2010: The ‘Decisive Moment’ of our Lives?

by Pete Greig

The Hebrews have a saying: ‘God is not a kindly old uncle; He’s an earthquake’. Whenever students invest the passion of their university years in prayer and mission, an earthquake of God’s presence is born…

One of the most extraordinary historical examples of such a shaking culminated exactly one hundred years ago and has much to teach us as we pray like never before this year. In June 1910, the ‘Edinburgh Missionary Conference’ drew 1,355 delegates from 160 Missions Agencies to Scotland to conspire together for ‘the evangelization of the world in this generation’. Instead of competing they chose to co-operate for the ultimate prize: the fulfillment of Christ’s Great Commission. It was to be a defining moment in the modern Missions movement, giving rise to unprecedented co-operation, focused missionary intelligence and the formation of The World Council of Churches. But it would also have terrifying global implications as we shall see...
 
The conference was presided over by John Mott (left), the founding leader of the Student Volunteer Movement which mobilized a staggering number of American students – some 20,000 - to go overseas as missionaries, shot out like rockets from the prayer meetings that were igniting campuses at the time. America’s role as the world’s biggest missionary-sending nation today, began back then with those campus prayer meetings just over a century ago. Isn’t it exciting, therefore, to see prayer spreading once again on our campuses?

For John Mott the tremors were first felt at Cornell University one frosty night in January 1886 when he arrived late at a meeting, just in time to hear the British evangelist JK Studd challenging the students not merely to seek great things for themselves, but instead to seek first the Kingdom of God. Deeply challenged by this call to complete surrender, Mott – a promising student assured a glittering future - sought out the Englishman for an earnest conversation. ‘It was’, he later recalled, ‘the decisive hour of my life’.

Decade of Global Revival

24 years later, with prayer and mission multiplying globally, Mott sat on the platform at the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, surveying the sea of faces from around the world. There was palpable excitement – a rising faith - that the fulfillment of Christ’s Great Commission in their generation really was possible. This was not mere conference-hype; take a look at the facts:

  • The legacies of the great evangelists Dwight L Moody in Chicago and Hudson Taylor in China had captured the imagination of a generation of students, propelling them from passivity into prayer and from campus prayer into global, sacrificial missionary endeavor.
  • Matching this wave of human sacrifice there seemed to be divine sparks of sovereign acceleration. For instance, just three hundred miles south of their gathering in Edinburgh, the revival that had begun in 1904 was still shaking Wales under the leadership of a young man called Evan Roberts. Thousands had turned to Christ and Welsh society was being transformed. At several mines, pit ponies had stopped working because they were so used to being sworn at, and now no longer understood the instructions of their newly sanctified masters!
  • Such stories from the Welsh Awakening triggered similar revivals around the world – not least in Korea, renowned at that time as a missionary graveyard, but today known as the home of the biggest churches on earth.
  • Norwegian delegates at the Edinburgh Conference reported that the spiritual outpouring back home at that time, was unprecedented since the days when their Viking forbears were first evangelized.
  • Indian delegates similarly reported that the Christian population of their nation had recently grown by 70% in a single year (1905-1906).
  • Other agencies reported that, in the decade leading up to the gathering in Edinburgh, the church in Japan had doubled in size, and in Indonesia it had trebled.
  • Meanwhile, in the USA, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on those gathered in a 24-7 prayer room in Azusa Street, Los Angeles in 1906 had detonated the beginnings of the global Pentecostal and charismatic movements which would bring renewal and a rediscovery of the Holy Spirit’s power to hundreds of millions of believers around the world.
Against this thrilling historical backdrop, eight bold ‘Commissions’ were addressed by the Conference, dealing with such explicit challenges as ‘Carrying the Gospel to all the Non-Christian World’ (on Day One), and ‘The promotion of Christian Unity’ (on the last day), via discussions about the role of national governments and ‘Education in Relation to the Christianization of National Life’. Perhaps understandably, the conference has been criticized for the sheer audacity of such goals. Some have even called Mott and his co-conspirators arrogant. But the apostolic passion firing their hearts is surely beyond contention. Each had their own ‘decisive moment’ of commitment to the Gospel of Christ, and so, like the Apostle Paul they were “not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” (Rom. 1:16)

Divine Symmetry

We’re praying that many students will – like John Mott at Cornell - encounter ‘the decisive moment’ of their lives in 2010. Quite by chance, this Campus America Year of Prayer will mark the precise centenary of that remarkable Edinburgh Missionary Conference.

So if you’re wondering why God is pouring out His Spirit on students right now; or ‘what happens next after an unprecedented year of prayer on America’s campuses?’ or ‘Where do we go once we’ve prayed like never before?’ then start planning now to come and join with others from all over the earth, 23rd – 25th September, in the historic and beautiful city of Edinburgh, on the centenary year of that great Missionary Conference. Together we will be recalling the movement of prayer on America’s campuses that played such a part in the Gospel advance of the twentieth century. We’ll also be celebrating a decade of 24-7 prayer that has touched more than a third of the nations on earth. And we’ll be conspiring together for the evangelization of the nations and the transformation of society in our generation.

I don’t know about you, but I am terrified and stirred simultaneously. The stakes are so high as we pray. I must decide, once and for all, whether Jesus Christ is my Lord. But then I look around at the crying needs of our time, the violence and suffering, the emptiness of consumerism, the crisis of global warming, the holocaust of unjustifiable abortions, the AIDS pandemic, the enslaving of Africa through debt, the breakdown of families, the decline of the western church, and I know something has to change. And then I look to Jesus, and see his tears, and I know that there must be an uprising and it will begin, as it always has done, in prayer. Perhaps, as we continue praying like it all depends on Him, and living like it all depends on us, we may imagine the cries of men like John Mott, John Wesley and Count Zinzendorf caught up in that great cloud of witnesses, cheering us on!