Haystack Prayer Meeting

In the summer of 1806, five students from Williams College in Massachusetts gathered in a meadow to pray for the spread of the gospel to the nations. A thunderstorm broke over them, and they sought shelter under a haystack while they continued their earnest prayers. What seemed like a small and hidden meeting became one of the defining moments in the history of missions. From that prayer meeting came a vision that the gospel must be carried to the ends of the earth, and that students and ordinary believers could be the instruments God would use to accomplish it.

The students, Samuel Mills, James Richards, Francis Robbins, Harvey Loomis, and Byram Green, were deeply moved by the plight of those who had never heard the name of Christ. Their conviction was that prayer must lead to action, and that America must rise up to send missionaries abroad. Out of their prayers grew the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810, the first organized missionary society in the United States. Within a decade it had already begun sending missionaries to faraway lands, including the first company to Hawai‘i in 1819, directly answering the longing prayers of Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia.

The reach of the ABCFM was astonishing. In less than forty years, missionaries had been sent to dozens of countries and peoples. By the mid nineteenth century the ABCFM had carried the gospel to Hawai‘i, the Marquesas Islands, Micronesia, India, Burma, Ceylon, China, Turkey, Greece, Africa, and many of the islands of the Pacific. In some cases they were the very first Christian witnesses ever to arrive. The society also became a driving force for Bible translation. Missionaries supported by the ABCFM translated Scripture into more than thirty languages during its early decades, ensuring that people could hear God’s Word in their own tongue.

Samuel Mills, one of the young men who prayed under the haystack, went on to be a founding influence not only in the ABCFM but also in the American Bible Society, established in 1816. That organization became one of the most important means of publishing and distributing the Bible, supporting translations, and putting the Scriptures into the hands of people across the world. From that single haystack prayer meeting, God raised up not just missionaries but movements to translate, print, and distribute His Word to the nations.

The Haystack Prayer Meeting reminds us of the power of prayer. What began with five young men kneeling beneath a haystack became a global movement that sent hundreds of missionaries, translated the Bible into dozens of languages, and carried the gospel across continents and oceans. Its legacy endures as a testimony that when God’s people pray, the world can be changed.