Keller recounts that while American churches back then had sent out missionaries to the frontier, no churches on the continent had been involved in any sort of prayer or missions internationally.

“A bunch of college kids got together under a haystack, they began to pray, God moved mightily. They thought about doing something no one had thought about doing … they changed the course of history,” he said.

I had a similar reaction when reading a recent CT History piece exploring the history of American adoption from Korea, which told the story of how World Vision and the precursor to Compassion International transformed Americans’ views of Asian orphans.

Their founders “helped conservative Christians integrate evangelism with social action by grafting evangelism with humanitarianism.” Their outreach laid the groundwork for a wave of adoption from Korea, which has only tapered off in recent decades.

These ideas—praying for global evangelism, caring for children and orphans—seem so essential to the work of the church today that it was hard for me to imagine a time before they were a major priority. Both are undeniably biblical, right? Jesus calls on his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19) and “be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), and both Old and New Testaments contain specific directives to care for the widow and orphan, with James saying true religion is to “to look after orphans and widows in their distress” (1:27).

Certainly these Scriptures, and the same Holy Spirit that inspires the church today, were at work among the early leaders of America’s international missions movement and overseas orphan care initiatives. Looking back at their history reveals how far we’ve come on these fronts.

A few years ago, Williams College—where a monument now commemorates the site of the Haystack Prayer Meeting—discussed whether the campus landmark should be “contextualized” to note what some see as imperialist and racist motivations at the heart of Christian missions. And while some research shows that Western missionaries don’t live up to that stereotype, there has still been so much needed reorienting that has taken place in missions, from dropping terminology like “foreign” or “Orient” or “third world” to relying on missionaries from outside the West to serve, teach, and train (as Dorcas Cheng-Tozun has written about).

We have also grown far more sensitive to the dynamics around adoption, including prioritizing family unification, avoiding negative characterizations of birth parents, and giving adoptees themselves a greater voice in the movement. As Soojin Chung writes, “American rhetoric concerning Korean children was at times tinged with paternalism. World Vision’s newsletter … predicted that the older children would soon ‘forget their life in Korea’ and would have only ‘memories of kind parents whose hearts were big enough to take them in.’” She notes that more recently, adult adoptees have begun to write their own narratives. “Their stories are often layered with experiences of abandonment, identity crisis, and longing for their cultural roots.”

These historical accounts also remind us that even when the biblical command seems so clear-cut, there is still work to be done to ensure our global engagement is as compassionate, respectful, and ultimately, Christlike as possible.

Kate