June 01, 1986 by Ralph D. Winter

These four pages portray the background of the century initiated by the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. However, something else happened that year that was far more important. As a matter of fact, almost all these events here listed give us insight into what God was doing that did not necessarily attract a lot of secular attention.

Indeed, the reader must be warned that most of these events are not contained in the average college text on American history. For example, in the last century great revivals swept this country. Toward the end of the century Dwight L. Moody cut a phenomenal swathe through both this country and England. The YMCA was a powerful evangelistic movement that also invented basketball and built hundreds of buildings all across America and the world. An organization called "The Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor" (Item #15) created youth groups in 100,000 congregations. Even more extensively a women's missionary movement (#10) spawned women's missionary societies in practically every Protestant congregation in America.

All this makes no difference to an 850 page college text on American history published by Oxford University Press in 1977, A Concise History of the American Republic. It does not make the slightest mention of Moody, the YMCA, or the women's missionary movement, The word missions and the word missionary do not even appear in the index,

Similarly, The American Heritage History of the Confident Years focuses on the period between the War Between the States and the First World War without making any reference to these momentous events which profoundly changed American history. This latter text, while only 400 pages, employs huge double column pages and covers only 54 years. What a brainwashing this book is in terms of the actual facts! Thus, whether you go to school to read a textbook or stay at home and read a high priced, specialized book, you may find the authors so highly prejudiced against religious factors that they feel that they are performing an act of kindness by refraining from criticisms of such things.

At any rate, we can at least mention a number of key events in terms of the unfolding purpose of God for all the earth.

This brief listing highlights three waves of awareness (#1 ,#l 1. #35) in the modern American history. We only touch on the William Carey era sufficiently to give perspective. It illustrates how a student movement (beginning with #7) could add significant force to a mission movement already in progress. Once mission agencies had secured a foothold on the coastlands of the world, it became time to venture inland. And it was another young man, Hudson Taylor, who pointed the way.

Again, a gradual increase of interest among students came to the point where it fairly exploded with the events of 1886 both the year of the Statue of Liberty and the year of the famous 100 Student Volunteers who stepped forward at Mt. Hermon, Massachusetts (#18). The result was the greatest single push forward in missions in all history. The movement was carried forward by the evangelical concensus of that era arid the widespread collaboration engineered by the students, especially when they hit their 40s (#26).

Disillusionment set in with the 1st World War. Malsive immigration of non Protestant populations began to bog down the consensus. The 2nd World War displayed the profound sickness of the western world and further destroyed the high minded ideals of the "confident years."

At the darkest hour of the depression, when more immigrants were returning than arriving at these shores, the final era of the unreached peoples crept into existence. Townsend (#35) and McGavran (#36) led the way to a new awareness of the nature of the unfinished task peoples, not countries: tribes, subnations, people groups that needed to be dealt with one at a time by essentially missionary methods.

As we turn the page, the plot thickens decisively. There was a great jump in response rate at the student missionary conference at Urbana in 1973 (see Items #57, #64, #70, and #77) despite the disillusionments of the preceding six decades. A second, even more hopeful, World Congress on Evangelism was held at Lausanne (#61, compare #49) that directly led to the founding of the U.S. Center for World Mission (#63).

In 1980, a conference on the world level focusing on the unfinished task took place in Edinburgh, Scotland (#73). Shortly after, the oldest association of mission agencies formed an Unreached Peoples Committee (#76). This awareness swept the mission industry (items #78, #79, #81, #82, and #83) and caught on in Latin America (items #86 and #99).

What will happen at Mt. Hermon this time (#95)? Will it be another threshold like 1886 and a sprint for the end of the century? Why not?

Events in the future are listed with question marks unless already scheduled. This should fuel your prayers and challenge your priorities. Put your age instead of mine in the parenthesis after each date so you can get a feel for the possibilities this may have for you personally in the onrush of coming events. This is no time to give up!