A Place of Destiny
“There has been at times a deep and solemn thoughtfulness among the students at the State University …under the influence of the Holy Spirit…banishing the last remains of skepticism.”
(1850’s revival at the University of Michigan)-New York Herald
“Tuesday April 20: Being some rain in the fore part of the day, we could not meet in the woods for prayer so we met in Phi Gamma Hall, and in a few minutes there were six or eight converted and we went to the church where there were several more converted before we left.”
1858 student diary, Church College
“A number of our choices young people felt that God was calling them to missionary work…so great was the power of God. The meeting continued to well after midnight and a number were saved.”
The History of Seattle Pacific College
In 1886 the first ever Christian conference for College Students was held at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts. On Friday evening, the last day of the conference, 250 students were given a challenge by Robert Wilder to consider taking the gospel to the world as foreign missionaries. One by one, coming forward to except the challenge, were 100 students from schools such as Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Cornell. As a symbol of their commitment, each student signed a pledge, which simply read:
“We the undersigned, declare ourselves willing and desirous, God permitting, to go to the unevangelized portions of the world.”
Seeing God’s hand at work, Wilder spent the next year feverishly traveling to over a hundred and fifty campuses giving the same challenge, and seeing an additional 2,100 sign the Pledge. And this, quite literally, was only the beginning; for over 50 years missionaries would pour out from the Student Volunteer Movement to the far corners of the earth-a total of 20,500 missionaries, the greatest missionary endeavor in the history of the church.
In 1948, The Student Volunteer Movement splintered, its evangelistic core feeling increasingly unwelcome joined with a newly formed college ministry and held their first missions conference in Urbana, Illinois. The group is known as InterVarsity and was soon joined by Campus Crusade for Christ and other campus ministries: a whole new missionary enterprise once again springing from the campus and flowing out to the world.
But the history of God using college students and the University goes back much further, threading through the great spiritual revivals of the nineteenth and eighteenth century, and back to the Protestant Reformation which was launched at the University of Wittenberg and nurtured on the campuses of Paris, Toulouse, and Basel.
The fact is, no one thought up the strategy of fulfilling the Great Commission by reaching the college campus. Campus ministry is the result of the observation that God has chosen to use University and college students like you as His primary vehicle in accelerating the evangelism of the world. The campus ministry is the heart of God’s global missionary strategy.