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This article is amazing. Tells a picture of what the power of prayer can accomplish!

Why Campus Revivals Spark Missionary Advance*
In America’s Past, Every New Missionary Thrust has followed a Spiritual Revival in Colleges.
Will It Happen Again?
By J. Edwin Orr
Can you imagine…
one third of a university’s student body coming to Christ in a single year?
50 percent of those new believer’s going into full-time Christian work following
graduation?
more than 20,000 students eventually serving Christ overseas due to the influence of a
few of these students?
Imagine it, because it all happened!

It began in the early 1800’s at schools like Amherst, Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, and
Yale where up to half the students turned to Christ. By 1835, 1,500 students had committed their
lives to Christ in 36 colleges. Impressive statistics…especially when you realize that in those days
student bodies numbered only 100 to 250. Similar results continued to be seen from one
generation of students to the next. In 1853, 11 New England colleges with a total enrollment of
2,163 reported that there were 745 active Christians on campus. Of this number, 343 planned to
go into the ministry.
Then in the 1880’s, an unprecedented missionary enterprise known as the Student
Volunteer Movement came into being. “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation”
became its rallying cry. This spirit was evidenced in the movement’s results – more than 20,000
serving overseas mission fields in half a century. College students set the pace in this era of
spiritual advance. The full dynamic of their story cannot be fully appreciated, however, apart from
a look at the context of its beginnings.
In 1790 America had won its independence, but it had lost something as well. In the wake
of the Revolutionary War, French infidelity, deism, and the generally unsettled condition of society
had driven the moral and spiritual climate of the colonies to an all-time low. Drunkenness was
epidemic; profanity was the most shocking kind; bank robberies were a daily occurrence; and for
the first time in the history of the American settlement, women were afraid to go out at night for
fear of being assaulted.
Conditions on campus were no better. A poll taken at Harvard revealed not one believer
in the whole student body. At Princeton, where a similar survey showed there to be only two
Christians on campus, when the dean opened the chapel Bible to read, a pack of playing cards
fell out, someone having cut a rectangle from each page to fit the deck. Conditions on campus
had degenerated to the point that all but five at Princeton were part of the “filthy speech”
movement of that day. While students there developed the art of obscene conversation, at
Williams College they held a mock communion, and at Dartmouth students put on a “anti-church”
play. In New Jersey, the radical leader of the deist students led a mob to the Raritan Valley
Presbyterian Church where they burned the Bible in a public bonfire. Christians were so few on
the average campus and were so intimidated by the non-Christians that they met in secret. They
even kept their minutes in code so that no one could find out about their clandestine fellowship.
Then suddenly, at the turn of the century, the nation made a spiritual about-face that
affected every level of society – from the frontiers to the college campuses. Something so
radically changed the campuses of America that the same schools which a generation before had
mocked the gospel began sending out workers in the harvest!
The beginning of this dramatic change can be traced to Hampton-Sydney College in
Virginia. In
Why Campus Revivals Spark Missionary Advance p 2
1787, with the moral climate there deteriorating rapidly, five non-Christian students decided to
hold a
prayer meeting to ask for God’s help. They locked themselves in a room, for fear of the other
students, and kept their voices down so they would not be caught. However, the other students
discovered them and tried to break down the door. The president of the college heard the
disturbance and came to find out who had started the latest riot. One of the students outside said,
“Oh sir, it’s nothing important; there are just some fanatics in here holding a prayer meeting! Can
you imagine? So we’d thought we teach them a lesson. We won’t hurt them. We’ll rough them up
a little bit, but we won’t hurt them.”
The president rebuked them saying, “You don’t mind cheating, you don’t mind stealing
from rooms, you don’t mind the lying and the profanity, but you object to a prayer meeting. Well, I
do not!” He then knocked on the door and said authoritatively, “This is the president of the college
speaking. Will you please come out?” The students unlocked the door and came out not knowing
what to expect. President Smith said, “Gentlemen, come to my study, we’ll pray there together.”
This prayer meeting marked the beginning of American campus revivals during the Second Great
Awakening of the 1790’s and early 1800’s. Not only did half the students at Hampton-Sydney turn
to Christ as a result, but the revival also spread to local churches and to other schools, having
similar effects.
In college after college students formed similar Christian fellowships. At Harvard, Bowdin,
Brown, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Williams, and Andover, students began to meet and pray. Three
students at Brown formed the College Praying Society which met in a private room “for fear of
disturbance from the unpenitent.” In December 1802, at Harvard, seven students formed the
Saturday Evening Religious Society, which also met secretly. At Yale, president Timothy Dwight
regularly preached apologetical messages in chapel, hitting the relativistic philosophy of the day
head-on with such talks as “Are the New Testament Documents Reliable?” As a result of the
Christians’ prayers and Dwight’s powerful presentations, one third of Yale’s student body
accepted Christ in 1802.
At Williams College in Massachusetts, the scene of discouraging anti-Christian rioting,
there was a small secret band of Christians as well. Burdened by the deplorable conditions on
campus, they met twice a week to pray for revival. Little did they know how abundantly God
would honor their faith. As a result of their prayers, God used these students to make an impact
on not only their campus, but also on an entire century. It was to be through the efforts of the son
of one of those students that the Student Volunteer Movement would eventually be launched in
the 1880’s. However, the beginnings of their global influence for Christ were much less dramatic,
as the following account will show.
One hot August afternoon in 1806 five students hide themselves to pray under the
camouflage of a maple grove. As they met, the sky began to darken, and the accompanying
thunderstorm and lightning persuaded them to run for cover. Before they could reach the campus,
however, the clouds began to disperse and they were able to continue their meeting under the
privacy of a haystack. The group’s leader, freshmen Samuel J. Mills, began to guide the
discussion toward the topic of foreign missions. He contended that it would be impossible for the
masses of Asia and Africa to hear the gospel unless the students from Christian nations were
willing to dedicate their lives to the cause of the Great Commission.
As he shared his vision for world evangelization, he said, “We can do this if we will ,”
revealing a determination lacking in the expected, “We will do it if we can . “ Drawn by the
challenge of their commitment, this group attracted the “cream” of student leadership, including
the valedictorian of 1809. Four years later they asked their denomination to send them out as
missionaries. Prior to this, there was not a single American engaged in preaching the Gospel
overseas. While awakenings in Britain had already led to the formation of missionary societies,
American agencies for sending workers into the harvest had not yet been established. The
leadership of the Massachusetts Congregational Churches agreed to help them and formed the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions – the first American organization of its
kind. Shortly after this pioneering venture, many similar agencies were begun by other
Why Campus Revivals Spark Missionary Advance p 3
denominations – all owing their origin to a group of students from Williams College who had
caught God’s
vision for the world during a prayer meeting.
The revival at Williams and other colleges was part of a far wider movement of the Holy
Spirit that affected not only every level of American society but also other countries of the world.
In Britain, where the movement had originally begun, in addition to numerous missionary, tract,
Bible and reform societies, God raised up the Young Men’s Christian Association in 1844. The
YMCA, which was at first evangelistic as it was social, provided an organizational structure that
would one day link the numerous student Christian groups across America. Through this network
the vision and challenge of total world evangelization would eventually spread to thousands of
students.
The development of the YMCA’s role in sending student volunteers to the world occurred
during another period of worldwide revival from 1857 to 1899. Awakening again broke out as a
result of prayer. Jeremiah Lanphier began a weekly noonday prayer meeting in Manhattan in
September 1857. The first week six attended. The following week there were 14 and by the third
23, at which time it was decided to meet daily. By March 1858 every church and public hall in
downtown New York City was filled. Horace Greeley, the famous editor, sent a reporter racing
throughout the city by horse and buggy to count how many were attending the prayer meetings.
At the 12 locations he was able to get to in an hour, he counted 6,110 people. By May 96,000
New Yorkers – 10 percent of the population of one million – had received Christ. By the end of the
year more than one million throughout the country – 3 percent of the nation’s population of 30
million – had turned to Christ.
As during the early part of the century, the awakenings of 1857 and following years
quickly spread to America’s colleges. In 1858 at Yale, 204 students – 45 percent of the school’s
447 students – received Christ. As a result of revivals at the University of Michigan and the
University of Virginia, the first college YMCA’s were begun to mobilize and equip students for
effective ministries of evangelism and discipleship. By 1877, approximately 50 of the 200 student
Christian societies scattered across the country were affiliated with the YMCA. That same year
the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union was formed to unite the various British student
Christian groups. Then in 1879, Oxford formed its Intercollegiate Christian Union. At Princeton in
1875 there was no YMCA. However, a student Christian group known as the Philadelphian
Society had 110 active members. Luther Wishard, who became the group’s president in 1876,
united the society with the growing YMCA movement.
Through his leadership and the student’s prayers, evangelist Dwight L. Moody was
persuaded to conduct a series of evangelistic meetings on campus. As a result, nearly a third of
the student body received Christ. Among those working in the Princeton YMCA were some of the
most outstanding campus leaders. One such student evangelist was Tommy Wilson, who
eventually became better known as T. Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States.
Luther Wishard’s efforts extended beyond the ministry at Princeton. In 1877, he
spearheaded the formation of a separate intercollegiate division of the YMCA. As the
organization’s first full-time secretary he was instrumental in establishing student associations
nationwide. By 1890 there were more than 250 college YMCA’s with 12,000 members. Thus by
the 1880’s the stage was set for an unprecedented thrust forward toward the fulfillment of the
Great Commission. It would be from this vast reservoir of students associated with the YMCA that
the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions would arise.
The key figure in the movement’s birth was the son of Royal Gould Wilder. After more
than 30 years of missionary work in India, the Wilder family had returned to America where young
Robert eventually enrolled at Princeton. While there, Robert P. Wilder, Phi Beta Kappa scholar as
well as Christian activist, was instrumental in beginning the Princeton Foreign Missionary Society
in 1883. Members of this group signed a covenant pledging, “We, the undersigned, declare
ourselves willing and desirous, God
Why Campus Revivals Spark Missionary Advance p 4
permitting, to go to the unevangelized portions of the world.” They adopted a watchword that
expressed
their objective, “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation.”
Having inherited his missionary father’s world vision and burden for those without Christ,
in 1886 the younger Wilder helped recruit students to attend a summer YMCA conference at
Mount Hermon, Dwight L. Moody’s retreat grounds in Northfield, Massachusetts. By the end of
that conference, 100 of the 251 students had dedicated their lives to missionary service.
Encouraged by what God had done and wanting to capitalize on this momentum, Wilder
and fellow Princeton graduate John Forman traveled from school to school the next year to recruit
more volunteers. By 1888 over 3,000 had pledged themselves to the cause of foreign missions.
Thus, while God had used the YMCA to mobilize Christian students into campus chapters, the
Princeton Foreign Missionary Society influenced the development of the Student Volunteer
Movement, which was used to send them into the harvest. Robert Wilder and his sister Grace,
herself a student at Mt. Holyoke, had been praying that a thousand students from American
colleges would be raised up. God answered powerfully as more than 20,000 set sail over the life
of the movement!
On college campuses during the 19th century, God revived generation after generation of
students and used them to move the church closer to the fulfillment of the Great Commission.
They first pioneered work along the coast lands of Africa and Asia. Then by 1886 a second era
of Protestant missions saw footholds established in the vast inland territories of those lands
through thousands of student volunteers. As today’s students are sensitive to the conviction and
call of the Holy Spirit, perhaps they can match their predecessor’s faith and actions.
Could it be that a movement of 20th century volunteers and national believers might
make this the third and final era of missions?
Perhaps the volunteers’ objective, “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation,”
will be realized during your lifetime.
*From the International Prayer Diary, compiled by Frank Dickerson from the writings of J. Edwin
Orr. Copyright 1981 by Campus Crusade for Christ, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship,
International Students, Inc., and The Navigators. Used by permission.