“Illuminating the whole earth”: Adventism and foreign mission in the Battle Creek years, c.1860...

“Illuminating the Whole Earth”:Adventism and Foreign Mission in the Battle Creek Years (1859 to c.1912)

David J. B. Trim

I n the winter of 1859, a Sabbatarian Adventist living in Wisconsin, Mr. A. H. Lewis,

wrote to the Review and Herald and asked, “Is the Third Angel’s Message being given, or to be given except in the United States?” Note the twofold question: first, was the third angel’s message only being proclaimed in the USA? But second, was it supposed to be proclaimed beyond America? Uriah Smith, the Review editor, published the letter along with an editorial note in reply, in which he stated, “We have no information that the Third Message is at present being proclaimed in any country besides our own.” Having answered one question, he then addressed the other. Smith conceded, “Analogy would lead us to expect that the proclamation of this message would be co-extensive with the first [angel’s message],” i.e., worldwide; but he then went on to suggest, ingeniously, that “this might not perhaps be necessary to fulfill Rev. x, 11, since our own land is composed of people from almost every nation.”1

Since the late twentieth century, more than 90 percent of Seventh-day Adventists have lived outside the United States of America, and church members of 2018 may well find Smith’s response strange. They may be prompted to ask a question of their own: how on earth could members of the “Great Second Advent Movement” ever have imagined that

God wanted them to preach only within one country? But there is another, even more appropriate question to ask. For by the time the denominational headquarters moved from Battle Creek to Washington, DC, in 1904, the third angel’s message was being proclaimed on every inhabited continent of the world, by missionaries appointed and funded by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In other words, within less than half a century after Uriah Smith’s 1859 editorial comment, Adventist attitudes and organizational practices had both been transformed. And one has to ask: how and why did that shift take place?

That is the focus of this chapter. It sketches out the development of the widening vision of mission from local to worldwide focus; it looks at lessons learned as early church leaders dealt with members who came from different cultural/ethnic backgrounds; and it considers what lessons church leaders can learn today, as Adventists continue globally to proclaim the gospel and the third angel’s message.

1. From 1844 to the founding of the General ConferenceSeventh-day Adventists have not always been committed to worldwide mission. It was necessary first to prevail against American particularism and national pride and

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then to overcome doubts about whether such a small movement truly could “go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15).

Adventists inherited a presumption that the exceptional qualities of the United States meant it could stand in for the whole world. William Miller’s teachings were accepted and propagated in Europe, especially in Britain.2 Nevertheless, the Millerites were not really interested in foreign mission. Miller and his chief lieutenant, Josiah Litch, both held that, by the 1840s, the gospel had been preached in the entire world, thanks to the efforts of the early church and the recently founded missionary societies.3 Miller’s message, in their minds, was the last in a series and was intended primarily for people (like themselves) in the northeast of the United States—the apple of God’s eye, as they thought. In a sermon of 1813, for example, the prominent Congregationalist minister and university president, Edward Griffin, asked rhetorically where, if there were to be a revival in the church, it was “more likely to rise than in the United States . . . ? And if in the United States, where rather than in New England?”4 In 1843 Litch expressed similar sentiments but went further, arguing that

New England, being the most pious portion of the earth, would naturally be the theatre of the darkening of the sun and moon, and the falling of the stars.. . . The proclamation of the coming of Christ has also been the most effectually proclaimed here__ The world hashad the Midnight Cry . . . in proportion to the prevalence of true Christianity in the various parts of the earth.5

We see not only the American nationalism typical of the era but also a parochial arrogance.

Eventually, Seventh-day Adventists recognized that their particular insights into biblical truth needed to be preached all around the world, in addition to the general proclamation of the gospel by all churches. But this recognition was some time coming. One reason for the delay was that, until the early 1850s, Sabbatarian Adventists, in common with other Millerites (including William Miller), believed that only those who had accepted Adventist preaching by October 22, 1844, could be saved: the “shut door” doctrine.6 This meant that Sabbatarians conceived their task as in-reach rather than outreach, as merely persuading former Millerites of the truth of the sanctuary and the seventh-day Sabbath.7 Ellen White recalled in a letter to John Loughborough in 1874, “With my brethren and sisters after the time passed in forty-four I did believe no more sinners would be converted,” though as she also observed, “I never had a vision that no more sinners would be converted.”8 Indeed, a vision of March 1849 brought home to her that the sanctuary doctrine was at odds with the shut door doctrine; this prompted the Sabbatarians, as was their custom, to study the Scriptures anew. An additional impetus was the fact that they were, to their own surprise, winning people who had never been Millerites. The study process eventually bore fruit.9 In February 1852 James White declared in the Review and Herald “that we are of the Open Door [as well as the] seventh day Sabbath. . . this is our faith.”10

The transition from a closed to an open door was crucially important because it

136 Lessons From Battle Creek

turned Sabbatarians into active public pros- elytizers, and the movement grew. New believers, who had not been Adventists in 1844 and were converted after the shift away from the “shut door,” made vital contributions to the developing movement. They included John Byington, who later served as the first president of the General Conference, and who had heard a Millerite sermon in Cleveland in 1844 and been unimpressed, but was won to the Sabbath in 1852;11 Joseph B. Frisbie, frequent contributor to the Review and Herald and a powerful preacher of whom James White said, “I know of no man equal to Eld[er] Frisbie to go into a new field, and awaken an interest in the word of God,” who was converted in 1853;12 George I. Butler, later the fourth General Conference president, converted in 1856;13 and Jotham M. Aldrich, who chaired the founding General Conference Session in 1863 having only been converted in I860.14 In the 1850s, the Sabbatarian Adventists expanded geographically, as well as numerically, they had arisen in New England, which was a stronghold of another ex-Millerite sect, the Advent Christians, but they began to grow in western New York State, prompting key Sabbatarian leaders (including James and Ellen White) to move to a region that had been, perhaps even more than New England, the stronghold of Millerism. But Adventists continued to spread west; and by the end of the 1850s, they extended across the Midwest, with the majority in Michigan, where Battle Creek was their chief base.15 They had yet to make any sustained efforts in the South or the West, but the “Great Second Advent Movement” was on the move across the United States.

However, Sabbatarians were unquestionably aware of the efforts in the preceding four decades of Protestant American missionaries in the Middle East, China, and elsewhere in Asia, which, widely reported in contemporary American newspapers, loomed large in American public consciousness.16 By the late 1850s, Sabbatarians naturally began to wonder whether they, too, ought to be sending missionaries beyond the United States.17 Hence the letter to the Review in 1859, asking if “the Third Angel’s Message [is] being given, or [is] to be given except in the United States?” Uriah Smith’s response that “our own land is composed of people from almost every nation” may have been prompted partly by logistical realities. The Sabbatarian Adventists at this point were still vigorously debating whether they should organize; they could not even agree on a common name. How could they, at this point, think of foreign mission?

It is notable that Smith did not say that preaching globally was definitely not necessary—instead he wrote that it “might not perhaps be necessary.” This gives us a hint that at least some Sabbatarians were moving away from Litch’s view. Within two years they had good reason to shift ground, for, by the autumn of 1861, the believers who had recently adopted the name “Seventh- day Adventist” became aware that they had fellow believers in the British Isles, who had been converted in 1859 and 1860 by reading literature sent to them by relatives in the United States.18

By 1863 at least some Seventh-day Adventist leaders were clearly beginning to think of mission as a global responsibility. The first General Conference (GC) constitution,

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adopted on May 21, 1863, included a provision that the newly established GC Executive Committee was to have “the special supervision of all missionary labor, and as a missionary board shall have the power to decide where such labor is needed, and who shall go as missionaries to perform the same.”19 Seventh-day Adventists did not yet understand the word missionary as necessarily or only meaning foreign missionary, for they frequently referred to evangelists sent into new fields within the United States as “missionaries.”20 But that phrase, “a missionary board,” unmistakably evoked the great Protestant foreign mission boards founded in both Britain and America in the previous seventy years.

In 1792 an English shoemaker turned Particular-Baptist minister, William Carey, had helped to found the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen, which became the Baptist Missionary Society. Over the next half century, Britain saw the creation of the London Missionary Society, the (Anglican) Church Missionary Society, the Scottish Missionary Society, and the Free Church of Scotland’s Foreign Missions Board. Meanwhile, partly motivated by their examples, in New England, Adoniram Judson helped to found the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810. Initially Congregationalist, it almost immediately became nondenominational. It in turn helped to inspire the founding of the Presbyterian and Baptist Boards of Foreign Missions (in 1837 and 1845 respectively), and several other American missionary boards and societies, sixteen in all by about 1860. The ABCFM was particularly influential and celebrated, but in the evangelical Protestant

milieu that gave birth to Adventism most, if not all, of the American mission boards were well known.21 Although some sent missionaries to American Indians, all were predominantly concerned with foreign mission. Thus, the term “missionary board” connoted foreign mission; its use in the first GC constitution suggests that evangelizing beyond North America was in the minds of some delegates who founded the General Conference in May 1863.

James White was certainly thinking in these terms, for he immediately urged the Review and Herald's readers to donate money for missionary activity, declaring it possible that the GC “Executive Committee may send [B. F. Snook as] a missionary to Europe before the close of 1863.”22 Two months later, the Review published a long article on mission by Snook, who, as president of the Iowa Conference, was an important Adventist leader.23 Its title, “The Great Missionary Society,” again evoked the Protestant missionary societies, and its substance was an argument that the new denomination should be a missionary society. After setting out a biblical model of mission, Snook maintained that “the Lord does not ordinarily call and send men independently of the church.” Instead, he averred, “the church as a missionary society sustains her missionaries in the field of labor, and co-works with them for the salvation of souls.” Snook was the first Adventist to make a biblical-theological case that the whole church has to be engaged in mission, praying for and financially supporting “those who labor in the missionary work.” Consequently, he appealed for donations to the missionary fund, affirming, “All should desire to be doing what they can in this


way.” But most important, his vision of mission was global. Snook declares that Christ’s “commission [to His disciples] is unlimited, requiring that they should preach the gospel everywhere.” And, he urges, “the same great commission that authorized them to go out into all the world is yet in force . . . Go, and I will go with you, is the sentiment of the Lord.”24 Adventism, it seemed, was about to expand overseas.

2. Initial hesitationIn fact, however, it was to be more than eleven years before John N. Andrews sailed for Europe as the first official missionary. So what went wrong?

Several factors combined to produce hesitancy. Of course, the American Civil War was a major distraction.25 But the war alone cannot explain the failure to go beyond America, or once the war was over, the church would have moved to send missionaries abroad; and in fact, it took another nine years before that happened. In 1865 Snook abandoned Adventism and launched a fierce attack on Ellen White’s prophetic ministry. Thereafter, no Seventh-day Adventist was going to be looking back to Snook’s old articles and quoting them approvingly! However, even before Snook’s apostasy, Adventist leaders were showing themselves wary of foreign commitments.

In the winter of 1863-1864, the leaders of the newly founded General Conference received a request for endorsement from a would-be foreign missionary: Michal B. Czechowski, a Polish immigrant to the United States who asked to be sent to Europe. But church leaders turned him down.26 Some Adventist authors have deplored this

decision, depicting it as the fruit of instinctive dislike of somebody who just didn’t fit in, emphasizing that, as a converted Roman Catholic priest, a Pole, and a very recent convert, Czechowski was very far from being a typical Seventh-day Adventist.27 However, as we have seen, recent converts had chaired the founding General Conference Session and served as first GC president, which suggests simple prejudice was not the key issue.

Church leaders already had good reason to question Czechowski’s judgment and believe him reluctant to take counsel.28 In particular, they suspected him of poor financial judgment and were right to do so—indeed, this weakness was already evident to Adventist leaders by the time of his request in 1864.29 Despite his valorization by some Adventist scholars, Czechowski ended up abandoning his wife, Marie Virginie, and their four children in America, while in Europe he may have conducted an adulterous affair with a convert;30 and as H. H. Leonard puts it, he “was, moreover, economical with the truth.”31 His potential for duplicity was swiftly confirmed, for, after being rejected and consequently becoming disenchanted with the General Conference (he later denounced “the church of Battle Creek . . . as seeking the truth, but lacking . . . charity”), Czechowski turned to the Advent Christians, who had also emerged out of Millerism but were “the strongest opponents” of the Seventh-day Adventists. Remarkably, he persuaded them to send him as a missionary to Europe.32 Once there, however, he preached Seventh-day Adventist doctrines! Czechowski’s chutzpah can prompt chortles among Adventists today, but taking one denomination’s money to preach another’s doctrines

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is hardly ethical conduct. It highlights the extent to which Czechowski combined a passion for mission with significant character flaws.33

Nevertheless, while the reluctance to send Czechowski is understandable and probably was justified, it only explains why he was not sent. It begs the question of why no one was sent to Europe, especially since Snook’s dispatch was already being considered the previous year.

Meanwhile, in 1863, Hannah More and Alexander Dickson, two Protestant missionaries already serving in West Africa, had been convicted of the truth of Seventh-day Adventist beliefs by reading Adventist literature. In 1864, More wrote to church leaders, expressing a hope “that your society may do something toward a Sabbathkeeping mission in this part of Africa.”34 This would have required a financial commitment, to pay More and Dickson’s salaries, but unlike the situation with Czechowski, no expense would have been required to send them abroad— they were in Africa already. Again, however, church leaders said no. Hannah More remained as a missionary but only until 1866 when, because she adhered to Seventh-day Adventist beliefs, the missionary society employing her sent her home. She died in Michigan in 1868, having been cold-shouldered by Adventists in Battle Creek when she visited.35 Seven years later, Ellen White wrote, “Oh how much we need our Hannah More to aid us at this time in reaching other nations. Her extensive knowledge of missionary fields would give us access to those of other tongues that we cannot now approach.” Deploring the fact “that our missionary work should be retarded for the want of

knowledge” and rebuking believers for their behavior to Hannah, she declared, “God brought this gift among us to meet our present emergency; but we prized not the gift, and He took her from us.”36 Church leaders might have felt they could not be blamed for how church members treated More (though White thought some culpable, whether by acts of commission or omission).37 Yet they unquestionably were responsible for deciding not to make the most of her gifts and her situation in 1864 and the two years following.

In considering why “the brethren” in Battle Creek refused to take active steps to help Adventism expand overseas, the Civil War and Snook’s defection could not have helped, of course—but there was a greater problem. There was a continuing refusal on the part of many Adventists to accept that biblical phrases such as “every nation” and “all the world” really meant what they said.

The idea expressed by Smith in 1859, that converting foreigners in America could fulfill the Great Commission and the prophecies of Revelation 10 and 14, remained common among Seventh-day Adventists throughout the 1860s and into the early 1870s. It was a view James and Ellen White tried to counter, but in “the autumn of 1865 . . . James White had a stroke,” which had lasting effects; in 1867 he was “relieved of his [church] offices at his own request,” and he then “lived in semi-retirement until 1869.”38 His powerful voice was thus silenced. Other voices dominated the Adventist conversation about mission.

The prevailing attitudes are evident from the way Adventists in the 1860s referred to the work they began to do for emigre groups in the United States. Consider Michal


Czechowski, who five years before his request to be sent to Europe had written in the Review in 1858 of “how I would love to visit my own native country,” to preach the Second Coming, “the Commandments of God and the Faith of Jesus.”39 Yet two years later this advocate of foreign mission, writing in the Review about his work for New York City’s immigrant population, observed that in New York one found “all people, nations and languages” and, after recounting his work for French, German, Italian, Polish, and Swedish emigres in their languages, he concluded by characterizing his work as mission “in foreign nations.”40 Similarly, in November 1863, only a few months after the articles of White and Snook, John G. Matteson, who had been born in Denmark in 1835 but had emigrated to the USA in 1855, wrote to the Review of his efforts “to spread the truth among [his] countrymen” and his desire that “the third angel’s message be carried to the ends of the earth.” However, the way he proposed reaching fellow Danes (and other Scandinavians) was by having translated “tracts . . . to sell or distribute” to the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish immigrants who were already beginning to flood into the Midwest of the United States.41 Thus, even Adventists born outside North America accepted the view of mission advanced by Uriah Smith in 1859, or assumed that this was how their American fellow believers saw things. In other words, either “the ends of the earth” was not understood literally, or it was assumed only to require mailing tracts, not sending missionaries.

Now, it is to the credit of early Sabbatarian Adventists that they tried to reach immigrants and seem to have been free

of the widespread suspicion of foreigners, amounting to xenophobia in some parts of the United States, during the 1850s, which spawned so-called “nativist” political movements that achieved widespread (if temporary) political success on an anti-immigration platform.42 It is to the credit of Sabbatarians, too, that some were willing to take on the difficult conditions that attended working among some immigrant communities, such as those in urban areas. We know little about Czechowski’s work in New York City—but he was working “in a city with the worst disease mortality and highest crime rate in the Western world,” trying to evangelize emigre communities most of whose members worked “in low-skill jobs for marginal wages.”43

Nevertheless, while outreach to immigrants was important and Sabbatarian attitudes towards them enlightened, focusing on them could never, of itself, fulfill the gospel commission with its global assignment—or so we see today. But that was not the perception among Seventh-day Adventists, and their refusal to take the New Testament at its word was at the heart of the reluctance to send missionaries beyond the shores of the United States. The prevalence of the perception that America was the world is evident not just in Czechowski and Mat- teson’s words, already quoted—their views coincided with other attitudes.

In the 1860s, Uriah Smith, editor of the Review and Herald, returned to his notion of 1859, but with greater certainty. In 1865, with the end of the Civil War in sight, Smith was not looking beyond America’s borders: “The principal theater of the third angel’s message . . . seems to be in our own country.”44


Two years later he wrote of America’s “providential place in history,” quoted statistics that “Illinois contains over 500,000 foreigners” with “more than forty nationalities . .. represented” in Chicago’s public schools, then posed the rhetorical question: “In what other land could the proclamation of the truth reach so many ‘peoples, nations and tongues?’ Rev. x, 11. People from every civilized part of the globe are here to be found, as a settled and abiding portion of our population.”45 In 1868, Matteson, the man who wanted to see the third angel’s message “carried to the ends of the earth,” reported in the Review on his work among Danish immigrants—he characterized Christ’s kindness and mercy to “foreigners” in the United States as fulfilling His promise “that the last message will be proclaimed before many nations, and tongues. Rev. x, l l . ”46

3. Deciding to “go into all the world”In 1869, however, American Seventh-day Adventists learned, to their astonishment and perhaps even chagrin, that they were not alone; that as well as isolated individual seventh-day Sabbath keepers in Europe, converted through literature, there were some sixty Seventh-day Adventists in Switzerland in organized congregations: some forty in a church in Tramelan (near Berne), the others in several small companies in francophone Switzerland.47 As J. N. Andrews, who had briefly taken over as editor of the Review observed, with a hint of reproach: “We cannot take any credit to ourselves for being instrumental in raising up this company of commandment-keepers.” Instead, the first Adventist churches in Europe had been planted by Czechowski!

Denominational leaders had known that the Advent Christians had adopted him and that, with their assistance, he had gone to Europe. “But we supposed,” Andrews wrote, “that he had given up the observance of the seventh day. It was, therefore, much to our surprise that we learned . . . that [Czechowski] was not only adhering to the Sabbath himself, but that he had raised up a body of Sabbath-keepers in Switzerland.”48 The latter were as surprised as their American brethren to find out there was a Seventh- day Adventist Church, for the eccentric Czechowski had not seen fit to share this information with them. However, the elders of the Swiss company, Albert Vuilleumier and Jakob Erzberger, found a copy of the Review in papers he left with them before he set off on further proselytizing peregrinations in Germany, Romania, Hungary, and Austria, where he died in Vienna in February 1876.49

The Swiss were in need, both spiritually and materially. They needed additional doctrinal instruction; but they also needed money, for their church building in Tramelan, which they owned, had been mortgaged to the hilt by Czechowski and was about to “pass into the hands of worldly men,” as Andrews noted.50 They sent Erzberger, who had replaced Czechowski as their minister, to the United States to strengthen contacts with the mother church. He went to Battle Creek, where James and Ellen White “welcomed him into their home.” The young John Harvey Kellogg tutored him in English, while James White and Andrews studied the Bible with him. Erzberger later stayed some time in Andrews’s home and was ordained at the New York camp meeting, before returning home in 1870.51 There is no doubt that


his visit made an impression. At the seventh General Conference Session, a new society, “the Missionary Society of the Seventh-day Adventists,” was founded “to send the truths of the third angel’s message to foreign lands, and to distant parts of our own country, by means of missionaries, papers, books, tracts, etc.” Its officers were to be the same as those of the General Conference. Announcing the formation of the society in the Review in June 1869, James White, who was reemerging into leadership positions after prolonged health problems, also appealed for funds for the Swiss Adventists, proclaiming: “Means are wanted. Other lands are reaching out their hands to us for help.”52

It may be thought that at this point American Adventists would recognize, if not a duty to evangelize in Europe, at least some responsibility to help their fellow believers, which might lead into a feeling of obligation to send missionaries overseas. And some accounts of Adventist mission and history give the impression that, after Erzberger’s visit in 1869, the dispatch of Andrews as the first official missionary in 1874 was a natural and easy progression.53 In fact, in the following five years it was by no means clear that the one event would lead to the other.

Indeed, in June 1870, seven months after White’s appeal for funds, he reported with some frustration: “Our people very slowly respond to the call for means to help the cause in Switzerland . . . we have been disappointed.”54 He identified three reasons: first, few Adventists were wealthy, and many of those who wanted to help had no money to spare; on the other hand, “most of those brethren who have ready cash, have either never seen their duty to help the cause in all

its departments, or have. . . [lost] the spirit of sacrifice.” Perhaps most important, though, American Adventists did not agree they had a responsibility to help the work abroad. “In the minds of many there is some doubt,” White wrote, and for “those who are ready to hand out money to circulate publications in our own country, and to help the cause in our own land . . . to risk their money to help the cause in Europe does not look so clear.”55 In other words, insularity and parochialism were problems—Seventh-day Adventists did not yet see the world as their parish.56

James White tried to broaden horizons by appealing to sentiment, telling readers of the Review “that in Switzerland there is to-day a body of Seventh-day Adventists in whom we may have confidence. We have the photographs of many of them .. . . We have their letters, which show ability, and true devotion to the cause.” And, as he added, many had now met “our very dear brother,” Jakob Erzberger, who had impressed as “a man of real worth, good ability, and sound piety.”57 Ironically, the first indigenous European Seventh-day Adventist minister was “in position before the first American missionary. But he was self-supporting and unfunded.” For at the eighth General Conference Session, in March 1870, Andrews had “pleaded for a missionary to be sent [but] to no avail.”58

Twenty months later, the tenth General Conference Session, in December 1871, “voted to send out Bro[ther] Matteson as a missionary to the Danes and Norwegians.” At last, it may seem, Adventists had grasped their global responsibilities—but this action actually sent Matteson to Wisconsin!59 In other words, “missionary” work was still seen as something done to immigrants in

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America. The session also resolved that, since the “providence of God has thrown multitudes of foreigners into our own land . . . where we may reach them ... without the labor and expense of foreign mission work, therefore . . . we will with renewed interest and zeal, take hold of the work of missions among the foreign-born population of this land,” declaring such work to be “one of the most efficient means of spreading to other lands a message which is to go to many nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples.”60

To be sure, this session did pass another resolution, asserting “very deep interest” in mission in the “countries of Europe” and “especially acknowledge[ing] the hand of God in planting the truth in Switzerland.” This was appropriate language, since denominational action had not done it! But the resolution did affirm a “will, so far as the providence of God shall open our way, [to] do what lies in our part to assist in the spread of the truth to [the] countries of Europe.”61 Yet the language of this resolution is curiously irresolute, and its lack of certainty in sharp contrast to talk of reaching immigrants as “one of the most efficient means.” At the end of 1871, then, American Adventists were, so to speak, teetering on the brink of accepting they had a global responsibility, yet still hoping that their obligations to the world could be discharged by working solely within the United States, putting the onus on God for progress in Europe (and apparently barely thinking of the rest of the world).

It was surely in response to this state of affairs that, in December 1871, Ellen White penned a testimony on missionary work. She wrote reproachfully, “There has been but little of the missionary spirit among

Sabbathkeeping Adventists.” She urged, “Young men should be qualifying themselves by becoming familiar with other languages, that God may use them as mediums to communicate His saving truth to those of other nations.” Lest there be any misunderstanding, she continued, “Much can be done through the medium of the press, but still more can be accomplished if the influence of the labors of the living preacher goes with our publications. Missionaries are needed to go to other nations to preach the truth in a guarded, careful manner.”62

In 1873 Seventh-day Adventists finally began to turn the corner. A catalyst was another appeal from Europe. At the eleventh General Conference Session, held in March 1873, in Battle Creek (as all early sessions were), denominational leaders shared a heartfelt letter from the Swiss believers, sent in November 1872. Written by Albert Vuil- leumier (1835-1923), who later evangelized in Switzerland, France, Italy, and Algeria, the letter was signed by Jules-Etienne Dietschy and Jules-Henri Guenin, who later also became leaders of the church in Europe. They noted that

the last Review, received this week, stated that the General conference will be held soon; We pray you to consider under the regard of God, if it will not be necessary to send an American messenger to Europe to direct the propagation of the truth. Oh, dear brethren, pray for us, and for the work in Europe. This is the earnest prayer of your affectionate brethren in Jesus Christ; who renew to you the assurance of their Christian love.63


This letter, so redolent of Paul’s Macedonian vision (Acts 16:9) was difficult to oppose. But it is also the case that the wider situation was changing. It is likely that, gradually, American Adventists were beginning to accept that they had a responsibility to their European brethren. Furthermore, a longstanding conflict between James White, Uriah Smith, J. N. Andrews, and J. H. Waggoner, which had been “one more factor in delaying the sending of foreign missionaries” and that had drawn in George I. Butler, began to be resolved in the late spring of 1873. The Whites were reconciled with Butler, who began to make strong public affirmations of the leadership of James White, whose powerful influence could thus once again have effect.64 At the eleventh General Conference Session in March 1873, James White gave the conference address, which was on the theme of worldwide mission.65

He left his audience in no doubt that Adventist mission had to be global. He began by declaring that the General Conference existed to oversee “the entire work connected with the message, which we have to give to the world.” He moved on to leave no doubt that the third angel’s message was a message “we are bearing to the world.” Quoting Revelation 14:6, he stated that this is “a worldwide message,” repeating soon after: “the third message will be a strong message. It will go with power. It is a world-wide message.”66 Significantly, too, he cited the prophesy of Revelation 10:11 and also explicitly declared it to be “another world-wide message,” “the last great world-wide warning.”67 No longer would Adventists suggest that “many nations” meant immigrants from many nations. White acknowledged that American

Adventism included “men of different nations and tongues,” who were “gathered from almost every nation in the world,” but in the context of thanking God for giving Adventism the resources for carrying out “the second great world-wide proclamation to the world.”68 He admonished the session “that our time to . . . bear this message to the world, is short.” Even when stressing the need, “in our own country,” for more “good translation[s]” into foreign languages, he returned to the theme of overseas mission: “We need them in our own country, but, my friends they need them in Europe, and they must have them there .. . . All that is necessary is action on our part.”69

Butler, the GC president, publicly praised “the excellent and stirring Conference Address delivered by Eld[er] White,” declaring the “thoughts and suggestions contained in it” to be “just such as our people need to consider at the present time.”70 By the end of the year, White was returning to the same theme in a powerful article in the Review: “The field is the world. And the original commission, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,’ has the same weight and power for the consciences of all true ministers of Christ, and the same fire for their souls that it had nearly nineteen centuries ago for Christ’s first ministers.”71 Meanwhile, the personal disputes between James White and other church leaders had, to a great extent, been resolved in the summer of 1873, after the March GC Session; the next session was called surprisingly quickly in November, and was a meeting marked by a remarkable spirit of unity.72

At the thirteenth General Conference Session in August 1874, James White was elected


president again, his third period as president. He and George Butler, the outgoing president, persuaded the session to vote to send Andrews to Switzerland. Within three months, Andrews had sailed from Boston for Europe, accompanied by his two motherless children. In November that year, he met with representatives of six Swiss companies of believers—the fruit of work by Erzberger and Vuilleumier. In January 1875, less than three months after Andrews’s departure, Ellen White had a vision whose unmistakable message was that he was not the only Adventist to be sent overseas. White saw the globe, covered in “darkness like the pall of death”—and then saw it transformed by “light, a little light, more light, much light!"73 The spread of multiple pinpricks of light, as she soon after explained, represented the spread of Adventist workers and printing presses not merely to Europe but around the world.

Soon enough, the vision became reality. In 1877, Matteson finally realized his dream and was dispatched to Scandinavia. In 1878, John N. Loughborough was sent to England, and H. P. Ribton began work in Italy. The following year, Ribton moved onto Alexandria, establishing the first Adventist mission in an Islamic country.74 By the end of the 1880s, Adventist missionaries had gone to the continents of Australia, Africa, and South America, but the crucial moment had been the sending of Andrews. In 1874, the Seventh-day Adventist Church “committed itself to foreign missions. There would be no turning back.”75

4. Adapting to “all the world”Unfortunately, the parochialism that helped

to hold Seventh-day Adventists back from foreign mission continued to shape attitudes of the mostly American church workers and missionaries of the thirty years following 1874. It no longer held the denomination back from sending missionaries overseas; but it did affect the way they conducted themselves and the methods they used in outreach. They found themselves replicating the mistakes by early missionaries from other Protestant denominations.

Seventh-day Adventists were well aware of British and American missionary boards and societies, along with the exploits and sufferings of the missionaries they had sent to the non-Christian world. Missionaries’ memoirs were a popular genre in nineteenth-century America.76 We know that Adventists were among those who read them. In the 1888 edition of The Great Controversy, Ellen White outlines this history, referencing William Carey, Adoniram Judson, and “the formation of the American Board of Foreign Missions” (i.e., the ABCFM), all in approving terms.77 Elsewhere she praised Carey as “one of the greatest missionaries”; and she twice recommended “[Robert] Moffat, [David] Livingstone and Carey, and the present daily-unfolding of history of missionary effort” as subjects Adventist young people ought to study.78 Her attitudes were widely shared; many Adventists read the reports of the various boards and societies and were familiar with their activities.79 Denominational periodicals regularly made laudatory reference to Carey (“the ‘Father of modern missions’ ”), Judson, Livingstone, Moffat, and Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission, as well as other British and American Protestant missionaries, both male and female.80 They were also


celebrated as godly heroes and heroines in books by Adventist authors, printed by Adventist presses.81 It is significant that, when it came to foreign mission, Adventists saw themselves as being links in a more widely Protestant missionary chain; further (as will be seen below), their awareness of the activities of Protestant missionary societies shaped the way they viewed their task. But of course, literary familiarity with the stories of Protestant missionaries was no substitute for undergoing actual experiences.

Early Adventist missionaries had to internalize for themselves, from first-hand experience, the lesson learned by one of the first American foreign missionaries, the Baptist Adoniram Judson, that “Burma was not Connecticut.”82 A similar lesson had to be learned about Europe, which was far closer to the United States culturally and religiously as well as geographically, but which nevertheless differed significantly from the United States in certain key aspects of culture and society; yet these were differences that pioneer Adventists did not always identify, at least not at first.

Less than fourteen years after Andrews left the United States, Ellen White wrote to two young men, Charles Boyd and Dores Robinson, who had recently arrived in Europe, where they would take part in planning for mission on that continent before sailing on to serve in Africa as the first Adventist ministers in that continent. She had advice that was relevant for the work they would start in Africa and for the discussions in which they would take part in Europe. “There is great importance attached to the starting in right at the beginning of your work. I have been shown that the work in England

. . . [is not] making that decided advancement that it might have made if the work had commenced right.”83 Unfortunately, the first American missionaries in Europe often used the methods that they had successfully used in the New World without thinking of whether they were appropriate for the Old World.84

An example was using tents for evangelistic campaigns. Andrews, who recognized and learned from his mistakes, wrote in 1878 that there was no point using tents for mission in wealthy Switzerland—tents conveyed the wrong image entirely to the affluent Swiss. Similarly, in 1880 Andrews observed of Britain, which he had visited several times, that “to reach the middle and upper classes to any great extent, it is necessary to hire respectable halls.”85 Yet the lesson was not learned by others.

In particular, John N. Loughborough was one who adamantly continued to use tent missions. To be fair to him and to put this in context, Loughborough and M. E. Cornell had been the first Seventh-day Adventists to use tents for Adventist evangelism. Loughborough had used a big tent very effectively in the Midwest and California. Not only had he won many converts but also he had won people of all social classes, prosperous as well as poor. When Loughborough arrived in Britain in 1878, he found that everything cost much more than in the United States and he wanted to be a good steward of limited denominational resources. Eventually, despite Andrews’s counsel, Loughborough decided to rent a large tent and use it for his first public evangelistic campaign, which was held in Southampton, a large, cosmopolitan port city on England’s South Coast.86


He justified the tent partly on the grounds that to hire “respectable halls” would be too expensive; but it seems likely that Loughborough simply took for granted that he would have the same impact in England as he had enjoyed in America. Unfortunately, he was to discover that the Midwest and West Coast of the United States were rather different to the South Coast (and indeed everywhere else) of the United Kingdom.

English society in the Victorian era was heavily class conscious. To middle-class English people, a large tent advertised with garish brochures conjured up images of working-class amusements; it connoted cheap and nasty. In consequence, people stayed away in droves and the few people who did attend were from the poorest section of society. This limited Adventist growth in Britain from the very beginning; thanks to Loughborough’s strategy, the movement had been “associated with evangelism for the ‘lower orders’ and, once this image had been created, Loughborough was unable to a ttract. . . other classes.”87

In 1887, Ellen White blamed slow progress in the British mission partly on Loughborough’s stubbdrn preference for tent missions.88 She declared that in Britain, had “the plans and methods [adopted] been of a different character, even if they necessarily involved more outlay of means, there would have been far better results.” What “God would have [Adventist missionaries do],” she observed, was to “make the very first impression the very best.” Her conclusion was stark: “The work in Old England might have been much farther advanced now than it is if our brethren had not moved in so cheap a way.. . . if they had hired good halls, and carried forward the

work as though they had great truths which would be victorious... [then] the work would have advanced more than it has.”89

Loughborough was not the only American Adventist to struggle to adapt to cultures that, even when they seemed similar (as in Britain, another English-speaking country, where the majority of Americans of that time had family roots), could be very different. When Adventists considered non-Christian peoples (who at this point were, as will be seen, subject of only very limited missional efforts), there was little or no empathy.90 This was an ongoing problem for the rest of the Battle Creek years, and beyond.

At the 1901 General Conference Session William Spicer, who had served in England and then in India, gave a devotional on mission service in which he noted that “every worker” who had served several years in a “foreign field” had at some point felt the depression of finding persons coming into the field impulsively, without understanding what they are to do, or why they come, then collapsing, right in the front of the battle— They have. . . come abroad, and later discovered their unpreparedness, and have said to us, “I believe they made a mistake in sending me: I needed, a different preparation for the work.”91

But others did not recognize their own cultural blinkers and consequent lack of preparedness. Spicer frankly raised the issue “of Americanism, of nationalism,” calling it “something to reckon with.” Too many times, he averred, the missionary had “erected a barrier between himself and every soul who is not an American. Anybody who has been in a foreign field has known this fact: Difficulties which perhaps it has taken years to


clear away have been created by those who kept that national spirit forward.” Spicer concluded, “It does one no good to take along from America a national feeling into the field.” And he urged session delegates, “if the Lord will take away the self-consciousness that ruins us, he can help us to reach the people a great deal better than we have allowed him to do very often.”92

However, as Spicer’s session speech revealed, Adventist missionaries were learning to adapt to local cultures. Indeed, in contrast to the blinkered approach shown by the first missionaries from America, in Germany in the 1880s and ’90s, under the leadership of the German-born but American-raised L. R. Conradi, Adventist workers adopted some of the practices and terminology of German Pietism and emphasized the Reformation roots of Adventist doctrines. Partly as a result of making Adventism appear European, rather than American, the church enjoyed considerable growth, both in Germany and among ethnic German communities in the Russian Empire.93 And in 1902, as the Battle Creek years came to an end, Guy Dail, an American missionary then serving as secretary of the German Union, wrote that missionaries, on arriving in the field, needed to reach “a mutual understanding with our newly acquired neighbor[s].”94

5. Mission interruptedIn the 1890s, however, despite the fact that culturally sensitive strategies were beginning to emerge, Adventist mission growth began to slow down, thanks largely to a breakdown in the 1863 model of organization. It had been appropriate for a sect confined to the northeast and Midwest of the

United States but was inadequate for an increasingly globe-spanning movement.

Leaders in Battle Creek after 1874 were certainly supportive of the concept of foreign mission. Ole Olsen was not only the first foreign-born General Conference president (though he was raised in, and a citizen of, the United States)—he was actually serving in Europe when he was elected president in 1888. Furthermore, the 1889 General Conference Session established a semi-autonomous Foreign Mission Board that was given “far- reaching authority” in an attempt to add institutional weight to the church’s mission enterprise.95 Yet there is no doubt that in the ten years before the move away from Battle Creek, missional momentum had slowed, due largely to sclerotic, top-down administration and poor financial management.96

It was not only in foreign countries but also in the South of the United States (which throughout the Battle Creek years was an Adventist mission field) that mission was beginning to grind to a halt, impeded rather than impelled by administrative structures originating in and intended for a denomination that was much smaller, in terms of membership, geographical extent, and number of administrative entities. The top- down approach of leaders in Battle Creek was compounded by the increasingly toxic atmosphere in the Michigan town, which partly reflected the insidious influence of John Harvey Kellogg.97 In the end, the creation of the Foreign Mission Board only added another administrative layer, another political prize to be fought over, and another potential bureaucratic bottleneck.98 J. Edson White, the effective leader of Adventist work in the South of the United States, wrote to

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his mother, then in Australia, to express his frustration with how the Southern work was developing. He was particularly vexed that leaders in Battle Creek, albeit lacking the insight (and perhaps passion) of leaders on the spot, nevertheless refused to delegate authority to them. He complained in graphic terms that “in this part of the field where I am working the principle seems to be . . . ‘Where there is a head, HIT IT.’ if the General Conference is so balled up that they cannot or will not do anything for [this field], then why not stand aside and let those who will help along do something?”99

In addition to an administrative structure that centralized power in the hands of the GC presidents and their close advisers in Battle Creek and did not adequately allow for the exercise of local initiative, financial administration was unsound. By 1900, denominational finances generally were in disarray; around the world, schools, colleges, publishing houses, and health institutions were deeply in debt and in danger of bankruptcy. The church’s institutions in America alone owed $l,250,000.lot) Mission finances were particularly disordered. At the 1899 General Conference Session, W. W. Prescott, who had been superintendent of the British Mission, complained that “funds designated for specific mission fields had been mismanaged and had often not been sent to the intended fields.” The General Conference was obliged to take out loans in order “to support its missionaries.”101 Finances were so chaotic, and priorities so askew, that at a GC Executive Committee meeting in 1897 there was a serious suggestion to use “the foreign mission work [as] a practical solution” to “this financial question.” It was proposed “to turn the

laborers into the foreign mission fields as fast as possible; then go before our people and make a plea for help from the standpoint of the needs in foreign fields.”102 Workers were to be dispatched overseas, yet not primarily for mission work, but rather as a device to move the financial burden from the General Conference to foreign fields, for which it was thought American church members would be more likely to donate than for GC funds! If this testifies to the transformation of the mind-set of American Adventists since the failure of James White’s fundraising for Swiss Adventists in 1869-1870, it is also a striking illustration of the topsy-turvy priorities and financial ineptitude of GC Executive Committee members.

There was a further weakness to the denominational mission program—a conceptual one. The task of Adventist missionaries was to win over other Christians, particularly Protestants, to “present truth.” In these years, while “mission to non-Christians was approved of and praised,” it was seen as the responsibility of the other Protestant missionary societies—once “they had brought people to Christ,” then Adventists would take over, “bringing them the last warning.”103 Thus, mission was still (as in the first years after 1844) a kind of in-reach, rather than outreach. Spicer later recalled,

When I came back from Europe in 1892, to be secretary of the Foreign Mission Board, . . . truly we didn’t have much of an idea of going to the heathen. We didn’t expect to go in any really strong way. We never expected to go to the Catholic countries. We thought: We will get a few along the edges, and the Lord


will come; but the Lord all the time had in mind this purpose, of calling the heathen, of calling through all the Catholic lands for His people to come.104

Such attitudes help explain why the Mission Board refused Abram La Rue’s request to send him to China in 1887 (he did serve in Hong Kong for 15 years, 1888-1903, but as a self-supporting missionary) and declined to take further Stephen Haskell’s 1890 recommendation, made after visits to China and Japan, that missionaries be sent to China.105

Ellen White was one who recognized the symptoms and diagnosed the underlying cause. In the winter of 1896 she wrote,

The whole body is sick because of mismanagement and miscalculation. The people to whom God has entrusted eternal interests, the depositaries of truth pregnant with eternal results, the keepers of light that is to illuminate the whole world, have lost their bearings. . . . Are those in Battle Creek, the men and women that God has appointed to do the most solemn work ever given to mortals, in partnership with Jesus Christ in His great firm? Are those whom He has bidden to communicate the light from the burning lamps to others, that the regions of darkness may have opportunity to hear the saving message, doing their duty?106

The reforms of the 1901 General Conference Session and the subsequent 1903 Session not only achieved significant structural changes but also raised to the highest offices

leaders more committed to mission (a point elaborated below).

Ellen White was not alone in identifying the need for change, especially the need to empower local leaders and to reenergize the missionary spirit of Seventh-day Adventists. One of those who wanted the Executive Committee “to distribute its administrative responsibilities among the union conferences, and to get into a position where it could give all its time and influence and power to missionary problems,” was Uriah Smith. He strongly supported the 1901 reforms, urging A. G. Daniells to do whatever was necessary to make it possible “to send forth in this generation this gospel of the kingdom, for a witness to all nations.” Whatever his views in the 1850s and 1860s, by 1903 Smith had come to see that the third angel’s message had, indeed, to go “to all the world.”107 Whatever the mistakes made by the GC presidents of the 1890s, Ole Olsen and George Irwin, they were personally committed to worldwide mission and, after structural reforms were introduced, they loyally served Daniells during his presidency (1901-1922). Indeed, both men went on to be mission leaders overseas, serving as union presidents (perhaps enjoying the decision-making authority devolved to them in that capacity!) in Europe, Africa, and Australasia.

In the end, apart from the changes in organizational structure and personnel, even the physical move away from Battle Creek in 1903 was a change for the better. As events proved, getting away from John Harvey Kellogg’s negative influence was only one and not the greatest of the benefits of the move from provincial Michigan to the nation’s capital—the home of foreign diplomats as


well as US political and governmental leaders, and a major city near a large ocean port. New opportunities presented themselves, and new horizons were opened, mental as well as geographical.108 The move was a shock to many Adventists, but it need not have been. James White had written thirty years before, “The gospel field is the world. Ours is a vast field. And there is nothing to bind us to the locality of Battle Creek, only that it was the headquarters of our cause in its infancy.”109

6. Summing up: The Battle Creek years— and beyondDuring the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s four “Battle Creek” decades, 1863 to 1903, it had experienced an astonishing transformation. The denomination’s membership was still very small in global terms, yet in contrast to the 1860s, its leaders and many of its members now demonstrated extraordinary boldness and assurance. They were now asserting with great confidence, We ought to preach this gospel of the kingdom throughout all the world, we can, we will; and they were doing it.

What had made the difference? How did a church whose leaders’ public position in the 1850s and 1860s was “We don’t have to go into all the world” become audacious enough to go everywhere? First and foremost, as we have seen, Adventists genuinely shifted their theological understanding. This in turn owed much to the role of certain important advocates, and their role is the second factor.

James White played a vital role in the 1860s and early 1870s. In the long term, however, even more important was the role of Ellen White. In the 1860s she did not express herself as publicly or forcefully on foreign

mission as did James, but her testimony of December 1871 was an important intervention in the debate about foreign missions, while her vision of January 1875 preempted any criticism of the decision to send Andrews to Switzerland. Later, her own two-year visit to Europe (1885-1887) was crucial in helping to put the embryonic mission in Europe on a firm footing. Then in the 1890s, her nine- year term of service in Australia (1891-1900) not only was vital, in contributing to the development of the denomination in Australasia; it also helped give her a truly global perspective. She was one of the chief public proponents of worldwide mission, about which, during and after her time in Australia, she was increasingly insistent.110

In 1900, for example, in Christ’s Object Lessons, she wrote: “The gospel invitation is to be given to all the world—‘to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.’ Revelation 14:6. The last message of warning and mercy is to lighten the whole earth with its glory.” She continues, “The whole world is the field for Christ’s ministers. The whole human family is comprised in their congregation. The Lord desires that His word of grace shall be brought home to every soul.”111 The same year, in a testimony she drew on again later, for an article for the 1901 Week of Prayer readings, she eloquently declares, “The vineyard includes the whole world, and every part of it is to be worked— The whole earth is to be illuminated with the glory of God’s truth. The light is to shine to all lands and all peoples. . . . Our burden for the ‘regions beyond’ can never be laid down until the whole earth shall be lightened with the glory of the Lord.”112

The language of this testimony was used


by the American missionary E. H. Gates in a report from Singapore after his arrival there in January 1902: “All these experiences give me new courage to push the knowledge of God’s truth into the ‘regions beyond.’ ”113 This illustrates the impact of Ellen White’s views. There was now no doubt that “illuminating the whole earth,” and all its peoples, was the mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

A third factor was effective communication. This was to become even more important in the post-Battle Creek years (as we shall see), but it had already helped to transform the Adventist worldview by 1903. Andrews and Loughborough, in Switzerland and Britain, set an excellent example, writing numerous reports for the Review and Herald and Signs of the Times. Others followed their model. There were powerful examples of lives of commitment and literal self- sacrifice, but these became known back in North America because of good communications. The net result of constant publicizing of missions in denominational publications, and of the widespread dissemination of the testimonies of Ellen White, was that American Adventists began to take for granted that to be a Seventh-day Adventist meant to be supportive of foreign missions; as generations passed, the “global-ness” of Adventism became an integral part of Adventist identity.

Some of these trends were not fully realized until well into the twentieth century. But the church’s trajectory regarding foreign missions had been decisively changed. During the Battle Creek years, the foundations of what would later become a grand edifice had been put in place. From a parochial,

introspective outlook in the 1850s and 1860s, Adventism’s outlook had been transformed into a global one.

Still, in the summer of 1904, as denominational leaders undertook the arduous task of moving themselves and all their files from Michigan into their new (rented) offices in Takoma Park,114 ending the denomination’s Battle Creek years, they could have been excused for reflecting on how much there was still to do, rather than how much had been achieved. And they would have been right to do so. To be sure, forty years earlier there had been only some 125 churches, with 3,500 members, served by 30 pastors; whereas in 1903 there were exactly 2,120 churches, with 77,554 members, served by 936 pastors.115 The number of Seventh-day Adventists per million of the world’s population had grown from roughly 3 to just under 50.116 Of approximately 190 independent nations in the 2010s, by 1900, some seventy had been entered by Adventist missionaries, who were present on every inhabited continent.117 And yet in many ways the work of Adventist mission had only just begun. The denomination was relatively well entrenched in North America, northern and central Europe, and Australia; but in most of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Northern Asia, and Latin America, outposts were manned by just one or two missionaries, most of whom were American, while there was no administrative and financial infrastructure for maintaining them.

It would fall to the president elected in 1901, Arthur G. Daniells, to the two officers elected in 1903, William A. Spicer, the secretary, and Irwin H. Evans, the treasurer, and later to Evans’s successor in 1909, Walter T. Knox, to create that infrastructure, which

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enabled worldwide mission to become not just an aspiration but a reality. It is striking that both Daniells and Spicer were veterans of foreign mission service, Daniells in New Zealand and Australia, Spicer in Britain and India. Evans had been a missionary in Norway and in 1909 became president of the Asiatic Division—the first division, a new organizational form created especially to foster mission. Most of Knox’s career had been in the USA, but he had worked in Mexico. In addition, the denomination’s first vice presidents, elected in 1903, were Conradi, the long-term leader of Adventist mission across Europe, and W. W. Prescott, who had served in Britain and Australia.

After 1903 there was a new urgency; this surely reflects the fact that, for the first time, most if not all senior church leaders had extensive experience in foreign mission fields. They might now be based on the outskirts of Washington, DC, rather than serving abroad, but then Takoma Park (as already noted) was a more cosmopolitan headquarters than Battle Creek; and in any case, denominational leaders regularly traveled overseas—for example, starting in 1906, the GC Executive Committee had an annual series of meetings in Europe, meetings attended by the GC officers.

Just as important was the fact that even though no longer serving as missionaries, GC leaders retained their passion for mission, and their conviction that it was not an optional extra for the remnant church, nor yet the responsibility of only some of its members. As Spicer put it in 1901, “God calls us to take hold of this foreign work.. . . It is often taken up as something aside from [the] regular work. We are to do the work as the regular

work of God, because the message is to go to every nation before the Lord comes.”118 It was a theme to which he repeatedly returned over the next two decades, declaring in 1921, the year he was elected General Conference president: “The cause of worldwide missions is not something in addition to the regular work of the church. The work of God is one work, the wide world over.. . . to carry the one message of salvation to all peoples . . . is the aim of every conference, every church, every believer.”119 The Foreign Mission Board was dissolved in 1903—not because mission was relegated to a low priority but because it was so high a priority that now the GC Executive Committee accepted mission as its responsibility. As Bruce Bauer shows, Daniells and Spicer “made the General Conference Committee into a virtual mission board.” The GC Secretariat made recruiting for, and generally administering, foreign mission its chief priority.120

More countries were entered in the ten years after 1901 than in the preceding ten years.121 But just as important, mission work in a number of other countries was strengthened. First, although many Adventist evangelists still focused primarily on winning converts from Protestant denominations, more and more missionaries were sent abroad to non-Christian societies, including the first missionaries to China. This was something encouraged by Ellen White, who, writing late in life, stressed that

scattered in every land . . . are those who have not bowed the knee to Baal. Like the stars of heaven, which appear only at night, these faithful ones will shine forth__ In heathen Africa, in the


Catholic lands of Europe and of South America, in China, in India, in the islands of the sea, and in all the dark corners of the earth, God has in reserve a firmament of chosen ones that will yet shine forth amidst the darkness.122

Second, church leaders, especially Dan- iells and Spicer, consciously and strategically planned to enter new territories. They also ensured church periodicals began an era of intense promotion of mission and encouraged denominational presses to publish books on mission. In addition, Mission Quarterly was founded in 1912; the next year, the Missions Offering was created.123 The church was well on its way to having worldwide mission implanted in its DNA.

These were all achievements after Battle Creek. Within a decade of the departure of the denominational headquarters to Takoma Park, a steady stream of missionaries was flowing out into the world from Europe and Australia—the mission fields of the 1870s and 1880s had joined America as the new Adventist homelands, the leaders of which were looking beyond the Christian world. The Germans had taken responsibility for Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia; the Swedes for Ethiopia; the British for West and East Africa; and the Australians for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

Yet as we look back after 150 years of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and 140 years of Adventist foreign missions, not with complacency, certainly, but with a degree of satisfaction, could we not also truly say, “We have only just begun”? In 1902, missionary E. H. Gates wrote from Singapore of the needs of Asia: “Here . . . are millions

of men and women . . . bound to their idols as with chains of iron.”124 That is still true today, but in the twenty-first century there are additionally millions subject, not only to animism and rival world religions, but also to secular humanism; today what was once the heartland is likely to be a mission field. “From everywhere to everywhere” is more than just a good slogan for the Office of Adventist Mission; it is an absolute necessity for the Great Second Advent Movement.

This is important to stress because, today, parochialism and provincialism still exist and can still impede the mission of the church. Parochialism is increasingly evident in some parts of the world. Our organizational structure helps bind us together;125 yet it can also prompt administrators to focus on just their own region, without looking at the needs of those in the “regions beyond” us. A powerful lesson from the Battle Creek years that is still relevant in the twenty-first century is that none of us can, in good conscience, be content with progress in our own country, our own conference or mission, our own union, our own division—not when there are so many around the world who, like the Macedonian in Paul’s dream, like adherents of world religions in several of Ellen White’s visions, or like Jakob Erzberger and Albert Vuilleumier, need “help.”126 They need to know about healthful living and Sabbath rest; they need to know more fully about the Savior who died for us, was raised to life for us, and ministers in heaven for us, redeeming us from the wages of sin through His righteousness. We may not always hear the appeals for assistance from the millions bound to Islam, idolatry, or postmodernity— but we know their needs. And so we need to

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listen again to Ellen White: “The vineyard includes the whole world, and every part of it is to be worked.. . . The whole earth is to be illuminated with the glory of God’s truth.” We must always be looking to the “regions beyond” and feeling a burden for them, for truly that “burden. . . can never be laid down until the whole earth shall be lightened with the glory of the Lord.” Bearing in mind that “Christ has commanded [us] to communicate the light” so that all “may have opportunity to hear the saving message,” Seventh- day Adventists must ask the question: are we “doing [our] duty”? Has outreach to the world’s many unreached and little-reached

areas now become, after all, “something in addition to the regular work of the church”? Are we “in partnership with Jesus Christ in His great firm?” Or have we somehow slipped into a different line of business?

Perhaps the most important lesson to learn from mission during the Battle Creek years is that we, now, need to be as committed as our pioneers became, to proclaiming “this gospel of the kingdom . . . in all the world for a witness unto all nations” (Matthew 24:14, KJV). As Adventists have long affirmed, “Then, and not till then, will the end come, for which we so earnestly long.”127

Endnotes

1. A. H. Lewis to Uriah Smith, January 22,1859, and Smith’s editorial “Note,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald [hereafter RH], February 3,1859, 87. The scriptural citation is interesting: Revelation 10:11 (v. lib , “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.”) rather than 14:6, the prophecy of the three angels (including, v. 6b, “the everlasting gospel to preach . . . to every nation, tribe, tongue and people”). However, P. Gerard Damsteegt, Foundations of the Seventh-day Adventist Message and Mission (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), points out that, in the 1850s and 1860s, “it was especially Rev. 10:11 which was employed as a symbol for . . . mission to other nations” (p. 292). Sabbatarians saw “in Rev. 10 a prophetic account of the proclamation of the first angel’s message, the Disappointment, and [in v. ll] the mission of the third angel’s message” (p. 284, cf. p. 281).

2. J. N. Loughborough, The Great Second Advent Movement: Its Rise and Progress (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing, 1905), 87, 88, 101-104; H. I. Dunton, “The Millerite Adventists and Other Millenarian Groups in Great Britain 1830-1860” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1984); H. I. Dunton, “Millennial Hopes and Fears: Great Britain 1780-1960,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 37, no. 2 (Autumn 1999): 179-208, esp. 193-200.

3. Damsteegt, Foundations, 50, 51; Harry H. Leon

ard, “The Adventist Rubicon: John N. Andrews and the Mission to Europe,” in D.J. B. Trim and Daniel Heinz, eds., Pluralism, Parochialism and Contextualization: Challenges to Adventist Mission in Europe (l9th-21st Centuries), Adventistica: Schriftenreihe des Historischen Archivs der Siebenten-Tags-Adventisten in Europa 9 (Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt am Main, New York and Vienna: Peter Lang, 2010), 32. The missionary societies are discussed below.

4. Quoted in William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 56.

5. Anon., “The World Has Had the Midnight Cry,” Signs of the Times, September 20,1843,36. This is a leading article and thus was written by one of the three editors: Litch, Joshua Himes, or Sylvester Bliss. Damsteegt ascribes it to Litch (Foundations, 53).

6. See Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1950), 313, 314, 316; Damsteegt, Foundations, 106-108; George Knight, William Miller and the Rise of Adventism (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press®, 2010), 200, 259.

7. Cf. Damsteegt, Foundations, 106, 149, 155, 163; and Borge Schantz, “The Development of Seventh-


day Adventist Missionary Thought: A Contemporary Appraisal,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, 1983), 1:212, 214.

8. Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, book 1 (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1958), 74.

9. The most in-depth analysis is Damsteegt, Foundations, 149-154, 272-278; but for overviews (from different perspectives), see also C. Mervyn Maxwell, Tell It to the World: The Story of Seventh-day Adventists, rev. ed. (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1977), 153,154; Schantz, “Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Thought,” 1:215-217; Godfrey T. Anderson, “Sectarianism and Organization, 1846-1864,” in Gary Land, ed., Adventism in America: A History, rev. ed. (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 1998), 32; George R. Knight, A Brief History of Seventh-day Adventists (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2000), 64-66; George R. Knight, A Search for Identity: The Development of Seventh- day Adventist Beliefs (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2000), 83, 84. See also Cross, Burned-Over District, 316, 317, who claims that the Sabbatarians made “the necessary compromise with expediency and devise[d] a new theory”; and Don Barton, “The Investigative Judgment; Adventism’s Life Raft,” Spectrum 41, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 16-19, who argues (p. 18) that the shift actually resulted from the Sabbatarians’ calculation “that holding to a shut door belief was no longer tenable for their long-term survival” and was only then “attributed to much Bible study and prayer.” Neither of these interpretations do justice to the actual process of study and prayer that led to the “opening” of the shut door.

10. James White, “Who May Hear the Truth?” RH, February 17,1852, 95.

11. See the obituary by his son-in-law, G. W. Ama- don, “The Sickness and Death of Eld. John Byington," RH, January 25,1887,57; see also John O. Waller, “John Byington of Bucks Bridge," Adventist Heritage 1, no. 2 (July 1974): 66, 67; James R. Nix, “The Little-Known General Conference President,” Adventist Review, April 5, 2001, 516.

12. John Byington, “Death of Eld. J. B. Frisbie,” RH, November 21, 1882, 735. See Leo Van Dolson, “The ‘Marrying Preacher’ and Captain Bates,” Youth’s Instructor, February 28, 1961, 12-16, esp. 12, 15, for details of his conversion. Frisbie later left the ministry because of disagreements about biblical interpretation but remained a Seventh-day Adventist. James White was quoted by Byington, 735.

13. M. C. Wilcox and W. C. White, “George Ide Butler: A Sketch of His Life,” RH, August 29, 1918, 830. Note: Butler is still the record holder for president elected the most number of times (elected to nine one-year terms). See Merlin Burt’s chapter in this volume on Butler’s career and enduring influence.

14. Anon., “Death of Brother Aldrich,” RH, September 27,1870,120.

15. See Cross, The Burned-Over District, 287, 288, 312, 313, 316; Merlin D. Burt, Adventist Pioneer Places: New York & New England (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2011). It is notable that the Review and Herald was initially published in New England (Connecticut and Maine) before the press moved first to New York and then to Michigan.

16. See Clifford Putney, “Introduction” to Putney and Paul T. Burlin, eds., The Role of the American Board in the World: Bicentennial Reflections on the Organization’s Missionary Work, 1810-2010 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), xix; Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 94,143,144, 274; Dana L. Robert, “The ‘Christian Home’ as a Cornerstone of Anglo-American Missionary Thought and Practice,” in Robert, ed., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706-1914 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 145-147; Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 131,132; and see below.

17. Cf. J. R. Zurcher, “The Missionary to Europe,” in Harry Leonard, ed., J. N. Andrews: The Man and the Mission (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1985), 202.

18. Damsteegt, Foundations, 282, 285; Schantz, “Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Thought,” 1:244, 245.

19. Article V; constitution printed in RH, May 26, 1863, 204, 205, quotation at 205. Thus, pace Schantz (1:253), the new organization did make provision for a mission board, though he is correct that it was initially focused only on the USA and Canada.

20. Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 155,156.21. See Susan Thome, Congregational Missions and the

Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 24; Douglas K. Showalter, “The 1810 Formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” in Putney and Burlin, The American Board in the World, 1-10 (esp., 6- 8); Hutchison, Errand to the World, 43-46,91.


22. James White, “God’s Free-men” and “Missionaries,” both in RH, June 2,1863, 8.

23. Snook was actually chairman, but the Iowa Conference at this time did not use the title “president,” which was the office Snook effectively filled.

24. B. F. Snook, “The Great Missionary Society,” RH, July 6, 1863, 46. The article is discussed by Schantz, “Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Thought,” 1:248— 251, and also (very briefly) by Damsteegt, Foundations, 256.

25. Cf. Leonard, “Adventist Rubicon,” 37.26. Leonard, "Advenist Rubicon,” 36; Maxwell, Tell It

to the World, 156,160.27. E.g., Rajmund Ladyslaw Dabrowski, “The Fore

runner: M. B. Czechowski,” in Leonard, Andrews: Man and Mission, 190-201; Daniel Heinz, “The Development of Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Dynamic in Europe; Assessing the Contributions of Michael B. Czechowski, John N. Andrews, and Ludwig R. Con- radi,” in Trim and Heinz, Pluralism, Parochialism and Contextualization, 52, 53; see, more generally, Rajmund Ladyslaw Dabrowski and B. B. Beach, eds., MichalBelina Czechowski 1818-1876 (Warsaw: Znaki Csasu, 1979).

28. Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 159,160.29. See B. B. Beach, “M. B. Czechowski—Trailblazer

for the J. N. Andrews Central European Mission,” in Dabrowski and Beach, Michat Belina Czechowski, 436- 440; and Alfred Vaucher, “M. B. Czechowski—His relationship With the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and the First-Day Adventists,” in Dabrowski and Beach, 136-138,140,142. Cf. Heinz, “Development of Adventist Missionary Dynamic,” 53.

30. See Leonard, “Adventist Rubicon,” 37; Rajmund L. Dabrowski, “The Sojourn of M. B. Czechowski on the American Continent,” in Dabrowski and Beach, MichalBelina Czechowski, 122; Gottfried Oosterwal, “M. B. Chechowski’s Significance for the Growth and Development of Seventh-day Adventist Mission,” in Dabrowski and Beach, 160. For the potential affair with Wilhelmina Schirmer, who he later married but with whom he may have had children while his first wife was still alive, see Beach, “M. B. Czechowski,” 440,442.

31. Leonard, “Adventist Rubicon,” 37. He trenchantly but justly observes (fn. 31), “Dabrowski is so concerned to defend his fellow-countryman that he ignores the evidence of Czechowski’s duplicity even while quoting documents that demonstrate it,” citing Dabrowski, “The Forerunner,” 194,195,197, which are quotations from Advent Christian authors paying trib

ute to Czechowski; his sponsors never seem to have become aware of his betrayal of them because they were (as the quotations in question demonstrate) reliant on Czechowski for knowledge of what he was doing!

32. See Vaucher, “M. B. Czechowski,” 142, 146,148; Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 160, 161. Quotation about Advent Christians: Damsteegt, Foundations, 286.

33. Erich W. Baumgartner, “Charisma and Contextualization; Leadership Lessons From the Emerging Adventist Church in Central Europe, 1864-1914,” in Trim and Heinz, Pluralism, Parochialism and Contextualization, 63-81, is a nuanced study, broadly sympathetic to Czechowski, exposing the flaws that church leaders evidently suspected in 1864 but identifying his contributions to Adventist mission without special pleading.

34. See Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 177; Damsteegt, Foundations, 286, 287; Bill Knott, “A Winter’s Tale: The Tragic Case of Hannah More,” Adventist Review, January 22,1998,104-109, quotation at p. 106, citing RH, October 11,1864. Leonard is mistaken in his claim (“Adventist Rubicon,” 37) that the two missionaries were “both women.”

35. On More’s life see William M. Knott, “Foot Soldier of the Empire: Hannah More and the Politics of Service” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2006).

36. Ellen G. White, “Tithes and Offerings,” RH, December 15,1874,195.

37. Knott, “Foot Soldier of the Empire,” 435, cf. 442.38. Leonard, “Adventist Rubicon," 41.39. Letter to Ellen White, August 29,1858, in RH, Sep

tember 23,1858,144.40. M. B. Czechowski, “The N.Y. Mission,” RH, Sep

tember 4,1860,124,125. On Czechowski’s work in New York City see Dabrowski, “Sojourn of Czechowski," 110-116.

41. Matteson, letter to James White, October 30, 1863, in RH, November 10,1863,191.

42. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, Oxford History of the United States (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), 32, 33, 130-132. For the roots of nativism and its political expressions in the 1840s, when Adventism emerged, see Jerome L. Clark, 1844, 3 vols. (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Assoc, 1968), 1:204, 205, 207, 208, 245-276.

43. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 609.44. “The Time Has Come!” RH, February 21, 1865,

100.45. Untitled editorial comments, RH, January 1,

1867,48.


46. John Matteson, “Report,” RH, March 24, 1868, 237.

47. [j. N. Andrews], “The Seventh-day Adventists of Europe,” RH, November 30,1869,181. See A. W. Spalding, Captains of the Host (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1949), 514, 519; and Heinz, “Development of Adventist Missionary Dynamic,” 53. Spalding suggests two or three other companies, Heinz five.

48. Andrews, “Seventh-day Adventists of Europe,” 181.

49. Spalding, Captains of the Host, 514; Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 161,162; Knight, Brief History, 83; Heinz, “Development of Adventist Missionary Dynamic,” 54; and see Otto Uebersax, “M. B. Czechowski—His Last Days and Death,” in Dabrowski and Beach, MichalBelina Czechowski, 350-357.

50. Andrews, “Seventh-day Adventists of Europe,” 181.

51. Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 165, 166; Joseph G. Smoot, “The Churchman: Andrews’ Relationship With Church Leaders,” in Leonard, Andrews: Man and Mission, 53.

52. James White, “Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society,” RH, June 15, 1869, 197. See William A. Spicer, Our Story of Missions for Colleges and Academies (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1921), 91.

53. Pace Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 166; and Schantz, “Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Thought,” 1:260. Cf. Knight, Brief History, 84: “By 1869, the need to eventually send missionaries to other nations had become a reality for many Seventh-day Adventists.” As the evidence examined in this section shows, that “reality” was still rejected by many Adventists in the early 1870s (a fact that was recognized by Spalding, Captains of the Host, 514).

54. James White, “Cause in Switzerland,” RH, January 11,1870,21.

55. J. White, “Cause in Switzerland,” 21.56. See Leonard’s insightful analysis of this appeal:

“Adventist Rubicon,” 37-39.57. J. White, “Cause in Switzerland,” 22. James White

spells his name “James Ertzenberger,” which remained the version of his name most commonly used by American Adventists.

58. Leonard, “Adventist Rubicon,” 40.59. “Business Proceedings,” RH, January 2,1872, 21.60. “Business Proceedings,” 21.61. “Business Proceedings,” 20.62. E. G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 3:202,204.

63. November 29, 1872, General Conference Archives, Record Group 72, Box 13721D, fid. “Albert Vuil- leumier original letters,” original letter in French and contemporary translation. It is interesting that this letter was from French-speaking Swiss, whereas Erz- berger was German-Swiss, though this does not seem to have made a difference.

64. See Leonard, “Adventist Rubicon,” 41-46, quotation at p. 47; Kevin M. Burton, “Centralized for Protection: George I. Butler and His Philosophy of One- Person Leadership” (MA thesis, Andrews University 2015), 11-58; cf. Merlin Burt’s chapter in this volume.

65. James White, “Conference Address,” RH, May 20, 1873, 180, 181, 184. It is quoted at length in Clarence C. Crisler, Organization: Its Character, Purpose, Place, and Development in the Seventh-day Adventist Church (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1938), 190-192; Crisler seems to have been the first Adventist author to highlight the significance of White’s address for “changing conceptions regarding the heralding of the third angel’s message in broadening fields” (p. 191).

66. J. White, “Conference Address,” 180.67. J. White, 180,184. As Damsteegt, Foundations, 285,

points out, this was the first time a Seventh-day Adventist used “world-wide” in application to the prophecy of Revelation 10:11.

68. J. White, “Conference Address,” 180.69. J. White, 181.70. Geo. I. Butler, “The Conference Address,” RH,

May 20,1873,184.71. James White, “The Cause at Battle Creek,” RH,

December 30,1873,20.72. See Leonard, “Adventist Rubicon,” 41-46, quo

tation at p. 47; Burton, “Centralized for Protection,” 60-68.

73. A. L. White, “The Vision of January 3, 1875,” in Notes and Papers Concerning Ellen G. White and the Spirit of Prophecy (Washington, DC: General Conference of SDA, 1957), quotations at 143,144; italics in original.

74. Spalding, Captains of the Host, 519, 522,525.75. Leonard, “Adventist Rubicon,” 48.76. Cf. Amy Peterson, “Missionaries Uncensored,”

Christianity Today 59, no. 7 (September 2015): 77-79.77. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy Between

Christ and Satan During the Christian Dispensation, rev. and enl. ed. (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1911), 287.

78. Ellen G. White, “To the Workers,” RH, May 3, 1887, 273; and “The Definite Aim in Service,” General


Conference Bulletin [hereafter GCB], 4 (4th Quarter 1902): 670. In the latter article, she writes of “Moffat and Livingstone and Carey, Judson, and [John?] Williams, and [Robert] Morrison”; she re-used much of the article in amended form in Education (1903): this quotation appears at p. 269, but referencing only “Moffat and Livingstone and Carey” (i.e., omitting Judson, Williams and Morrison).

79. See Schantz, “Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Thought,” 1:253; cf. Damsteegt, Foundations, 192. See also sources cited in n. 21.

80. Examples could be multiplied, but the following are indicative: W. A. C[olcord], “The Beginning of American Foreign Missions,” RH, November 5, 1889, 694, 695; Anon., “Missionary Murmurings: Gathered From Various Missionary Journals,” Signs of the Times, March 10, 1890, 155; J. O. C[orliss], “The Past and Future of Missions,” RH, June 3,1890,342; Anon., “A Noble Woman,” Bible Echo and Signs of the Times, November 15, 1890,348,349; [F. M. Wilcox], “Reality Versus Romance in Foreign Missionary Work,” Home Missionary Magazine, October 1894, 218; D. A. Robinson, “What We Owe to India,” The Missionary Magazine, December 1898,436; Anon., “A Missionary Hero,” The Youth’s Instructor, October 31,1901,7,8; [H. E. Osborne], “ ‘To Every Man His Work’,” GCB, 4 (2nd/3rd Quarters 1902): 648.

81. See e.g., Clifford G. Howell, The Advance Guard of Missions (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1912), which tells twenty-five stories of missionaries, none of whom were Seventh-day Adventists. They included Carey, Judson and his wife, Morrison, Moffat and his wife, Livingstone, Williams, and Taylor (with a twenty-sixth and concluding chapter telling the story of William Miller). See also, .from after this period, but indicative of earlier attitudes, three books by William A. Spicer (on whose role see below): 1. The Hand of God in History (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1913), in which ch. 20, “The Era of Missions,” 160-172, briefly reviews the history of the (British) Baptist, London and Church Missionary Societies, the ABCFM, and Carey, Moffat, and others; ch. 21, “The Era of Bible Circulation,” 173-188, tells the story of the British and Foreign Bible Society; and the conclusion, 238-239, references Livingstone (ch. 24 is on “The Advent Movement”). 2. The Hand That Intervenes (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1918) tells stories of providential intervention from biblical times to the author’s present, including many stories of both Adventist and other Protestant missionaries, the latter drawn from works by Protestant authors; 3. Miracles of Modem

Missions: Gathered Out of Mission Records (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1926), inter alia celebrates Carey (pp. 18-21) and, though not mentioningjudson, tells the story of Hudson Taylor and the first London Missionary Society missionaries to the South Pacific (pp. 27-29).

82. Jay Riley Case, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 33.

83. Ellen G. White to D. A. Robinson and C. L. Boyd, letter 14 (June 18), 1887; reprinted in amended form in Gospel Workers (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1915), 462.

84. Cf. E. K. VandeVere, “Years of Growth and Crises 1875-1900,” RH, November 13, 1975 (125th anniversary issue), 11. VandeVere, a pioneering historian of Adventism, was perhaps the first to identify this issue.

85. Zurcher, “The Missionary to Europe,” 215; Harry Leonard, “Andrews and the Mission to Britain,” in Leonard, Andrews: Man and Mission, 247,251.

86. See Rex Riches, Establishing the British Mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church 1863-1887 (Greensboro, NC: for the author, 1997), 75, 78-81,107,108.

87. Harry Leonard, “The Foundations of Adventism in the British Isles,” in David Marshall, ed., A Century of Adventism in the British Isles (Grantham, England: Stan- borough Press, 2000), 6; cf. Riches, Establishing the British Mission, 244, 245.

88. Generously, she publicly defended Loughborough against criticism of his missionary work in England: Brian E. Strayer ,J. N. Loughborough: The Last of the Adventist Pioneers (Hagerstown, MD Review and Herald®, 2014), 284. This recognized his commitment and persistence. But privately her counsels highlighted his flawed methodology.

89. E. G. White to D. A. Robinson and C. L. Boyd, letter 14 (June 14), 1887.

90. Gary Krause, “Adventism Among the World Religions,” in Bruce L. Bauer, ed., A Man of Passionate Reflection: A Festschrift Honoring Jerald Whitehouse (Berrien Springs, MI: Department of World Mission, Andrews University, 2011), 227.

91. W. A. Spicer, “The Necessary Preparation for Missionary Work,” GCB 4 (GC Session extra no. 6; April 9,1901): 153.

92. Spicer, “Necessary Preparation,” 154,155.93. See Heinz, “Development of Adventist Mission

ary Dynamic," and Heinz, “The Pietist Roots of Early German Adventism," in Trim and Heinz, Pluralism, Parochialism and Contextualization, 51-62,83-92.


94. Quoted in Krause, “Adventism Among the World Religions,” 228.

95. See Bruce L. Bauer, “Congregational and Mission Structures and How the Seventh-day Adventist Church Has Related to Them” (DMiss diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, 1982), 104-108 (quotation at p. 108).

96. The organizational-administrative issues are discussed in Barry Oliver’s chapter in this volume. For overviews, see also David J. B. Trim, “ ‘Something More in the Way of Organization’: Seventh-day Adventist Ecclesiastical Polity in Historical Perspective,” Ministry, September 2017,17,18; George R. Knight, Organizing for Mission and Growth: The Development of Adventist Church Structure (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2006), 75-78.

97. VandeVere, “Years of Growth and Crisis,” 11; on Kellogg, see Bill Knott’s chapter in this volume.

98. Bauer, “Congregational and Mission Structures,” 109,110.

99. J. E. White to E. G. White, June 18, 1899, Ellen G. White Estate, James Edson White Correspondence (capital letters in the original).

100. Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 250; VandeVere, “Years of Growth and Crisis,” 10.

101. Bauer, “Congregational and Mission Structures,” 147; Maxwell, Tell It to the World, 250.

102. GC Executive Committee meeting, June 17, 1897, minutes in “S.D.A. General Conference Committee Proceedings,” vol. Ill (1897-1899), p. 5, in GC Archives, Record Group 1, Box 13736.

103. Schantz, “Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Thought,” 1:252, 253.

104. W. A. Spicer, “I Know Whom I Have Believed,” sermon to GC Session, June 11, 1930, in RH, June 26, 1930 (General Conference Report no. 15), 259.

105. Handel Luke, “Hong Kong-Macao,” in Gil G. Fernandez, ed., Light Dawns Over Asia: Adventism’s Story in the Far East Division 1888-1988 (Silang, Philippines: Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies Publications, 1990), 13-15; Spalding, Captains of the Host, 620.

106. Ellen G. White “To My Brethren in America,” letter 8 (Feb. 6), 1896; published in Testimonies to Ministers and Gospel Workers (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1923), 397,398; italics supplied.

107. A. G. Daniells, tribute to Smith, in RH, March 10,1903,4. For other examples, see Barry Oliver, “Why Are We Who We Are? The Ecclesiological Polemic That Shaped Reorganisation,” in Reinder Bruinsma, ed.,

Faith in Search of Depth and Relevancy: Festschrift in Honour of Dr. Bertil Wiklander (N.p.: Trans-European Division of Seventh-day Adventists, 2014), 446,447.

108. See A. W. Spalding, Christ’s Last Legion (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1949), 84, 85.

109. J. White, “Cause at Battle Creek,” 20.110. SeeDavidJ. B. Trim, “Ellen G. White and Adven

tist Mission,” in Alberto R. Timm and Dwain N. Esmond eds., The Gift of Prophecy in Scripture and History (Silver Spring, MD: Review and Herald, 2015), 333-353, esp. pp. 338, 339, 341, 345, 346, 348-351.

111. Ellen G. White, Christ’s Object Lessons (Oakland, CA: Pacific Press®, 1900), 228, 229. It is striking that (in contrast to Adventist exegetes 30-40 years earlier) she does not cite Revelation 10:11. As Schantz points out (vol. 2, pp. 636, 637), in this passage and elsewhere in her later writings, White makes Revelation 14:6, 7 the key prophetic passage on mission.

112. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 6:23, 24, 29; “Our Duty,” GCB 4 (1901): 572, 573; cf. Trim, “White and Adventist Mission,” 350.

113. E. H. Gates, “Some Experiences in East India,” Australasian Union Conference Record, May 1,1902,4.

114. Described by H. E. Rogers, letter to C. C. Crisler, July 8, 1904, in Statistical Secretary’s Letterbook, GC Archives, Record Group 29, Box 0386-0390.

115. “Statistical Report of the Seventh-day Adventist Denomination, for 1903,” RH, August 18,1904,14; historical table in Annual Statistical Report, 148 (for 2010): 84.

116. D.J. B. Trim, “Adventist Church Growth and Mission Since 1863: An Historical-Statistical Analysis,” Journal of Adventist Mission Studies 8, no. 2 (2012): 51-74.

117. See Bert Haloviak, “Brief Organizational History of Seventh-day Adventists,” Archives and Statistics Research Papers (2007), http://documents .adventistarchives.org/Resources/Papers/BOHofS- DAs.pdf.

118. Spicer, “Necessary Preparation for Missionary Work,” 154.

119. Spicer, Our Story of Missions, 11.120. Bauer, “Congregational and Mission Struc

tures,” 152,153.121. See Haloviak, “Oragnizational History,” 6-9.122. Ellen G. White, The Story of Prophets and Kings as

Illustrated in the Captivity and Restoration of Israel (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1917), 188,189.

123. See Bauer, “Congregational and Mission Structures,” 154-158, 163, 164; Trim, "Adventist Church Growth,” 51; Gina Wahlen, “100 Years of Mission Giv

http://documents


ing: Making a World of Difference,” Adventist World— NAD, November 2012, 26-29.

124. Gates, “Some Experiences in East India,” 4.125. As well as Barry Oliver’s chapter in this volume,

see his superb study of the subject, SDA Organizational Structure: Past, Present and Future, Andrews University Seminary Doctoral Dissertation Series 15 (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1989).

126. E.g., E. G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 6:27; E. G. White, Gospel Workers, 465.

127. A. G. Daniells, presidential address to 1905 GC Session, in RH, May 11, 1905, 9. Such sentiments are typical of Daniells’s missiological and eschatological thinking (see Oliver, “Why Are We Who We Are?”, 444-447.

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