One hundred ninety-three flags! It was impressive to watch them, ablaze with color, flying in the spotlight of the municipal auditorium in Vienna, Austria. Everyone represented a different country in which Seventh-day Adventists were conducting organized work at the time of the fifty-second session of the General Conference, July 1975.
July 1975 was 116 years after July 1859. If Sabbath keepers had prepared for the latter rain in the 1850s, it shouldn't have taken so long to enter all these lands. Yet work in 193 countries represents real progress. The next most active Protestant churches work in only half as many.
Seventh-day Adventists have always felt a "sense of mission." Article V of the short 1863 General Conference constitution required the three-man executive committee to act as a "missionary board." Before that, the first business venture of Sabbath-keeping Adventists was the purchase of a Washington handpress to publish truth. Before that, at the 1848 conferences in Rocky Hill and Volney, people listened to Ellen White's visions on "how we were to labor and teach effectively." [1] And before that, in the same inspired moment when Hiram Edson became the first person to perceive Christ's new heavenly ministry, the words of Revelation flashed into his mind: "Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings."
From its earliest beginnings Seventh-day Adventism has been more than a mere religious society. It has been a movement with a message and a sense of mission. "Let the message fly," wrote James White in 1849, "for time is short."
"For time is short." Theoretically, the belief that Christ was coming soon could have hampered the propagation of the third angel's message. It did restrict the early believers' vision a little; but with a York shilling and a three-cent silver they did the best they could nearby, and as opportunities opened, they pressed out and broadened their vision accordingly.
As early as February 1845 Ellen White was given a vision of the tremendous task God wanted done before Christ's return. She was taken to heaven and instructed to look back. Astronauts are excited to see earth glowing like a sapphire; Ellen saw the world in moral darkness.
Watching closely, she saw "jets of light like stars" flame up here and there, then other jets, and still more in other places, "growing brighter, shining forth from the east and from the west, and from the north and from the south, and lighting the whole world:" The light of these jets came from Jesus, and they stood for people who had faith and obeyed the Word, who adhered to the third angel's message. [2] Then in November 1848 came the vision of the Sabbath shining "like streams of light that went clear round the world."
When believers heard Ellen talk about these things, some of them accused her of putting off the second coming. [3] But others were elated. Bates burst into print with the prediction that the Sabbath would spread at once to France, Britain, Russia, and the Middle East. [4] James White before the year was out (1849) became convinced that the Sabbath would "ring through the lands, as the advent never has." [5] That was foresight!
Critics of Adventism have made much of an interesting early phase of the movement known as the "shut door period." Millerite leaders often spoke about a shut door. Miller believed that a few days before October 22, 1844, the door of mercy would close against all rejecters of the first angel's message. [6] Some Sabbath-keeping Adventists continued to hold this view for various lengths of time after the disappointment. Ellen White believed it until she had her first visions. [7] James White believed it somewhat longer, and Joseph Bates longer yet.
Logically or not, however, Bates, the Whites, and others who joined them, indefatigably shared their faith with all who would listen, for they were under a great sense of urgency to let the message fly since time was short. Understandably, with so much prejudice against them, it happened that practically nobody did listen to them at first except former Millerites.
But if any "worldlings" showed up at their meetings, they were assuredly not ushered out. John Wilcox told Loughborough that he was converted "right out of the world" during the April 1848 conference in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, and that James White baptized him then and there. [8] In 1850 Ellen White wrote to a friend that people were "coming in from all round" Oswego, New York. [9] By 1852, Methodists and Baptists were coming out of "Babylon" to "run in the way of all the commandments of God." [10]
As soon as these non-Adventists desired to join their ranks the Sabbath keepers did a noteworthy thing. Instead of clinging to exclusivist notions derived from some misunderstanding of Christ's ministry in the most holy place, they examined their theology to see if they had overlooked something. They found that although Christ's primary work since 1844 has been blotting out the sins of believers, He nonetheless remains every sinner's High Priest still. [11] It was theologically correct, therefore, to welcome the converts in.
Not only correct but, in retrospect, heartwarming too.
With memory of the disappointment fading, non-Millerites became increasingly willing to listen. By springtime 1852 such people made up the larger portion of the converts; [12] and by the middle 1850s, as we have already learned, evangelistic tents mushroomed in one state after another. Congregations of hundreds, even a thousand or more, crowded in to hear Loughborough, White, Andrews, Cornell, Waggoner, Sanborn, Taylor, Hull, and others preach the word.
But even preaching to crowds from Maine to Minnesota hardly meets Christ's commission to carry the gospel to all the world. (See Matthew 24:14; 28:18-20) Sabbath keepers didn't deny the gospel commission. Instead, they noted the striking similarity between the commission in Matthew 24:14 ("this gospel ... for a witness unto all nations") and the first angel's message in Revelation 14:6,7 ... ("the everlasting gospel ... to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people"). For a while they assumed that they had fulfilled the commission under the first angel's message by sending the advent hope to every mission station prior to October 22, 1844. Stirred, however, by the many non-Adventists who thronged their tents, they once more examined their theology. Whereas they had supposed that the first angel's message was intended for the world and the third, only for the saints, Ellen White led them to see that the third angel's message, too, was intended for "a guilty world." [13] And taking still another look at the three angels, they noticed that all three run parallel until the second coming, [14] leading to the conclusion that the gospel must continue to be preached to nations, kindreds, tongues, and people.
This being the case, to preach the word even to all English-speaking North Americans seemed no longer to suffice.
In 1855 Joseph Bates urged his fellow believers to mail literature to "some of the foreign missionary stations, especially to the Sandwich islands." [15] In 1856 James White admonished: "A missionary spirit is wanted to raise the cry more extensively in new fields, and sound the alarm throughout christendom." [16] In 1857 R.F. Cottrell preached through an interpreter to a company of Seneca Indians (they were Baptist) along the Tonawanda River. [17] That same year the bilingual Canadian-born Bourdeau brothers, A.C. and Daniel T., began to evangelize French-speaking people in Vermont, assisted the following year by a former Catholic priest, M.B. Czechowski, of whom more will be said later. John Fisher, a former Baptist minister, put a tract into Dutch for the immigrants near Holland, Michigan. Encouraged by such developments, Uriah Smith editorialized in the Review in 1859 that "perhaps" the command to prophesy to peoples and tongues could be fulfilled in North America! [18]
Smith was cautious. Joseph Clarke, an energetic Ohio school teacher, was not so cautious. "The work should not be sectionalized," he warned. "Ireland is as near as Ohio, and Russia is as dear as Iowa." [19] Others, also broader visioned than the Review editor, had already been shipping books and papers to relatives overseas. In the early 1860s reports came from folk in Ireland who had begun to keep the Sabbath in 1859 and who were deeply grateful for the Review and Sister White's Testimonies. "Myself, and two children, and governess," wrote one of them, "keep the seventh day. My house servant I compel to keep from work." [20]
It is easy to understand why in the 1850s Adventists sent publications instead of preachers overseas. The available ministers, overworked, underpaid, and inadequately led, were quite unable to meet even the demands at home. James White thought he had calls for twenty times as many as they could care for. And they could scarcely have served abroad before the home base organized itself in support.
So we return to the 1863 organization of the General Conference and the genesis of its executive committee as a missionary board.
If it was indeed a missionary board, charged to select personnel and locations for missionary endeavor, why did it take eleven years to send out its first foreign missionary, J.N. Andrews? For one thing, it was busy sending out home missionaries. Among its first actions in 1863 was a vote that Isaac Sanborn be sent" as a missionary to Minnesota." He was only one of several ministers sent out with evangelistic tents for the ensuing season and referred to as missionaries. [21]
Evangelists were appropriately called missionaries in the 1850s and 1860s. As early as 1853 Loughborough and Cornell had been sent by the sacrificial Jackson, Michigan, congregation on a "mission" several months long to the lonely, sparsely peopled prairies of Wisconsin and Illinois. [22] Sanborn on his mission to Minnesota 1863-64, logged 2400 rugged, lonely miles in eight months. And when J.N. Loughborough and Daniel Bourdeau volunteered at the 1868 General Conference for tent evangelism in California, they went as "missionaries" without a doubt. Sailing south on the Atlantic, crossing Panama by land, and then sailing north to San Francisco, they traveled 7000 miles, farther by many a league than Andrews would go in 1874 to reach Switzerland.
Facts are, however, that in spite of its heavy responsibility for home missions, the General Conference didn't wait eleven years before thinking about sending out a foreign missionary. Eager as a schoolboy, James White reported that the executive committee, only a few days old, was already thinking of sending B.F. Snook as a "missionary to Europe" before the close of 1863. [23] Providentially, it had second thoughts, for as you remember, Snook soon turned Universalist.
In 1864 M.B. Czechowski sought authorization to return to Europe as a missionary. Reluctantly--with the hope that they could send him later--the committee turned him down. [24] Czechowski, as we shall see in the next chapter, secured support from Sunday-keeping Adventists and went to Europe anyway. A few years later one of his Swiss converts, James Erzberger, came over to America. During his stay he was ordained so that he could return to Switzerland "to participate in the great work of preaching the final warning to men." He was looked upon as a missionary and Europe was considered as a mission field, as early as 1870. [25]
Meanwhile, and largely unrelated to these developments, a number of ladies in the sleepy village of South Lancaster, Massachusetts, encouraged by the energetic Stephen Haskell and led by the resourceful Roxie Rice, formed themselves in 1869 into the Vigilant Missionary Society. [26] Somehow they found time to pray, to call on their neighbors, to help the sick and needy, and also to mail out thousands of tracts and books to people in North America and in many countries far away. They maintained excellent records and wrote hundreds and hundreds of letters. The next year Haskell, newly elected president of the New England Conference, organized the New England Tract and Missionary Society, prompting the organization of local "T. and M." Societies all over New England. In 1873 he was asked to sponsor T. and M. Societies all over the United States. In more cases than anyone knows, the first converts to the third angel's message in distant lands were won by lay missionaries of the Tract and Missionary societies years before the arrival of a missionary in person.
We began this chapter by watching flags at the General Conference of 1975. The previous year, 1974, was chosen by the church to mark "a hundred years of world mission" out of respect for the departure in 1874 of J.N. Andrews. But because Seventh-day Adventists have ever been a movement with a sense of mission, other dates might have served almost as well.
For example, 1918 would have reminded them of 1818, when that early Adventist, William Miller, heard the call to "tell it to the world."
The year 1959 was a century after the first European accepted the third angel's message.
And 1964 was 100 years after M.B. Czechowski set sail as Seventh-day Adventism's first "volunteer" overseas missionary.
Notes: