Press
Urbana.org Press Release: New location; Haystack focus [2004-10-20]
Madison, WI, October 20, 2004 — Jim Tebbe, InterVarsity Vice-President and Director of Missions, is planning innovations for Urbana 06 at its new location in downtown St. Louis, Missouri in December 2006. He said that changing Urbana is an exciting opportunity to further the convention’s unique legacy in North America and around the world….
Urbana 06 hopes to include a commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Haystack Prayer Meeting, a student gathering that marked the beginning of the modern missions movement in North America. Tebbe is confident that the emphases of the Word, the world, and prayer, will continue to be the hallmarks of future Urbana conventions.
North Adams Transcript: Haystack Monument dates to storm in 1806 [2006-07-24]
WILLIAMSTOWN — Pilgrims do not need a special occasion to visit the Haystack Monument on the Williams College campus.
The 12-foot tall marble marker, topped by a globe, represents the global vision of five college students who met at the site in 1806 and started a Christian missionary movement that continues today.
North Adams Transcript: “‘Haystack 5′ inspired movement” [2006-07-24]
Monday, July 24 WILLIAMSTOWN — Many things about the Williams College campus would be unrecognizable to the five students at the original 1806 Haystack prayer meeting. But the multi-faith nature of the Haystack bicentennial conference would make perfect sense to the “Haystack 5.”
The missionary movement inspired by that meeting 200 years ago has been embraced by various Christian denominations, and several of them will be reflected in a three-day bicentennial celebration Sept. 22-24 at the college.
UCNews: ‘Haystack’ observes 200th anniversary [2006-08 / 2006-09]
Next time you’re talking up the UCC, mention the fact that it was Congregationalists who were the first to support foreign missions.
It all happened on an August afternoon in 1806, when five Williams College students — all Congregationalists — met in a northwest Massachusetts field to talk and pray about issues of the day. On this occasion, the topic was the spiritual needs of those in Asian countries.
Reading Eagle: Haystack revival resonates for UCC [2006-08-19]
Aug. 19–WHEN THE PROPHET Elijah underwent a lifechanging experience in 1 Kings 19, he discovered God was not in the storm. That was not the conviction of five young men on a late August Saturday exactly 200 years ago.
The five students at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., holding one of their regular prayer meetings in a grove of maple trees, were forced to take refuge next to — or under — a haystack as a ferocious thunderstorm developed.
Berkshire Eagle: Marking haystack meeting [2006-08-21]
STAMFORD, Vt. — SOME TIME this month, 200 years ago, a handful of students sought whatever shelter a haystack could provide from a thunder storm. The conversation they continued there led to the American foreign missions movement.
A monument, topped by a globe, in a grove of evergreens just north of the First Congregational Church in Williamstown marks the site today.
Christianity Today: The New Missions Generation [2006-08-31]
Two centuries after Haystack, college students remain excited about missions—but with fundamentally different assumptions.
Two hundred years ago, in August 1806, Samuel J. Mills, a first-year student at Williams College in Massachusetts, and four Christian friends gathered to pray in a maple grove near campus. Thunderclouds threatened, so the students sheltered under the eaves of a haystack. As the rain fell, their conversation narrowed to the need for American missionaries in Asia. Exhorting his classmates to consider God’s call to foreign missionary service, Mills said, “We can do this if we will.”
The first American student missionary society began in September 1808, when Mills and a group of other students formed a community called the “Brethren.” After graduation, Mills and James Richards, one of the students who had prayed under the haystack, and some seminarian friends petitioned the General Association of the Congregational Church to establish the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The first North American missionaries set sail for India in February 1812—fewer than six years after the Haystack Prayer Meeting.
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — In 2000, shortly after he was called to serve as chaplain at Williams College, Rick Spalding recalls receiving a letter from an alumnus. The 200th anniversary of the Haystack Meeting was upcoming in 2006. The alum wrote: What will you do to mark it? Now six years later on Sept. 22-24, at least 100 people will gather at Williams to consider the meaning of the word “mission” and, hopefully, inspire young and old alike to take on as their mission contributing to a better world….
Today, tens of thousands of Christians worldwide — evangelicals as well as main line progressives — identify the Haystack meeting with the founding of hospitals, schools and agricultural stations as well as churches. Is the point of christian “mission” to change peoples’ faith, or, to use Spalding’s phraseology — “what we would now call social justice — a sense of humanitarian solidarity and compassion?” The balance between those two thoughts is the intellectual flashpoint for the weekend….