It was a hot, sultry Sunday morning in a Connecticut church. The boys in the balcony were becoming restless and the elders sitting below were falling asleep. The preacher, Samuel John Mills, interrupted his sermon, “Boys, you must make less noise in the gallery. If you don’t, you will wake up the fathers below.”
Samuel’s son, one of the boys in the balcony that day, recorded another story in his journal that caught my eye. He wrote that “a colored man” knocked at the back door of the Mills’ home. His preacher dad answered the knock with the words, “Why did you come to the back door? When you come to my house, come to the front door, for we shall all go into heaven by one door.”
Son Samuel attended Williams College in Massachusetts. He met one Saturday afternoon in 1806 with four classmates at Sloan’s Meadow to discuss the need to share the gospel in Asia, having just studied the continent in geography class. As their discussion intensified, a sudden thunderstorm forced them to seek refuge under a nearby haystack. They knelt for prayer in the driving rain and committed themselves to the Lord’s service. After prayer, Samuel said above the storm, “We can do this, if we will.”
The five continued to meet and pray for the cause of Christian mission. Samuel Mills answered the call to preach the gospel in the Midwest and Southwest. Harvey Loomis took the gospel to rural Maine, James Richards became a missionary in India, Francis Robbins remained in Connecticut to do the Lord’s work and Byram Green preached in New England before becoming a U.S. Congressman.
Several Christian mission agencies trace their roots to this Haystack Prayer Meeting. Luke Wishard, who led YMCA’s ministry with college students, visited the Haystack Prayer Meeting site eighty years later and knelt for prayer in the snow next to the monument commemorating the prayer meeting. He asked God to pour out his Spirit among students in his own day, “Lord, do it again. Where water once flowed, let it flow again.”
Today’s prayer appeared in Samuel Mill’s journal for July 29, 1806, a few days before their climatic prayer meeting under the haystack: