A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818

Samuel J. Mills died at thirty-five, but his brief life ignited a movement that would reshape global Christianity. This nineteenth-century biography traces the arc of a young man from Connecticut who, after a transformative religious experience, became the unlikely architect of American foreign missions. The book follows Mills through his college years at Williams, where a legendary haystack prayer meeting sparked the first organized American missionary endeavor, through his work establishing the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and his eventual journey to England to secure support for global evangelization. Stryker writes with Victorian reverence, but her portrait captures something timeless: the dangerous power of conviction possessed by someone too driven to wait for the world to be ready. For readers curious about the origins of American religious global outreach, or anyone drawn to stories of individuals whose faith made them impossible to ignore, this compact life offers both history and inspiration.