The Haystack Prayer Meeting

Today's Scripture

Psalm 2:8 — "Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession."

Acts 13:2-3 — "While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 'Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.' Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off."

The Big Idea

In 1806, five college students hid from a thunderstorm under a haystack and prayed — and out of that soggy afternoon came America's first foreign missionary movement. God's biggest works often begin with small groups of unimportant people who take his promises seriously enough to ask. Prayer is not the warm-up before the real work. It is the real work.

Reflection

Caught in the rain

Picture it. August 1806. Five students from Williams College in Massachusetts are outside for their twice-weekly prayer meeting when the sky rips open. Thunder, sheets of rain. They sprint for the nearest shelter — a haystack — and crouch under it, soaked.

No adults. No budget. No plan. Just five teenagers under wet hay, talking about whether the gospel could reach Asia.

Their leader was a freshman named Samuel J. Mills, a farmer's son with an awkward voice and no particular talent anyone could name — except that he could not stop praying about the world. The students had been reading reports of William Carey's work in India and debating whether anything like it could happen from America. The obstacles were obvious — distance, money, danger, and the awkward fact that no American church had ever sent a missionary anywhere. Mills cut through all of it with one sentence:

"We can do this if we will." — Samuel J. Mills, quoted in Thomas C. Richards, Samuel J. Mills

There under the haystack, they committed their lives to taking the gospel overseas. Back on campus they formed a small society — so unsure anyone would take them seriously that they kept their records in code. Four years later their respectful pestering of church leaders produced the first American foreign missions organization, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Two years after that, the first missionaries sailed.

Today a marble monument stands on the spot where the haystack stood. Under a carved globe, it bears four words the students took from Jesus' own parable: "The Field is the World." Matthew 13:38 — "The field is the world, and the good seed is the sons of the kingdom." Five soaked freshmen took the parable at full size — and so did God.

If you had walked past that haystack, you would have seen nothing worth noticing. Scripture warns us about sneering at beginnings like this. Zechariah 4:10 — "For whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice." God's pattern is to start small on purpose — a haystack, a manger, a mustard seed — so that when the tree grows, everyone knows who grew it.

And God's pattern is to use unimpressive people on purpose. When the religious experts examined Peter and John, Acts 4:13 — they "perceived that they were uneducated, common men... And they recognized that they had been with Jesus." Uneducated and common — but they had been with Jesus. That was the Haystack five exactly.

Asking is the rule of the kingdom

What were they actually doing under that haystack? Not strategizing. Asking. The verse that fueled their whole generation was Psalm 2:8 — "Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession." It is God the Father speaking to his King — and the church gets to pray it after him. They read it as a standing invitation: God wants to be asked for the nations.

Charles Spurgeon preached a whole sermon on why God sets things up this way:

"Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the kingdom." — Charles Spurgeon, "Ask and Have," Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit

God could act without our prayers. Instead, he has chosen to act through them — the way a father who could easily carry all the groceries alone hands his kids a bag each, so the work is shared and so is the joy. Asking is not a formality. It is the doorway God himself installed.

John Calvin called prayer "the chief exercise of faith" (Institutes, Book III, Chapter 20). Exercise is the right word. Prayer is where trust stops being a feeling and starts doing reps. You can say you believe God rules the nations; the question is whether you ever ask him for any of them.

Jesus made a promise that should make every small prayer group sit up straight. Matthew 18:19-20 — "if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." Two or three. He did not set the minimum at two or three hundred. Five wet college students cleared the bar with room to spare.

And James 5:16 — "The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working." E.M. Bounds, who wrote more about prayer than almost anyone in American history, compressed it to five words:

"God shapes the world by prayer." — E.M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer

That is not poetry. The Haystack meeting is Exhibit A. Trace the missionary movement backwards — Carey's society, the Moravians, the Haystack — and at the root of every branch you find people on their knees. The missionary statesman Samuel Zwemer drew the obvious conclusion: "The history of missions is the history of answered prayer."

From praying to sending

Prayer that is real eventually buys a ticket. The early church shows the sequence. Acts 13:2-3 — while the church at Antioch was worshiping and fasting, the Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul." So they prayed more — and then "sent them off." Worship first, listening second, sending third. Notice that Antioch did not form a committee to study the question. The praying was the planning; the sending grew straight out of it.

The Haystack students followed the same path. They prayed for years, carried their burden to seminary, and then petitioned the New England churches until, in 1810, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was born — the first organization in American history for sending the gospel overseas.

In 1812, the first boats sailed. On board were a young couple named Adoniram and Ann Judson, headed eventually for Burma — a kingdom with no church, no Christian books, and a written language no Westerner had mastered. Their story would test every promise they believed. They labored six years before their first convert. Adoniram later spent a year and a half in a death prison, starved and hung with chains, while Ann walked miles to plead for his life and smuggled his translation pages to him hidden inside a pillow. She died while the work had barely begun; he kept translating until Burma had a whole Bible in its own tongue. Asked once whether the mission had any real prospects, Judson gave an answer that became famous:

"The future is as bright as the promises of God." — Adoniram Judson, quoted in Edward Judson, The Life of Adoniram Judson

Read that in its setting. The future looked as dark as a Burmese prison. Judson did not measure brightness by circumstances but by promises — the same way the Haystack five had measured possibility not by their bank accounts but by Psalm 2:8. Today the church in Myanmar numbers in the millions, and many trace their spiritual ancestry to the Judsons' Burmese Bible.

The God who hears young people

Maybe you have absorbed the idea that the important praying is done by important people — pastors, parents, professionals. The Bible keeps insisting otherwise. 1 Timothy 4:12 — "Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity." Paul wrote that to a young leader in a world that worshiped seniority. Notice he does not tell Timothy to wait his turn. He tells him to set the example — to go first. God has a long habit of starting his biggest stories with his youngest people: Samuel hearing his name in the dark, David facing a giant with a sling, Mary saying yes to an angel, and five college freshmen under a haystack.

A century and a half later, another college student sat in his dorm room at Wheaton, praying about the nations, and wrote a sentence in his journal that has sent thousands overseas since:

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." — Jim Elliot, journal entry, October 28, 1949

Jim Elliot was twenty-two when he wrote that — about the age of the Haystack men. He would give his life on a riverbank in Ecuador seven years later, carrying the gospel to a people who had never heard it. A fool? Only if you do the math without eternity, and only if the grave gets the last word. It does not.

Here is where the whole day lands. Prayer for the nations works not because young people are sincere, but because of who is being asked. When Isaiah saw the Lord, he heard heaven's question — Isaiah 6:8 — "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" and answered, "Here I am! Send me." But notice: before Isaiah ever volunteered, a burning coal had touched his lips and his guilt was taken away. Grace first, mission second. And the question itself — "who will go for us?" — was answered most fully not by Isaiah, or Mills, or Judson, but by the Son of God, who said Here I am, send me and left heaven for a manger and a cross. Every missionary since is just an echo of that sending. We can ask God for the nations with confidence because Jesus has already purchased people from all of them.

Going Deeper

Hold your own haystack meeting. It needs almost nothing — that is the point. Find one other person (a friend, a sibling, a parent) or just a quiet corner, set a timer for ten minutes, and pray Psalm 2:8 out loud: ask God for people and places that seem completely beyond reach. Write the date and what you asked for somewhere you will find it again. The five students had no idea what their afternoon would become. Neither do you.