A small group of student leaders gathered in Bowld 221 on Tuesday night to learn about how God has used college students throughout history to make an impact for Christ and how college students can be mobilized for missions in a session led by The Traveling Team.
The Traveling Team, a ministry that grew out of the Student Volunteer Movement, travels to college campuses across the U.S. to mobilize college students for the mission field. The team typically walks through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, showing that God has a heart for the world and that God’s heart for the world is a theme throughout the Bible.
Tanner Callison, one of the team’s leaders, began by sharing how he wasn’t a fan of history until he stepped into a history class his freshman year of college. His professor told the class that, instead of memorizing dates and names, they would look at movements throughout history and see how what has happened in the past affects the present and the future. He also took a class called Perspectives, which taught how God has pushed the Gospel forward throughout the world. He says that his perspective of history then changed from dates and figures to movements and how God has worked throughout history.
“One of the coolest things about God working throughout history is that God, all throughout history, from the beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible, has used His people to push forth the Gospel,” Callison said.
He said that dying to ourselves and to the way that the world tells us to live is the one prerequisite for being used by God and shared a verse from John 12, which says that whoever loves his life will lose it but whoever hates their life will find it. This dying to self, he said, is how several college students made an impact for Christ throughout history.
“[These] people were saying no to the world and yes to God, and God used them in huge, huge ways,” Callison said.
The first student he shared about was William Carey, who is known as the father of modern missions. He was a shoe cobbler who also had a role as a part-time pastor. During a meeting with other pastors that he regularly met with, Carey shared that he had been reading the book of Matthew and had felt convicted that they were not following Jesus’ command to make disciples of all nations.
At the time, churches believed that there was no need for missions because their mindset was that the world was reached if there were Christians in every country. This mindset caused an older pastor, John Ryland, to scream at Carey to sit down because he believed God could convert people without their help.
Ryland’s reaction made Carey uncomfortable because he had been reading the Bible and didn’t see justification for Ryland’s claims, so Carey wrote a pamphlet that laid out the biblical basis for missions. Carey later sailed to India and devoted the rest of his life to missions. This started a movement among Christians in England, who began to understand the need for missions and began to go.
News of Carey’s pamphlet spread to a U.S. college student at Williams College named Samuel Mills. Every week, Mills and his friends would gather to pray and talk about missions, something that was strange in 1806.
“When we look at the atmosphere of American missions in 1806, it’s pretty simple to talk about,” Callison said. “It was zero. There were no missionaries going. There were no mission agencies.”
One day, Mills and his friends went out to a field to pray and talk about their desire to see a missions movement in America. It became known as the Haystack Prayer Meeting.
“Out of these five or six guys, the first six mission agencies in the world were started,” Callison said. “College students, just like you guys.”
As the missions fervor grew in England, a college student named Hudson Taylor who had a passion for China decided to become a missionary. When he got to China, Taylor was surprised to see the English missionaries building English houses and villages and teaching the Chinese to behave and dress like the English before sharing the Gospel. Taylor decided to change the approach and began to dress like and speak in Chinese. Taylor, a successful recruiter and mobilizer, later started a mission agency called China Inland Mission.
“He was so satisfied, so amazed by how God was using him in China and the heart that God had given him for China that he looked at his life and how God had used him in his life that he said ‘I would do it a thousand times over,’” Callison said.
One of the people that Taylor mobilized was Amy Carmichael, who became aware of her need to go after hearing Taylor’s passionate heart for missions. Carmichael went to Japan and Sri Lanka before going to India, where she spent 55 years rescuing orphans from Hindu temples.
“She was willing to say no to the norm of the world,” Callison said. “Everyone in England’s not like ‘hey, spend the rest of your life in India’, but that’s exactly what she did, and God used her in huge ways.”
Taylor also mobilized a student named C.T. Studd, who was born to a wealthy family in England. Studd and his dad and brothers became Christians, but it didn’t affect their lifestyles until Studd’s brother became sick and Studd began to wonder what he was giving his life to. Although Studd had wealth and was the captain of the cricket team at Cambridge, he realized that all of that was meaningless in the face of his brother’s death and began searching for something of eternal value.
“This actually might be a lot of us in this room right now,” Callison said. “Maybe we’re still trying to figure out exactly what we can give our lives to that will be worth eternal value.”
During his search, he heard Taylor speak and gave up everything to go to China. Because he was so influential and because of the great sacrifice that he made, many of his friends followed. They became known as the Cambridge 7 and became a part of Taylor’s China Inland Mission.
“Can you imagine the top ten athletes in the United States right now saying ‘I’m done, I’m going to China?’” Callison said. “Can you imagine the impact that that would have in today’s world if the best athletes in our country said it’s not worth it, not worth all the fame and the flattery?”
“Your ‘yes’ matters in life,” Callison said. “Our personal obedience not only matters for us, but it’s an influence on the people around us. But you won’t know what that looks like until you put your ‘yes’ on the table.”
News of the Cambridge 7 reached a guy named Luther Wishard. Wishard worked for the YMCA, then the Young Men’s Christian Association, one of the first campus ministries to exist. Hearing about the Cambridge 7 sparked Wishard’s desire for American college students to have the same goal, and he went to the site of the Haystack Prayer Meeting to pray that God would start a movement among American college students. He expressed his willingness to “go anywhere at any time to do anything” for God.
Wishard came up with the idea to gather 250 of the most influential male college students for four weeks and let upperclassmen who had a passion for missions challenge and recruit underclassmen for missions.
Wishard approached Robert Wilder, a senior at Princeton, about helping recruit guys to missions, but Wilder said no because he wanted to go to India. Wishard talked to Robert’s sister Grace, who convinced Robert to share his missions vision at the conference and said that she would pray every single day that 100 men would give their lives to missions before the end of the conference.
On the final night, Robert counted exactly 100 students who wanted to give their lives to missions, and they became known as the Mount Hermon 100. This caused a rise in interest in missions and prompted others to get recruited to missions.
John Mott, a sophomore at Cornell, heard a chapel speaker, who happened to be Studd’s brother, share about God’s work in England and began thinking about what it would look like to say no to the world and yes to God. Mott, after much debate, decided to attend the Mount Hermon conference and would become a part of the Mount Hermon 100, traveling around to recruit other students to give their lives to missions.
Mott went on to start the Student Volunteer Movement, which lasted around 50 years and mobilized 100,000 college students, about 1 out of every 37 college students in the U.S.
“Over 50 years, 100,000 college students just like you said no to the world and said yes to God,” Callison said.
Callison said that the lure of the perfect life and our own plans for our lives pull us away from our mission.
“For some of us, we think we have this plan, but what God is saying is say no to the world, say no to our plans, and say yes to what he has called all of us to do,” Callison said. “When these people put their ‘yes’ on the table, people listened and people put their ‘yes’ on the table as well.”
The team then shared a practical tool called a World Vision Illustration that could be used to mobilize other students. David Sosna explained the difference between a Christian and a world Christian, both of which are believers who have placed their faith in Jesus.
“A world Christian has a different perspective on three key things: God’s word, God’s world, and God’s work,” Sosna said.
He highlighted three key verses. Genesis 12 talks about God’s command for Abraham to leave everything to go another land, Matthew 28 talks about Jesus’ command to go make disciples of all nations and Revelation 7:9 talks about all tribes, tongues and nations worshiping Jesus in heaven. These passages summarize God’s heart for the world.
Sosna said that the percentage of unreached people groups who live in the 10/40 window, the region between 10 and 40 degrees latitude, is 97%.
“From birth until death, their entire life, they will never meet a Christian, they will never shake hands with one, they’ll never step inside of a church, they’ll never hear Jesus’ name no matter what they do as long as they’re living in that box,” Sosna said. “That’s heartbreaking and that should hit home because we have access.”
However, only 4% of the world’s missionaries are in the 10/40 window, making this area a vital place for missionaries to go.
“Access always takes precedence over need,” Sosna said.
Sosna said college students can play a part in missions by going and sending. He said we need to be faithful where we are “here” before we go “there” and sending involves praying or giving. He suggested the JP Unreached app, which sends users a different unreached people group each day to pray for.
Sosna closed by encouraging students to be mobilizers. Mobilizers who go back to the Christian and help the Christian become a world Christian adds to the Christians who are actively going and sending, and world Christians become mobilizers, multiplying the effect. He also challenged students to be involved with ministry opportunities now.
“Be there, be active and pray about God growing your vision towards going,” Sosna said.
