Reading Eagle: Haystack revival resonates for UCC [2006-08-19]
Copyright 2006 Reading Eagle Reading Eagle (Pennsylvania)
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
August 19, 2006 Saturday
SECTION: STATE AND REGIONAL NEWS
By John W. Smith, Reading Eagle, Pa.
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.
As the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled, they pledged they would carry their Christian faith into all the world.
What followed this 1806 Haystack Prayer Meeting became known as the Haystack Revival, and it led to the founding of the American foreign-missionary movement.
There are a number of 200th-anniversary celebrations going on, including programs at Williams College this week, conferences at several sites in the fall and the declaration by the United Church of Christ of Sept. 24 as Haystack Sunday.
The Rev. Robert Thompson, president of the newly formed Faithful and Welcoming Churches of the UCC, or FWC, chose to use it as the basis for his keynote sermon at the first FWC gathering at Shepherd of the Hills UCC near Sassamansville two weeks ago.
The motto of Samuel Mills Jr., leader of the prayer meeting, was “We can do it if we will,” Thompson said. And Mills and his friends did it. Four years later, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was founded, and two years after that, the first American missionaries set sail for India.
Thompson said the motto could apply to the FWC’s efforts to recall the UCC to a more conservative theological position — specifically, he said, to a more Orthodox view of Christ, a more traditional view of the Bible and a more evangelistic view of the world.
David L. McKenna suggests in his book “The Coming Awakening” (InterVarsity Press) that the storm symbolized “the hostility against them and their faith” at this school which had become “a seedbed for sin and skepticism.” He sees the event as the catalyst, at least in New England, for the Second Great Awakening.
The UCC is very interested in the Haystack Prayer Meeting because all the participants were Congregationalists, one of the constituents of the denomination. (One of the first group of missionaries, though, was converted to the Baptist faith on shipboard: Adoniram Judson kept going, to Burma).
The UCC is offering to churches haystack bulletin covers, prayers, studies, skits, songs and family-night and prayer-vigil ideas.
Thompson noted that aspects of the celebration can be a bit embarrassing to the denomination, as its emphasis on missionary work today is far different from what it was two centuries ago, when the haystackers spoke of their concern for “the dark and heathen land of Asia.”
J. Bennett Guess, editor of the UCC newspaper, pays tribute to the students who “bucked conventional wisdom and dreamed of a world far beyond them — people who, in the spirit of global solidarity, wanted to share love across the continents.”
But he also finds a need to “lament the often-imperialistic consequences of that colonialist era of U.S. Christianity — when exporting American culture was often synonymous with sharing the Good News.”
The suggested UCC Prayer of Confession asks that we realize we have “the capacity to share the inbreaking glory of your realm” and we know “the blessed joy of carrying your love to the ends of the earth.”
It also acknowledges “our complicity with Western Culture in destroying so many indigenous practices of those peoples we want to serve.”
Copyright (c) 2006, Reading Eagle, Pa. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.