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The missions-focused Concert of Prayer served as the prayer covering for the evangelical mission begun in Hawaii in 1820, as well as for the evangelical foreign missions sent from America and Great Britain that spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ around the globe to unreached nations in the nineteenth-century. The Concert of Prayer service was simple, yet proved to be world-changing. Its two-part goal was to synchronize consistent prayer for the conversion of the world through reviving the Christian church, and through that revival to effectively and consistently advance the Kingdom of Christ throughout the world.

Usually held on the first Monday evening of the month the Concert of Prayer meeting brought missions to the forefront in local churches throughout the young United States and across Great Britain. The Concert of Prayer lay behind the 1806 American foreign missions-seeding Haystack Prayer Meeting at Williams College in Massachusetts. In 1809 Haystack Prayer leader Samuel J. Mills Jr. met ‘Opükaha’ia-Henry Obookiah in a dorm room at Yale College. Mills instantly envisioned an American mission to Hawaii to reach the Hawaiian people.

In October 1819 the pioneer mission to Hawaiinamed the Sandwich Islands Mission – departed from Boston Harbor. The mission company held a monthly Concert of Pray aboard the brig Thaddeus. Three native Hawaiian students from the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut joined them and were full members of their missionary church.