 Roman Catholic ones), and that church members' annual giving to mission boards totals $633 million, a 60% jump in three years. Though several denominations such as the Episcopal, United Methodist and United Presbyterian Churches have been trimming their missionary work, the Evangelical movement clearly treats overseas missions as a growth industry.

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