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Two hundred years ago, in August 1806, Samuel J. Mills, a first-year student at Williams College in Massachusetts, and four Christian friends gathered to pray in a maple grove near campus. Thunderclouds threatened, so the students sheltered under the eaves of a haystack. As the rain fell, their conversation narrowed to the need for American missionaries in Asia. Exhorting his classmates to consider God's call to foreign missionary service, Mills said, "We can do this if we will."

The first American student missionary society began in September 1808, when Mills and a group of other students formed a community called the "Brethren." After graduation, Mills and James Richards, one of the students who had prayed under the haystack, and some seminarian friends petitioned the General Association of the Congregational Church to establish the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The first North American missionaries set sail for India in February 1812—fewer than six years after the Haystack Prayer Meeting.

Missions fervor spread quickly among collegians. By 1856, 49 of the 70 colleges in the United States with Christian organizations had a Society of Inquiry for the advancement of foreign missions. In December 1888, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM) was established in New York with the slogan, "The Evangelization of the World in this Generation."

Like many other missionary slogans, this one didn't work out quite as intended. The world has not yet been evangelized, of course, and the remnant of the once vigorous SVM eventually died as its focus gradually shifted from overseas missions to political and social concerns in North America. But while the SVM was withering, another campus-based missions movement, the Student Foreign Missions Fellowship (SFMF), was beginning to flower.

After World War II, the SFMF became a missionary department of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA. The first InterVarsity/SFMF student missions convention was held at the University of Toronto in December 1946. An ice storm hit the city on the first day, making transportation dangerous. Still, 576 students from 151 schools attended the convention (which moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1948).

One of the featured speakers, Bakht Singh from India, urged students to consider the cost of following Christ in missions. "Young people, don't follow Christ lightly," he said. "Be willing to pay the cost." That day, 300 students pledged to serve Christ overseas, a hint that American postwar dominance would change the Western missionary movement for a generation.

Now, 200 years after Haystack and 60 years after the 1946 Toronto gathering, a new generation of U.S. students is hearing God's call to global missions. "There's a growing confidence that 2006 could be a marker year for the rebuilding of the student missions movement," says Ryan Shaw, director of Student Volunteer Movement 2, a network of churches and agencies promoting student involvement in world missions. But today's missions-minded students, while similar in their enthusiasm, differ from their predecessors in important ways.

Missions-minded students in 1806—and even 1946—believed that the call to overseas service was for life. Now they're not so sure. With the increasing convenience of international air travel, today's students are more spontaneous about overseas missions. For many, missions is an event, not a vocation that requires the sacrifice of years.

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September 2006, Vol. 50, No. 9