No one can study the development of the modern missionary move­ment and not be impressed with the extent to which prayer and missions have gone hand in hand.

As Helen Montgomery says:

Every fresh putting forth of missionary energy has been preceded by believing prayer. The seed of the missionary enterprise has been planted and has germinated in the hearts of believing, praying disciples.

The modern missionary movement was borne in a revival of prayer.

Justinian Welz was one of the few per­sons to raise a prophetic voice on behalf of missions in the 17^th century. In one of his essays he wrote:

Whoever will be used in the worthy activity of spreading the evan­gelical faith must be diligent in prayer in all his doings. If he wishes to undertake this office, he must begin with prayer. If he wishes to accomplish anything glori­ous, he must adhere to it with persistent prayer to his dearest master, Jesus Christ. If anything is to reach a blessed conclu­sion, he must seek to attain it through devout prayer. It is prayer — only prayer — that softens the stony heathen heart and makes it fit to obey Christ.

Justinian Welz was a voice crying in the wilderness. Few people paid any attention to him; consequently the beginning of the modern missionary movement had to await the arrival of the Pietist Movement under the leadership of Jacob Spener and August Francke. The outstanding feature of the Pietist Movement was the cultivation of the inner life by Bible study and prayer.

The modern missionary movement may be said to have begun in earnest with the Moravians. When a group of exiled Moravians under Christian David arrived in Saxony in 1722, Count Zinzendorf gave them shelter on his estate, later known as Herrnhut — the Lord’s Watch. The colony developed rapidly as additional exiles arrived, built homes and workshops, dug wells, laid out roads, established orphanages, and erected a meeting house and school. Under the dynamic leadership of Zinzendorf, Herrnhut became the nerve centre of a worldwide missionary movement unique in the history of the church.

It all began with prayer. A three-month revival at Herrnhut in the summer of 1727 led to the establishment of a round-the-clock prayer watch, seven days a week, by 24 single brothers and 24 sin­gle sisters. This prayer watch continued without interruption for one hundred years! Their first mission (1732) was to the Negro slaves on the Danish island of St Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Greenland was next in 1733. Within 20 years, the Mor­avian Brethren had started more missions than Anglicans and Protestants had started during the two preceding centuries.

About   the same time the Holy Spirit was moving among the churches in England. In 1723 Robert Millar, a Presbyterian minister in Paisley, wrote A History of the Propagation of Christianity and the Overthrow of Paganism, in which he advo­cated intercession as the primary means of converting the heathen. This book was soon followed by the rise of Methodism, whose first society was formed in 1739.

The great Methodist revival, which spread rapidly over the English-speaking world, was the first evidence of the church’s interest in world missions. It began in the hearts of a little group of students in Oxford University who met reg­ularly for prayer and Bible study. The idea soon caught on. Prayer groups began meeting all over the British Isles. Their chief petition was for the conversion of the heathen world.

In 1746 a memorial was sent to Boston inviting the Christians there to enter into a seven-year “Concert of Prayer” for mis­sionary work. The memorial evoked a ready response from Jonathan Edwards, who the following year issued a call to all believers to engage in intercessory prayer for the spread of the gospel throughout the world.

Some 30 years later, in 1783, Edwards’s pamphlet was introduced to the churches in England by John Sutcliff in the Northamptonshire Ministerial Association. Following the reading of the pamphlet, a motion was made that all Baptist churches and ministers set aside the first Monday of each month for united intercession for the heathen world.

It read:

Let the whole interest of the Redeemer be affectionately remembered, and the spread of the Gospel to the most distant parts of the habitable globe be the object of your most fervent requests. Who can tell what the consequences of such a united effort in prayer may be?

The “consequences” were not long in coming. In 1792 William Carey sailed for India under the Baptist Missionary Society. Other societies were formed in rapid succession: the London Missionary Society (1795), the Scottish and Glasgow Missionary Societies (1796), the Netherlands Missionary Society (1797), and the Church Missionary Society (1799).

The first mission field of the London Missionary Society in 1795 was the Society Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Eighteen members of the first party of 30 landed on Tahiti. After an encouraging beginning the situation worsened. King Pomare turned against the missionaries. Some were killed, others fled, and some died of disease. In 1804 the king died and was succeeded by his son, Pomare II, who was even more cruel than his father, and harassed and persecuted the missionaries to the point where they began to despair.

Just when the situation looked hope­less, friends back in London called for a special meeting to pray specifically for the conversion of King Pomare. That was in July 1812. That same month the king was converted and became an ardent sup­porter of Christian missions. At his own expense he built a large church where, in the presence of four thousand of his sub­jects, he was baptized. In a comparatively short time Tahiti became predominantly Christian.

Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, was above all else a man of prayer. His philosophy of the Christian life was summed up in four phrases: There is a living God; He has spoken in His Word; He means what He says; He always keeps His promise. Taylor gave 50 years of loving service to the people of inland China. During that time the sun never rose in China without finding Hudson Taylor on his knees. For more than 100 years the China Inland Mission (now the Overseas Missionary Fellowship) has followed the principle laid down by its founder — moving men through God by prayer alone. In 1889 the mission prayed for 100 new workers and got them. In the depth of the Depression (1932-33), when other missions were retrenching, the mission prayed for 200 new workers — and got them!

Hudson Taylor is often referred to as the “father of faith missions”, but that honour really goes to John Evangelist Goss­ner, a German pastor in Berlin, who at the age of 63 founded the Gossner Mission in 1836. During the remainder of his life Gossner, by prayer alone, sent out and supported 200 mis­sionaries, including wives. At his funeral it was said of him that “he prayed mission stations into being, and missionaries into faith; he prayed open the hearts of the rich, and gold from the most distant lands.”

Pastor Louis Harms, founder of the Hermannsburg Mission near Alice Springs, over a period of 30 years recruited and supported 350 missionaries who planted a church of more than 13,000 members. In his journal he wrote:

Last year, 1857, I needed for the mission fif­teen thousand crowns, and the Lord gave me that and sixty over. This year I need double, and the Lord has given me double and one hundred and forty over.

On the whole, Christian missions have not been very successful on the great con­tinent of Asia. After 250 years of Protestant missionary work, and a much longer period of Roman Catholic missions, slightly less than 3 per cent of the population are professing Christians. One bright spot, however, has been Korea.

There church growth has been described as “wildfire”. By far the strongest churches in Asia are in Korea, and the growth continues unabated. Several factors have contributed to this phenomenal growth, but the greatest sin­gle factor would have to be the great revival of 1907.

For five months prior to that time both missionaries and native Christians had been meeting daily for prayer, seeking for a deeper, more satisfying experience of the abundant life in Christ. On January 14, 1907, the Holy Spirit fell on the 700 Christians gathered in Pyongyang for the annual Bible classes conducted by the missionaries. There is no doubt that the revival was the direct result of five months of earnest prayer.

The revival lasted for two weeks, during which all other work was suspended and the Christians gave themselves to prayer, confession, and restitution. The revival spread to Seoul and other cities of Korea, and beyond the borders of Korea into Manchuria and China. To this day the church in Korea has a quality of spiritual life seldom seen in other parts of the world. Many of the churches have an early morning prayer service every day of the year, with several hundred in attendance. There is no doubt that the vitality of the Korean church can be traced directly to the revival of 1907 and the enormous vol­ume of prayer engendered at that time.

Three things have always gone together: prayer, revival, and missions. If church history has taught us anything it is that a moribund church can never engage in the task of worldwide missions. It must be revived in order to be ready for its chief task. And revival doesn’t “just happen”. It is always preceded by a period of pro­longed and earnest prayer. This is just as true today as it was 200 or 2000 years ago.