in 2001 in the book every nation our generation dr rice brooks talks about that phrase that has become so beloved to every nation folks around the world that that slogan that just in a few words captures the mission to every nation and in many ways gave us our name every nation and here's what he writes in 1999 while standing on the precipice of this new millennium i was impressed by the lord to articulate this 2000 year old apostolic mandate in a fresh way to our ministry i will never forget the sense of awe and surprise i experienced when a simple memorable phrase came to my heart and mind as i share it with other leaders it seemed to produce the same kind of enthusiastic response this phrase almost a slogan really was to become the rallying cry for our ministry one that would sum up the mission for us but hopefully mobilize people everywhere to the greatness and urgency of our call every nation in our generation at the time i had never heard anything like it as i later researched the history of missions i was intrigued to find echoes of it in the slogans of other movements we're going to talk about one of those movements in many ways the predecessor movement i would argue to every nation there are a variety of uh similarities that if you uh know this movement you'll say oh yeah wow but if you've never heard of this movement you'll be stunned by some of the similarities between every nation and this movement we're going to talk about today we're going to discuss the student volunteer movement and the long name is a student volunteer but for foreign missions like other movements we've discussed other major missional movements in church history we're looking at it because it is significant in its own right it is a remarkable movement that had a massive impact around the world but it's also significant in the every nation context because it in many ways is part of our root system as we get to unpack what they did their origins what they were about their culture what they you know what they gave their lives or begin to see as with the moravians as with the jesuits as with the the franciscans or the jewish diaspora we'll begin to see these bits and pieces of the puzzle that we see in front of us now and recognize that they didn't come from nowhere there's a history there's so much we could say about the student volunteer movement often we we hear it uh talked about in sermons and kind of a five-minute story here or i've given brief blurbs about it in many times when i've talked about every nation seminary or about church history we know kind of the snapshots but this lecture is going to do a deeper dive into the student volunteered we really look at its origins all the way to its demise in many ways we might call this the rise and fall of the student volunteer movement that might be too trendy we'll see we'll see if it lasts onto the onto path right but if we want to talk about the student volunteer movement it's important to recognize that it is in many ways still rooted in the modern mission movement we talked about that that emerged from the moravian movement in many ways but the modern missionary movement founded by william carey resulted in this massive uptick in protestant mission sending the beginning of the 19th century there are a few hundred missionaries on the field in front from protestant nations by the end of the 19th century there were thousands upon thousands of missionaries in every continent so we're going to look at a movement that began to the end of the 19th century so you might see it as part of this larger move the modern protestant missionary where protestants take missions seriously but there's a few distinctions about the student volunteer movement that that make it a separate movement even though it may be rooted in this earlier protestant movement one is that it was primarily coming from the united states whereas earlier protestant missions early present mission movements were coming from europe which in many ways is the heartland of the protestant movement by this point in late 19th early 20th century protestant missions really take off coming out of the united states not only of the united states there's also canada there's also britain and other places but it's really it's gravitational poles the united states and second one of the things we'll see very soon that is unique about this is the targeting of university students as the main mission force you target university students and you get them out under the mission field so though that's the big distinction so let's talk about some of the origins of the student volunteer movement before we get into uh where things go in this familiar but perhaps not so familiar history first let's talk about the ymca and i know many of us think about that as a gym franchise around the world where you can exercise and play basketball but the ymca was founded in the 1840s and the purpose of the ymca was to provide spiritual discipleship services to young men and later women with the ywca typically on college campuses it was an urban ministry but in the rye in the 19th century both especially in the united states there was a rise of secular state institutions so early american colleges were christian colleges but later on you end up having state schools that were founded by the the state or the national government or for the city and you end up where you have schools that are totally secular and these christian organizations these para church organizations are saying we need to provide discipleship services chaplaincy services um christian clubs for christian students on campus we also want to evangelize on campus because you have these collections these emerging collections of young people on the same patch of dirt in a city so the ymca was founded and took root on american campuses in the 1840s 1850s and really the goal was to promote small group bible studies evangelism and collaboration between christians from different campuses right so you might go to a ymca conference where students from all over these different campuses who are part of ymca chapters around different games would gather for one conference in particular city and have speakers and it was it was a way of connecting young christians around the world it was the young men's christian association well in the summer of 1886 the ymca hosted not just a singular conference but a month-long bible retreat a bible seminar for student leaders from different ymca chapters all across the united states they're meeting in mount hermon massachusetts and the keynote speaker was d.l moody and just an aside on dm moody in case some of you made more familiar with him and others he was one of the great evangelists of the 19th century he's he traveled all around america and the world but he was based in chicago he focused primarily on urban ministry to the poor he founded what's now called moody church it's one of the first mega churches in america it's still a mega church in chicago he founded the moody bible institute a remarkable man but he got saved through the ymca this is important and he would work on work work with the ymca on evangelistic initiatives throughout the rest of his life so this ymca event where dl moody's the speaker is a of you know what you might expect in 1886 it was a month-long bible conference they were doing with key leaders they only had 251 college students there was a small group it was key leaders from ymca chapters all over america and at this conference moody was a key speaker but he brought in other speakers and there was just this deep sense of revival that was going on with this group of 251 students and moody didn't even intend for it to be a mission conference he wanted to be something where they they were spurred on to be evangelistic where there was a sense of calling for their lives or their sense of holiness commitment to the lordship of jesus but there were a few folks there from princeton and princeton had had this sort of mini uh missionary wave going on at princeton during this time many of them were involved in the ymca there had been a burgeoning uh missionary uh missionary movement at princeton already many of those students were there and before this conference they this group of students at princeton had come up with a pledge they were all taking and it was called the princeton pledge and it said this i purpose god willing to become a foreign missionary and that's it one of the the students at princeton who was involved was he had grown up on the mission field in asia so when he was at princeton he was galvanizing his fellow students to get on the mission field some of these princesses were there at the at the ymca camp in mount hermon massachusetts and there was one night during an extended prayer meeting where something unexpected happened and 100 out of the 251 attendees of this conference felt called to give their lives to global missions so almost half the conference decides they want to give their life for the call for google admissions and they all took the princeton pledge right their princesses and saying hey we've been talking about this anyway see this this group is called the mount herman 100. this is seen as the origin the seed of the student volunteer movement where you get a hundred college students who went to a month-long bible conference and they have to go home and tell their parents that they're not going to be a lawyer anymore they're not going to be a doctor anymore not only are they christians who are on fire for god who would go to a month-long bible conference they're leaving the united states to go on foreign missions these 100 students were so excited by the work that god had done that no one had planned it wasn't in the program it wasn't deal moody was there but he didn't even plan this moment they were so excited that several of them began traveling to different college campuses for the next few years sharing this burden of formation saying hey what happened to us 100 really should happen in campus all over the united states and the world in two years this group went to 167 college campuses they got this campus tour this before before you have automobiles uh before you have airplanes so they were taking trains uh getting to all these campuses and over a two year period over 2 000 college students responded to this call to give their lives to foreign missions so much was happening right this movement was emerging they decided to create an organization a formal one in 1888 called the student volunteer movement for foreign missions they officially formed and their motto the motto of this movement was the evangelization of the world in this generation it's a little bit obscure who actually came with the phrase that exact phrase j.r mott who would become its chairman we'll talk about a minute in a minute he would become uh the main promoter of this song he wrote a book of the same title as uh pasteurized notes here but it had earlier roots but that it's it's it's this sense in which mott says we didn't create the slogan like we didn't come up with this it's almost like the slogan created the movement there was such a um a gripping that happened with that initial 100 at mount hermon but then the 2000 that they grew into in just several years that they decide we're going to create an organization we're going to have a student volunteer right it's students volunteering to go on missions this is not short-term missions this is i'm giving my life i'm taking a boat right they don't take planes and you're taking a ship somewhere and not coming back for a long time but let's talk about what the student volunteer movement actually was right because it's there's a lot you go wow that's really interesting but it wasn't exactly what uh you might have in your mind because it wasn't a denomination it wasn't even a movement of churches or a network of churches it was a para-church organization meaning it was a parachute sort of beyond the church its goal was to support local churches and more importantly missionary societies remember the rise of missionary societies with william carey in the previous century the goal was to support missionary societies and help recruit people there so they would the idea was this right student volunteer movement does not plant churches and they don't even send missionaries what they do is they recruit and mobilize college students and then they say now you go to your local church or go to your local sending agency and then if you're presbyterian go to the presbyterian mission board if your baby's going to the batter's mission board if you're if you're methodists go with them and they would say we're recruiting you we're calling you we're galvanizing you we're telling you you're not going to be an engineer you're going to be a missionary start learning chinese but then we send you back to your local church or your local mission board and they're going to send you so student volunteer had a very targeted goal they would go from campus to campus do campus speaking tours and they'd do every 40 years a large conference and where they get all their students all their volunteers together and do major calls to go on mission of those conferences but it was i want to make it clear there are some fascinating overlaps fascinating echoes in history but they were different they were a parrot church organization that was combined of presbyters and methodists and baptists it was meant to be sort of a broad tent kind of thing as was the case with an original prayer meeting where the mount hermon 100 gave their lives to missions one of their primary tools was this pledge card or declaration card and they adopted it from the princeton pledge and it said it is my purpose if god permit to become a foreign missionaries and they'd sign it they'd submit their card there'd be follow-up and they would again do this campus to campus but they'd also have these large every four-year conferences and just to talk about the growth between conferences right think about the rapid growth of this movement by the time they actually organized their first quadrennial conference in cleveland ohio quadrennial just means every four years first conference in 1891 right the revival at mount hermon had broken out in 1986 so five years ago so within the five years of sort of the early movement they have their first conference by the time they have their first conference they've already recruited 6 200 college students have given have pledged their life to foreign missions of those 6 000 only 300 are on the field but keep in mind these are university students so if they pledge when they're a freshman they're not going to go on the field until after they graduate so there's a little bit of a lag between people pledging to go on the mission field versus people going to the mission there's also a lag between someone's desire and what actually ends up happening right but you just think in five years six thousand volunteers in their terms recruited in many ways the peak was in 1910 which would have been roughly around the 24 25 year anniversary and this is the edinburgh missionary conference you've probably heard about this before it was not organized by a student volunteer because there was a larger group of organizations that were working together but it was chaired by j.r mott the fount one of the founders and the chair the chairman of the the leader of the student monitoring movement and it was the first interdenominational missionary conference that brought together missionaries and organizations from all over the world so it was like a like a larger version student volunteer movement that went beyond just students and they talked about the real actual historical possibility of within their generation evangelizing every single nation in the world in 1910 they thought and some people had an eschatological vision thinking if they did that then the end would come others just thought it's not about making the jesus come back like a pretty millennialist it's more this sense of every generation has a call to evangelism and evangelism is a global call so we're responsible for the world as we know it in our generation that was how much often defined it so you have this rapid growth where things are just there's this unbridled optimism and you just go the movement is not only not going to stop but it's actually going to succeed at their goal every nation the evangelization of the world in our generation the numerical peak of the student volunteer movement was in 1920. at this conference in iowa that's they moved around their quadrennial conference there were almost 7 000 attendees and almost 3 000 to the exact 2783 signed the declaration card and there are 600 more that went on the field that year who had signed previous declaration cards so you have this stunning i mean we think about uh you go to a campus conference you ask people to commit their lives to being a campus missionary you get a few dozen maybe maybe even a few hundred this conference is recruiting thousands of people giving their lives to missions uh it by conservative estimates by 1945 when the movie begins to transition we'll talk about that in a minute by 1945 over 20 000 students had signed the declaration card and gone on foreign missions so there are many many more had signed it but 20 thousand those who signed the declaration heart had gone on the mission field in about 60 years of this movement's life that is a stunning uh escalation volume wise of missionary mobilization let me just give you a little bit of a few biographical sketches of some of the main members of the movement perhaps the most important leader of the movement and really the mobilizer behind everything was j.r mott he became a christian in college after being an agnostic and was deeply involved in the ymca he was actually the leader of the ymca chapter at cornell where he went to school he was one of the mount herman 100 in 1886. he was at that ymca conference with the el moody and he was one of those attendees who felt like god had called him to give his life to world missions because he was part of that original group when they began to form the formal organization he was a recent graduate of cornell and he decided they they made they designated him the first chairman they had a variety of roles in the organization but he was the chairman of the student volunteer move and he ended up leading the movement for 30 years so he's part of that founding generation he led it for 30 years a very long tenure there very very popular he also worked within the ymca organization which was in many ways a partner organization with student volunteer movement for many years he worked with them for 40 years as well and really matt's goal in life was to organize mobilize and network this burgeoning student missionary movement create organizational structures mobilize more students he traveled almost 2 million miles in his life going from campus to campus to campus to campus going across to other continents starting student movements in other places uh he was a tireless mobilizer for missions he ended up actually not going on the mission field uh himself his role he felt his calling was to to make this movement um a reality sort of take this from a vision to this massive movement where students all over the world were giving their lives to missions he was particularly good at connecting denominations connecting missionary organizations to collaborate connecting students with missionary organizations you might say hey we have a hundred presbyterians who said they presbyterian colleges say they want to give their lives for admissions we need to connect them with the presbyterian mission board this was he was a very ecumenical very uh broadly connected uh leader and he also wrote and published many books if you just go on google google books just for fun and look up j.r.r mutt j.r matt you'll see many many books he wrote over his many decades serving as a missionary mobilizer and because they're mostly past the copyright laws they're almost all available for free on google because you want to just take a browse we'll talk about kind of the end of the move in a minute but mott was certainly the most visible spokesman for the movement he became something of a christian celebrity and i don't in a negative way but he was just very very popular he was friends with presidents uh woodrow wilson um when woodrow wilson resigned from his presidency at princeton to become the president of the united states they offer the presidency of princeton to mott he turned it down because he wanted to stay in student volunteer movement similarly when wilson was president united states he offered mot the ambassadorship to china because he believed that he had just a remarkable breadth and he could do things as an ambassador united states around the world mott once again turned it down because he cared so much about the cause of missions and eventually in the 30s mott won the nobel priest peace prize for all his work in galvanizing christians as for having them cooperate together on mission there are many many more things we could say about mott and he'll kind of show up a few more times toward the end here but let me just do a few other biographical sketches of other folks who are in that first generation in the move first or second donation of the movie another is samuel zwormer i'm probably pronouncing zwimmer professing his name wrong uh he felt called to go on the mission field after hearing the preaching of robert wilder who was one of the early founders of the student volunteer movement he originally asked the reform mission board if he could go to the arab world he felt really called to go to the arab world and they denied him they said you can't go they said it's too difficult there are almost no arab nations that allow missionaries to come i want you go somewhere else and he was so committed he and a fellow college student who also want to go to the arab world they formed their own organization called the american arab mission they sailed for arabia in 1890 and worked as missionaries in the persian gulf particularly in bahrain he had very little success in his early years in the persian gulf but he labored as a missionary they're really pioneering protestant missions to the muslim world he ended up returning back to the united states and serving the student volunteer movement as a mission mobilizer for the arab world really calling americans to give their lives to serving muslims and reaching muslims with the gospel he end up moving to cairo later in life and having more success there but really he spent 40 years of his life in the middle east serious language studies here's cultural studies serious sacrifices he made and a remarkable example of perseverance but there are only about a dozen converts in the end all his time about two about a dozen converts but he sowed seeds he plant he laid the groundwork he cast the vision for what would later become a movement of missions to the muslim world from the united states in particular another missionary who i i particularly fond of i'll just give you a very brief sketch uh is a missionary historian named kenneth scott la tourette then he'll know him as a world-renowned historian of china and japan as well as world christianity at yale but what people don't often know was that when he was at yale he got involved in the student volunteer movement and he actually also son declaration card and went to china as a missionary before he became a professor he was working with yale's uh branch in china and he wanted to send the mission field his for his life but he ended up having very very poor health and had to return to the united states but after his time as a missionary he never forgot that um calling and he worked with the student volunteer movement at yale and helped disciple students and mobilize them for mission as a professor and he's perhaps most well known for a seminal seven volume history the history of the expansion of christianity and it's the first attempt by any historian to tell the story of the spread of christianity in this um in every single continent right it's not just this single story that goes from jerusalem to rome to europe to america and back to everyone else uh he was many one of the first ones to tell a comprehensive global christian history i'm deeply indebted to latrett's work all of you are because this course and especially the leadership 2015 church history of course is very much rooted in that method that he pioneered and he could do it because he knew chinese he was very very familiar with the missionary movement so it really brought him in contact with um what was going on all around the world with christianity not just was going on the west one final alum of the student volunteer movement who's worth highlighting is e stanley jones he became a student volunteer as they call them while at asbury college in kentucky so he gave he was wrapped up in the student volunteer movement he gave his life to missions when he was at asbury college he originally wanted to go to africa but the methodist missionary society requested to go to india instead so he agrees in 1907 he went to india as a methodist missionary and would remain there for 40 years originally he worked with lower caste indians think of those who were outcasts who did not have a high place in society which many pro many missionaries would often begin on those fringes of society but eventually began working with higher caste hindu scholars and engaging in pretty serious pretty robust interfaith dialogue about the uniqueness of christ about how christianity relates with hindu culture and he really pioneered contextualizing methods for the hindu world and south asian world in general and one of his main hallmarks was to contextualize jesus to the hindu and try to remove as much western cultural baggage as possible i will say he was criticized by both fundamentalists uh for saying that he leaned too far into hindu culture and then liberals were saying he held on too strongly to do the supremacy and exclusivity of christ it kind of put him between both fundamentalists and liberals and i think he's a remarkable example of giving your life for missions but i will say some of his methods some of his his pioneering methods in intercultural interfaith dialogue with hindus are still questionable right they're things that it would be an interesting case study for a global mission class we may get to let me just give you one of a beautiful quote by him that gives you a sense of his method where he downplays ecclesiology the role of church and really plays up christology the role of jesus and i think we'll all probably resonate with this this is a very beautiful idea that i think is very biblical but there are there's a flip side to it and we'll talk about that but let me just read the quote because i think it's quite it just gives you a sense of some of the dynamic missionary work that's going on this is so this is jones right here's how he talks about his method as a missionary hindus i quote there's a beautiful indian marriage custom that dimly illustrates our task in india and where it ends at the wedding ceremony the women friends of the bride accompany her with music to the home of the bridegroom they usher her into the presence of the bridegroom that is as far as they can go then they retire and leave her with her husband that is our joyous task in india to know him to introduce him to retire not necessarily geographically but to trust india with the christ and trust christ with india we can only go so far and india must go the rest of the way india is beginning to walk with the christ of the indian road what a walk it will be so we could talk a lot about jones and maybe that would be for another time in another class he was friends with gandhi he was beloved in india he has a whole school at asbury university at asbury seminary named after him the stanley jones school of evangelism mission i believe it's called some of our students some of our every nation folks actually studied in a program there and uh he's a remarkable man but he's just one of many so you think about whether it's mott or zwermer or or uh la tourette or jose there's just a few of thousands of people who were mobilized as college students to the cause of foreign missions but as i said there was a meteoric rise and remarkable impact in its first 20 30 years and then there was something of a fall a decline let's talk about that briefly because we have to take that seriously as i said in 1920 at their des moines iowa conference where they gathered college students from all over that was a numerical peak right they had almost 7 000 college students gathering from all over america they had almost 3 000 commit their lives and signed the declaration card they had another 600 who were actually sailing off onto the mission field and you might think oh this is the peak numerically but things were already beginning to crater there was already a change in the air at that meeting let's unpack that a little bit the opening dress was given by many ways the grandfather of the movement mott who at this point was in his uh i believe in his late 50s so mott is still you know not an old man but he's a he's a he's a founder generation of the movement and he gives the opening address called the world opportunity and keep in mind this is 1920 this is right after the end of world war one and he's arguing that this cataclysmic thing has happened but now there's an opportunity we have to continue sending missionaries all over the world the world is changing the world is rising up out of this war-torn tragic world war there's a mission there's an opportunity but his keynote address which would have sounded like many of his others over the last 30 years of leading the student volunteer movement fell flat and the young college students who were there who were 30 who were who were not alive when he was at mount hermon they weren't born yet when he was part of the founding group they began having side conversations saying this is not what we came to hear and there's even stories of keynote speakers hearing all the murmuring happening between the sessions deciding to change their topics so they might be more relevant to what was going on on the ground keep in mind at the exact same time this is january 2020 the exact same time this conference is going on the paris peace conference is wrapping up in paris where they're kind of beginning they're deciding the new world order after world war one right which empires are going to be broken up and what's the fate of ex-nation that wants to be free from their colonial power that's happening right while this conference is going on so everyone is talking about the paris peace conference and woodrow wilson's 14 points and don't really care about matt's call to world missions really there is a general disillusionment following world war one you think about in 1910 you had this edinboro missionary conference utter optimism we're going to reach not just by the end of the century we're going to reach every nation in the world within our lifetimes four years later they're plunged into world war over 20 million deaths and keep in mind the nations that went to war in world war one were the missionary sending nations it was western europe the united states it was all the nations that met together at the edinburgh missionary conference without they could do all these things relationships they're the ones who are at war with one another so there's a general disillusionment there's also a burgeoning anti-colonial movement going on in non-western nations right so you have all these non-western nations who are saying hey i know you're sending a lot of missionaries that's fantastic but we'd really prefer that britain not be our colonial uh power right they say that's in india or the the indonesia is saying we'd rarely rather the dutch not be here anymore i know you're sending missionaries but you know and what you end up with with these anti-colonial movements and sim and westerners who are sympathetic and colonial movements begin going what's the difference between our western missionary ascending and these imperial movements right there's a frustration with colonialism with imperialism and and there's a difficulty in separating those two things next to add another layer of complexity there's the early debates of the fundamentalist modernist debate and i talk about this in leadership 15 so i won't go into a lot of detail but there's this debate within protestantism over what modern christianity would look like and there are many people who are arguing that modern christianity needed to let go of the exclusivity of christ right he was a good teacher good man too bad he died but this whole thing about him being god this whole thing with him being the messiah or the only way that's just not modern right the authority of scriptures the um supernatural elements of christianity the priority of conversion right these things are being debated hotly with fundamentalists and we might call protestant liberals and there is this debate happening in the 1920s so this debate is also causing fissures and divisions within the student volunteer movement and this all they're all kind of connected the disillusionment into colonial sentiment fundamentalist modernist debates there was a moving sort of slowly moving but a a genuine shift in the focus of mission what is mission what are we actually sending people to do we're recruiting volunteers what are they going to go do when they get to whatever they're going and there was a shift again subtle but profound in the long run toward what's called the social gospel right it's this idea that the west needs to focus on social justice issues issues of society issues of inequality issues that are sort of more corporate focused and focused on social needs less than individual needs we need to focus on those things not only abroad but even at home there began to be this realization that there are a variety of issues in the united states that had not been solved they had only gotten worse in the last 30 years and the question is why are we mobilizing all these young intelligent men and women and sending them everywhere else why don't we work on things here at home that was often the critique of foreign missions and we'll talk about more this debate in the case study but it was this subtle shift right toward removing removing the focus on individual conversion and the priority of a first relationship with jesus christ to focusing on let's focus on societal ills and see how the message of christianity can help transform society like this is what matters more and that was also a debate that was burgeoning in 1920 at the conference the final thing i'll say related to this was there was a general sense of frustration toward the founders generation the leaders of the student volunteer movement who were admittedly kind of toward the end of their time leading they were getting rid of the transition this would have been one of the last times mott is is a significant leadership role for the student volunteer but there was a younger generation again who had not been born when mott was the college student and they were concerned about post-world war one anxieties about the state of the west they were concerned about decolonization they were concerned about the modernist fundamentalist contractors they were concerned about the social gospel and they didn't feel like the conference organizer that older generation really understood them or understood their concerns for several more years mott and some of the elder statesmen tried to bridge this gap between the younger generation the old generation they tried to bridge the gap between fundamentalists and liberals and progressives in the movement but during the 1920s and especially the 30s the movement began to split and it the organization itself moved toward liberal protestantism moved toward the social gospel moved away from a classic evangelical understanding of mission and the gospel and the even if the theological emissional shift was kind of slow in the 1920s what happens after the 1920s after des moines is really stunning in 1920 as i said almost 7 000 attended the conference and 2783 signed the declaration card okay 18 years later at their quadrennial conference in 1938 right so less than 20 years later 25 people signed the card right you go from 2700 to 25 people signing the card and that was their only thing remember they don't plant churches they don't they don't um they don't even send missions they're just recruiting their recruitment arm they got 25 people by 1940 only 600 people attended the whole convention you go from over 6 000 to 600 in about 20 years so there's this rapid decline in the succeeding decades we'll talk more about the theological or or missiological debates that broke this thing apart but just a few things to note as we think about this with in kind of a sober place in 1922 so just two years after that conference in iowa where things were obviously shifting under their feet even if numerically things look great things were not right with the movement just two years later they voted to drop the slogan every nation the evangelization of the world in our generation they dropped the slogan and they argued some are arguing that it's just too broad otherwise it's too ambitious otherwise saying well we have a different view of mission now it's not evangelization it's it's healing all of society there was they they abandoned right mott said the movement didn't create a slogan the slogan created the movement well the movement dropped the slogan 1922 they dropped the slogan 1924 mott is no longer in leadership for the conference for the student volunteer movement his his 10 years 30 years leading the thing finally comes to an end and in many ways he tries so hard to keep the groups together he wanted people to cooperate but there is a sense that mat was committed to an older understanding of missions and evangelism and the young the young leaders didn't want to have any more of it in 1959 the student volunteer movement which was basically comatose at this point they stopped doing conferences several years earlier but they merged with another student organization to form the university christian movement and their goal had nothing to do with the original goal of mobilizing students to go on the mission field their goal was to unite christian groups on campuses right it was it was kind of an ecumenical let's be the organizer that we can organize different christian organizations on campus that's a great goal but that was how they had shifted so much by 1969 the university christian movement had officially disbanded right so the movement the organization student volunteer movement did not even make it a century they had about a 25 30 year rapid growth period and then a pretty rapid fall followed by kind of a slow end but there were successors to the movement and many groups that tried to carry on that splinter away try to carry on that same vision as early as the 1930s there are people within the student volunteer who were concerned about the theological emotional drift and they began forming new campus organizations with the hope of capturing that original vision of every nation in our generation perhaps the most self-conscious error institutionally of the student volunteer movement was the was inner varsity christian fellowship many of you familiar with that because there are intervarsity chapters on campuses all over the world intervarsity people who were in the student volunteer were so concerned with what was going on they began starting their own conferences and kind of spun off of the student volunteer movement and one of their first conferences was in 1948 at urbana at the university of illinois which that's why they're called the urbana conferences they're still going on today but they've very very much tried to keep that tradition of the early decades of student volunteer movement where the urbana conference is not a it's not a um a denominational thing it's not a church planet thing all they do is they have a conference every three years it's part it's a it's a branch of the intervarsity christian fellowship but during those conferences they still have decision cards that are very much reminiscent of the declaration cards uh you found at the early student volunteer movement conferences and they encourage people to pledge their lives to foreign missions those are their cards a little more complicated fewer options it's not just one sentence um but they mean their last conference in 2018 i believe they have one coming up uh quite soon and this the urbana conference saw an uptick in missionary activity in the 70s and 80s so it's a movement that's still going on um if you might even say it's at an age now where where it's it has to decide is it going to be like the student volunteer movement where it ultimately fades away and has a mission drift or is it going to refocus his mission and continue going on it's a good question every movement has to consider those questions another movement that you would see as a successor to the student volunteer movement is campus crusade now known as crew that was formed in 1951 by bill bright i've talked about that many times but they also have slogans quite reminiscent of the evangelization of the world in this generation another would be youth with a mission or wyoming found in 1960 and i would argue that every nation campus and every nation as a whole can be seen if a historian is looking at what we say about ourselves what we do the way we gather the way we make disciples we are in very much in very many senses a successor movement to the student volunteer movement it's not that we said well we want to be like them as much as you know intervarsity did that intervarsity intentionally was a spin-off but we are very much uh motivated by similar uh views of mission by a similar sense that college students are the future mission force uh obviously the key difference between every nation campus and student volunteer movement or varsity or crew or wyoming is that we are church-based campus ministry so we aren't merely parachutes just recruiting people to send them through other means we actually do the work on campus but we also do the church planting do the sending from every nation so that's that's a significant difference but i hope this not so short romp through the history of the student volunteer movement hopefully going deeper than you've been before giving you a little more of the sense of the whole uh has given you both a degree of inspiration going wow this happened 100 years ago and it's the kind of thing that we want to see on our campuses the kind of move that we want to see with college students i hope they get his personal hopes also gives a sense of sobriety and fear with what can happen in just a generation if there's mission drift so we're going to talk about the source of that mission drift and kind of the debate surrounding it in our case study but let's pray and close this portion lord i thank you for the student volunteer movement i thank you for the stunning events that were tipped off in that prayer meeting in 1886 where 100 students almost half the conference but it's a small conference how students give their lives to global missions but i i thank you for the way that you make things happen through history lord and the chains of causation that none of us could have predicted we thank you for what you're doing on the campuses today lord we ask for more movement on campus we ask that there would be thousands and thousands of college students who would abandon their small dreams for their lives abandon their self-centered small worlds and give their lives to the mission of god they would give their lives to see your kingdom come your will be done in every nation jesus name amen [Music]