Student Volunteer Movement

Background

The nineteenth century saw a great expansion of Western Protestant foreign missions and is often called the Great Century of missions. Western civilization held a dominant position in the world at the time, and knowledge of the non-Western world was growing. This climate fueled missionary enthusiasm. On American campuses, a tradition of student missionary societies had continued since the early nineteenth-century "Haystack Prayer Meeting" of Williams College students such as Samuel Mills. In the 1880s the intercollegiate organization of the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) played a central role in the student religious movement. Robert Wilder, a student at Princeton, had founded the Princeton Foreign Missionary Society and was urging his fellow students to commit themselves to missionary service.

Development

• July 1886: At the invitation of the YMCA, a Bible conference for college students (a gathering devoted to intensive Bible study) was held for about four weeks at the Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Dwight L. Moody. It was attended by 251 students from 89 colleges in the United States and Canada. Wilder and others organized separate meetings devoted to missions. At the conference, Arthur T. Pierson challenged the students to evangelize the world in this generation. By the close of the conference, one hundred students had resolved to become foreign missionaries; they are known as the "Mount Hermon Hundred."
• 1886–1887: Wilder, together with John Forman of Princeton, visited more than 160 schools to promote the movement. By the end of 1887, more than 2,100 students had signed the missionary volunteer pledge, about 500 of whom are reported to have been women.
• 1888: Student representatives meeting at Northfield formally organized the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. The YMCA, the YWCA, and the Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance endorsed the plan. John R. Mott, one of the Mount Hermon Hundred, became chairman and led the movement for more than thirty years. Membership required signing the pledge: "It is my purpose, if God permit, to become a foreign missionary."
• From 1891: Large student conventions were held every four years to introduce foreign missions to each new generation of college students. Small groups known as "volunteer bands" were formed at many colleges and seminaries to carry on mission study and prayer. The movement was interdenominational, uniting students of every denomination around a single goal.
• 1900: Mott published a book titled after the movement's watchword.
• 1910: The Edinburgh Missionary Conference, regarded as the high point of the missionary movement of the era, was held.

Results and Influence

As Wilder introduced the movement to Britain and continental Europe, similar student missionary movements arose in a number of countries. More than twenty thousand students are reported to have gone abroad as missionaries through the movement. One count states that 20,500 were sent out over roughly fifty years, mainly to Asia. Many young missionaries are also reported to have arrived in Korea during this period, linking the movement to the early years of Korean Protestant history. Leaders such as Robert Speer, Sherwood Eddy, and Ruth Rouse were also active in the movement.

The movement declined rapidly in the 1920s. Even among its longtime leaders, the view spread that "the evangelization of the world in this generation" was not a realistic goal. By some assessments, it had largely lost its vitality by the 1940s and had effectively ceased to exist by the 1960s.

Assessment

• Some missiologists regard the movement as the most geographically extensive and most fruitful missionary recruitment movement in the history of Protestant missions.
• Some studies from Korean Reformed theological circles hold that the movement declined as missionary zeal cooled and theological drift set in, beginning around the time of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference.
• The movement arose in an era when imperialist expansion was widely regarded as an altruistic undertaking. For this reason, it is sometimes discussed within the historical context of colonialism and missions.
• Within present-day student mission movements, it is frequently cited as an example of how student missionary commitment can be revived.