In 1886, 251 young men from nearly 90 colleges gathered together in Northfield, Massachusetts for a month-long Bible conference with famed revivalists D.L. Moody, A.T. Pierson, and others. The students would daily gather together with Moody for 6am prayer meetings, a morning Bible study on the subject of the Second Coming of Christ, and games and sports in the afternoon. Despite Moody’s lack of any formal education, he captivated the hearts and minds of some of the best and the brightest college students with a vision of a great awakening in the hearts of college students to the revelation and beauty of Jesus.
In the midst of this month-long conference, a young radical named Robert Wilder, a recent graduate of Princeton, began to envision his fellow students with a dream to evangelize the world in their generation. Though missions was not the purpose of the month-long conference, it became the dominant theme in the minds of the students as Wilder spread his passion for a collegiate missions movement among the other students. John R. Mott, the future leader of the Student Volunteer Movement, remembered, “You could hardly go anywhere without somebody crossing your path and presenting this great missionary message.”
Robert Wilder’s sister, Grace, had prophesied to her brother that 100 college students would be set apart for missionary work at the summer Bible conference. On one of the final nights of the conference, students gathered together who had consecrated themselves to the finishing of the task of world evangelization in their generation. One by one they explained their reasons for their commitment to this great undertaking. Many remembered the power and effect of this meeting for years to come.
Then, on the night before the conference would end, those who had committed themselves to the missionary cause gathered together for one final prayer meeting to present themselves to the Lord and consecrate their lives as foreign missionaries. There, 99 students gathered together, and as they began to kneel together before the Lord, one final student slipped through the back door and joined his fellow students. These initial 100 student volunteers would come to be known as “the Mt. Hermon 100.”
In a breathtaking moment, just as had been prophesied earlier by Grace Wilder, exactly 100 students who would come to be known as “the Mt. Hermon 100” launched the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. Within one generation, these Student Volunteers would explode from 100 college students to over 20,000 young men and women who became foreign missionaries preaching the gospel in every nation of the earth.
Could it happen again?
The students that were volunteering as foreign missionaries had the best minds and the brightest futures of their generation. Upon graduation, if they desired it, they were all but assured of high-paying jobs in the highest echelons of society and promised lives of prestige and honor. Yet, these student volunteers were captured with a different vision than the so-called American Dream. These students had been swept up into the grand vision of “the evangelization of the world in this generation” and to these student volunteers, anything less than the accomplishment of this vision would have been failure.
In fact, in his later years, John R. Mott, the missionary statesman and primary leader of the Student Volunteer Movement, was asked by President Woodrow Wilson, an earnest and early supporter of the student volunteers, to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to China, a post that promised wealth and prestige. John R. Mott responded by telling Wilson that though he was profoundly honored by the offer, he had to decline. Upon further persuasion with promises from the White House, as legend goes, Mott firmly responded that the problem in accepting was not that the job was too big, but that the job was too small for him as he was already an ambassador of the King of kings and Lord of lords. Wilson later told reporters that Mott was “one of the most nobly useful men in the world.” President Taft had earlier referred to Mott as “one of the great men of this generation.”
The Holy Spirit had directed these young men and women–the cream of the crop–like the daughter of Psalm 45 to “forget your own people…and your father’s house…So the King will greatly desire your beauty.” These student volunteers were consumed not by the things of this world, but by the vision of finishing the task of world evangelization and bringing back the King.
Are there young men and women like that today?
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