John R. Mott

Organizer

  • Born: May 25, 1865
  • Birthplace: Livingston Manor, New York
  • Died: January 31, 1955
  • Place of death: Orlando, Florida

American religious leader

The central figure in at least four worldwide Christian movements, Mott combined missionary zeal and personal piety with administrative efficiency. Cowinner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946, he is widely regarded as the founder of the ecumenical movement, the most significant religious movement of the twentieth century.

Area of achievement Religion and theology

Early Life

John R. Mott (mawt) was the third of four children and the only son of John Stitt Mott and Elmira Dodge Mott. When he was only four months old, his father, a farmer, moved the family to Postville, Iowa, where he entered the lumber business and soon became the leading lumber and hardware dealer in town. While working in his father’s lumberyard, Mott learned to keep meticulously accurate and detailed records, which he continued to do throughout his life. John Mott expressed his individuality early when, at age eleven, on his own initiative he added the initial “R” (for “Raleigh”) to his name.

Mott acquired from his mother much of his personal piety, together with an almost insatiable desire for knowledge. Elmira was an earnest Methodist and subscribed regularly to such magazines as Harper’s Weekly, The Youth’s Companion, The Christian Advocate, and The Guide to Holiness, all of which were eagerly devoured by young Mott. The family also had a relatively large library, and his mother told him much about European history and public affairs, both absorbing interests of his in later years. At the age of thirteen, Mott came under the influence of an Iowa Quaker evangelist, J. W. Dean. Shortly thereafter, a young circuit-riding Methodist pastor, the Reverend Horace E. Warner, not only instilled in him the desire and purpose to obtain a college education but also convinced his parents to make it possible for him to do so.

In the fall of 1881, Mott, at age sixteen, enrolled in Upper Iowa University, a small Methodist preparatory college at nearby Fayette. His primary interests in his years there were English literature, history, and philosophy, with special emphasis on politics, constitutional law, and logic. He joined the Philomathean Society, a debating club, and won prizes in historical and political oration and debate. Mott’s debates and orations, in preparation for a political career, were to prove highly useful to him in later years, as did his nearly complete mastery of Robert’s Rules of Order (1876).

During his years at Upper Iowa, Mott was not particularly religious, although he did become a charter member of the local Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). His decision to transfer to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, seems to have been motivated primarily by a need for wider horizons in his preparation for a career in politics and law, but also by a desire to attend a large secular institution in hopes of escaping religious influences. Such was not to be. On Friday evening, January 15, 1886, Mott attended a lecture by J. E. K. Studd, a famous English cricketer from Cambridge (later to be knighted and become lord mayor of London), and heard Studd utter three sentences that changed his life. As Mott took his seat, having arrived late, Studd announced his text: “Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not. Seek ye first the kingdom of God.” Mott later wrote, “These words went straight to the springs of my motive life. I have forgotten all else that the speaker said, but on these few words hinged my life-investment decision. I went back to my room not to study but to fight.” Following an interview with Studd the next day, Mott wrote his parents of his decision “to devote my whole life and talents to the service of Jesus.”

Mott immediately began a period of intensive Bible study and prayer, along with holding religious services in the local jail. He was elected vice president of the Cornell YMCA, whose membership rapidly grew from 40 to 150. In the summer of 1886, he was selected to represent Cornell at the first international and ecumenical Christian Student Conference, a gathering of 251 young men from eighty-nine colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, under the leadership of the evangelist Dwight L. Moody. Mott returned to Cornell from Mount Hermon determined to complete his education and to devote his life to missionary work. He was elected president of the Cornell YMCA, and its membership rapidly grew to 290. He also was instrumental in raising the money for a building for the Cornell YMCA. In 1888, he was graduated with degrees in philosophy, history, and political science, along with membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

Life’s Work

Rejecting several opportunities for further study and travel, Mott agreed to a trial period of one year as student secretary of the International Committee of the YMCA. This involved extensive traveling to college campuses and coordination of campus Christian activities. Mott was to remain in this position not one year but for the next twenty-seven years until 1915, at which time he became the committee’s general-secretary until 1931. Only four months into his new job, however, Mott also accepted the additional responsibility of chair of the newly organized Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, the missionary branch of the YMCA, the YWCA, the American Inter-Seminary Missionary Alliance, and the Canadian Intercollegiate Missionary Alliance. This post Mott would hold until 1920, and he continued to solicit funds for it most of his life. Its slogan, The Evangelization of the World in This Generation, was the title of one of his most important books (1900). Mott had an almost uncanny ability to seek out other capable leaders and to inspire them by his own contagious enthusiasm and zeal. In addition to Mott’s extensive travels, he sent out others to work with student Christian groups on various campuses. By 1925, his efforts had resulted in the recruitment of more than ten thousand American and Canadian student volunteers for various mission boards.

In November of 1891, Mott married Leila Ada White, an English teacher and graduate of Wooster College, at her family home in Wooster, Ohio. White accompanied him in much of his travel and was a devoted wife and partner for nearly sixty-one years, until her death in 1952. The Motts had four children: John Livingstone, Irene, Frederick Dodge, and Eleanor, all of whom grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, while their father commuted to offices in New York City when not traveling elsewhere. Mott is described by his biographers as six feet tall, with handsome features and an impressive bearing. His reddish-brown hair, gray in later years, topped a large, finely molded head. Photographs indicate his most impressive facial feature to have been his thick, shaggy eyebrows. His entire physique suggested strength: square shoulders and square head, firm mouth, and dark brown, piercing eyes. Small wonder that at least one student is said to have emerged from a conference with Mott and commented, “It was like being in to see God!”

Mott defined his life’s work as one of weaving together Christian movements particularly among students all over the world. In 1893, he organized the Foreign Missions Conference of North America in an effort to unite missionary work on that continent. He was repeatedly elected to its executive committee and was made an honorary life member in 1942. Mott also was one of the leaders in founding the World’s Student Christian Federation (WSCF) in Badstena, Sweden, in 1895, and he became its first general-secretary. In this role, he organized student movements in China, Japan, India, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as in Europe and the Near East. International meetings were held in such unlikely places as Tokyo, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Beijing, and Madras. By 1925, the WSCF claimed the membership of more than 300,000 young men and women in more than three thousand colleges and universities in twenty-seven different nations. Mott served as chair of its executive committee from its inception until 1920, then as general chair until 1928.

A high point in Mott’s career came in June of 1910, when he was elected chair of the World Missionary Conference, attended by more than twelve hundred delegates, in Edinburgh, Scotland, which Mott himself called “the most notable gathering in the interest of the worldwide expansion of Christianity ever held, not only in missionary annals, but in all Christian annals.” Mott was also made chair of a “continuation committee” to carry on the work of the Edinburgh conference until the next one. He toured the Far East in this role and organized regional missionary councils in various nations, including India, Japan, Korea, and China. Mott spent his days organizing these councils and his evenings addressing huge throngs of students. Although he spoke through interpreters, his impassioned words were interrupted time and again by applause. Mott deserves much of the credit for the leading role assumed by the “younger churches” in later missionary conferences throughout the world. Against strong opposition, he recruited Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians into ecumenical groups. The “continuation committee” was succeeded by the International Missionary Council in 1921, with Mott as its chair. In 1942, when he retired from that position, he was named its “honorary chairman.”

Mott’s travels on behalf of various Christian causes were prodigious. Following extensive trips throughout the United States and Canada, he made his first visit to Europe in 1891. For the next sixty years, he crossed the Atlantic both ways almost annually, occasionally twice or three times, and the Pacific at least fourteen times, in all logging well over two million miles and visiting eighty-three countries. One indication that these travels were far from pleasure junkets is that Mott was often afflicted by motion sickness not only on sea travels, but on trains as well. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 (after his first intercontinental flight), this “world citizen” received congratulatory messages from seven chiefs of state and numerous other world leaders. He died January 31, 1955, a few months before his ninetieth birthday, and was buried in the Washington Cathedral. Among his last recorded words were these: “While life lasts I am an evangelist.”

Significance

For many years, Mott was the central figure in at least four major world Christian movements: president of the World’s Alliance of YMCAs, general-secretary and later chair of the World’s Student Christian Federation, chair of the International Missionary Council, and the first honorary president of the World Council of Churches. As an American Methodist layman, he was awarded an honorary doctor of divinity degree by the (Russian) Orthodox Theological Institute of St. Sergius, in 1940. He declined many prestigious opportunities during his career, including President Woodrow Wilson’s offer to become United States ambassador to China and offers of the presidencies of Princeton University, Oberlin College, and Yale Divinity School. At President Wilson’s request, he served on the Mexican Commission in 1916 and the Special Diplomatic Mission to Russia (the “Root Mission”) in 1917, utilizing the latter as an opportunity to bring the Russian Orthodox Church into the ecumenical network. Mott was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his fund-raising work and other service during World War I, at the conclusion of which he also made significant contributions to the peace conferences at Versailles. In addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with the pacifist Emily Greene Balch in 1946, he was the recipient of eight honorary degrees: the Imperial Order of Meija from Japan, the Order of the Saviour from Greece, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre from Jerusalem, the Prince Carl Medal from Sweden, the Order of the White Rose from Finland, the Second Order of the Crown from Siam, the Order of Polonia Restituta from Poland, and the Order of the Italian Crown and he was made a chevalier, and later an officer, of the French Legion of Honor. He raised more than $300 million for his various Christian causes, most of it for World War I relief work.

Although a brilliant organizer and fund-raiser, Mott also had deep spiritual strength. “Organize as though there were no such thing as prayer,” he said, “and pray as though there were no such thing as organization.” President Wilson once called him “the world’s most useful man.”

Mott was typical of much of early twentieth century American religious thought. An evangelical liberal, he eagerly embraced the “social gospel” and applied it to missions and other burning issues of his day. Mott was probably influenced as well by the “social Darwinism” of the period; there was unbounded optimism in the popular slogan The Evangelization of the World in This Generation. This slogan did not originate with Mott, although he made it his own. Yet it is also clear that he knew the difference between the “evangelization” of the world and its “conversion.” He simply wanted the Christian Gospel to be preached to the entire world and sincerely believed it could be done in a single generation. Perhaps in part because of his lack of a seminary education, Mott was not deterred by theological niceties in urging ecumenical cooperation. He made the words of Jesus, “that they all may be one,” into an ecumenical rallying cry.

In his speech responding to the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize, Mott characterized his career: “My life might be summed up as an earnest and undiscourageable effort to weave together all nations, all races, and all religious communions in friendliness, in fellowship, and in cooperation.” In its 1965 tribute to him, on the one hundredth anniversary of his birthday, the General Board of the National Council of Churches called Mott “the greatest missionary statesman since the Apostle Paul.” If anyone ever deserved the title of founder of one of the most important religious movements of the twentieth century, the ecumenical movement, it was John R. Mott.

Bibliography

Fisher, Galen M. John R. Mott: Architect of Cooperation and Unity. New York: Association Press, 1952. Written shortly before his death, this volume is very positive throughout in its analysis of Mott’s many contributions. The book contains many quotations from distinguished churchmen in praise of Mott’s work. The concluding chapter compares Mott’s service with that of Saint Paul.

Hopkins, Charles Howard. John R. Mott, 1865-1955: A Biography. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. The definitive biography of Mott, by an emeritus professor of history at Rider College, Philadelphia, this is a detailed, straightforward, and well-documented account of Mott’s career and influence. The result of fifteen years of research, this volume tends to emphasize Mott’s social concern and the details of his travels, perhaps to the neglect of his evangelicalism and churchmanship.

Howe, W. Tracy, and Nancy Reece, eds. Strengthening the Organizational Heart: Fifteen Timeless Lessons from Legendary YMCA Leader, John R. Mott. Franklin, Tenn.: Providence House, 2006. Mott summarized what he had learned in fifteen basic principles. YMCA leaders examine his precepts to describe how they can be applied to contemporary issues.

Mackie, Robert C. Layman Extraordinary: John R. Mott, 1865-1955. New York: Association Press, 1965. A brief monograph of nearly unbridled praise and enthusiasm on behalf of Mott and his accomplishments.

Mathews, Basil. John R. Mott: World Citizen. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934. This book was authorized by Mott to describe the principles and experiences of his life as examples for young people. An excellent portrayal of his personality and character written some twenty years before his death, this volume portrays Mott as one who applied the principles of business to the work of Christian missions.

Mott, John R. Addresses and Papers. 6 vols. New York: Association Press, 1946-1947. Mott wrote at least sixteen books himself, as well as many shorter works, which are included in these volumes. His personal papers and his comprehensive archives of the World’s Student Christian Federation are in the Mott Collection of the Yale Divinity School Library, New Haven, Connecticut.

Rouse, Ruth. John R. Mott: An Appreciation. Geneva: World’s Student Christian Federation Press, 1930. A well-balanced portrayal of Mott in midcareer by an admirer and historian of the ecumenical movement.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The World’s Student Christian Federation: A History of the First Thirty Years. London: S.C.M. Press, 1948. Mott wrote the foreword to this volume, which traces the WSCF from its origins prior to Vadstena, Sweden, in 1895, to High Leigh, England, in 1924, with appropriate attention to Mott’s contributions.

Woolverton, John F. Robert Gardiner and the Reunification of Worldwide Christianity in the Progressive Era. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. This biography of Gardiner, a leader in the Christian ecumenical movement, includes a discussion of Mott.

1941-1970: August 22, 1948: World Council of Churches Is Formed.