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The rise and fall of the Student Volunteer Movement

The 1870s: rebuilding the missions movement

As the era began, there was a noticeable uptick in expansionistic missions thinking. Joseph Hassell of England published From pole to pole: a handbook of Christian missions for the use of ministers, teachers and others, optimistically believing world evangelization was possible. Dr. Joseph Angus preached a sermon entitled “Apostolic Missions: or, the Gospel for every creature” before the Baptist Missionary Society. His suggestion that 50,000 preachers supported by $50 to $75 million yearly could evangelize the world in a decade sparked the thinking of Rev. A. T. Pierson. Simeon Calhoun, missionary to Syria, wrote that “if the Church of Christ were what she ought to be, twenty years would not pass till the story of the cross should be uttered in the ears of every living man.” F. F. Ellinwood published The Great Conquest saying, “The generation now living is our stewardship.” In 1877, 120 missionaries representing most of the denominations working in China met in Shanghai to discuss the evangelization of that land, and produced an appeal that the church could evangelize the world (Johnson 1988).

Action soon followed talk. The women, who were becoming so active in all realms of life (largely taking up tasks which there were too few men to take up) began taking up the task of missions too. In 1860 women began forming autonomous women’s boards to send out women as missionaries. One example: Mrs. Sarah Doremus founded the Women’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands as a vehicle to send single women as missionaries to women in closed societies where the women were unreachable by male missionaries.

Baptist women were contemplating organizing for missions beyond just the local church level: “The Baltimore women who circularized the South with calls for women to give their mites for missions also advocated organizing Southern Baptist women into local societies and state committees for the purpose of greater efficiency.” (Women’s Missionary Union).

The women’s movements also sparked off another trend that we will follow—the youth movements. In 1876, a small youth group called the “Mizpah Circle” was formed at Williston Congregational Church, led by Harriet Clark. It was a missionary circle for young people, and it would go on to become the massive worldwide organization Christian Endeavor.

Meanwhile, the intersection of the lives of three men would catalyze a movement that would last nearly a century, through World War II. The first was Luther Wishard. When the YMCA formally organized a college division, he was appointed its first campus staff member to direct its work in the higher education institutions of the United States. From 1877 to 1884, Wishard grew the student movement with an emphasis on prayer, Bible study, and evangelism. After hearing the story of Samuel Mills, he made a pilgrimage to Williams College in 1878 where he knelt and prayed in the snow at the Haystack Monument, and began seeking a greater emphasis on the Great Commission in the YMCA.

The second was the Rev. A. T. Pierson, who would become one of the most consistent voices calling for world evangelization by 1900. In a prayer meeting at a Presbyterian church in Detroit, he voiced his conviction that the world could be completely evangelized in the present generation.

The third was Robert Wilder. Born in Kolhapur, India in 1863 to Royal Wilder—sent out by the ABCFM—Robert lived for the first fourteen years of his life in India as an MK of a pioneering missionary family. After thirty years of serving in India, Royal Wilder, who suffered from ill health, was forced to return home. The family lived in Princeton, but the mission field remained in their hearts. Royal Wilder founded and edited The Missionary Review of the World, an influential missionary publication advocating world evangelization. His daughter Grace went to Mount Holyoke, the first women’s seminary, located in Massachusetts. Robert Wilder began studies in Princeton.

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© 2008 Momentum Magazine.
Related: The Mission Manual · Justin Long's Annotated Links and Notes