After Elder Andrews's death, no eulogy in his honor appeared in the Review.
It was what he wanted; and the editors of the paper reluctantly complied. But a grand eulogy has been written nonetheless. Missionaries and missionary families who have left their homes in an ever flowing stream to serve the Lord in unfamiliar climes have done him the ultimate honor of following where he led.
Here may be the great qualitative difference between his missionary service and that of M. B. Czechowski. Because Andrews left the country in harmony with and at the behest of his brethren, the whole organization in a sense went with him, and in no time the church as a whole saw itself as a world missionary movement.
Not that it understood the concept fully at the time. Not that it does so even yet. But almost immediately it began taking its worldwide task seriously. The very next year it voted James White of Battle Creek, John Loughborough of California, and John Andrews of Switzerland as its three-man executive committee, which was also its missionary board. The arrangement seemed "very appropriate" to editor Uriah Smith, for, said he, "the message which S. D. Adventists are giving is a world-wide message." [1]
Having mentioned Czechowski again, by the way, it may be only fair to observe that Andrews, too, had the gospel treasure in an earthen vessel. I appears that he did not need to die so soon. Ellen White as the Lord's messenger frequently counseled him not to work nearly so hard and to take much better care of his health. Andrews promised to try, then justified his excessive labor by saying that the success of the cause required it. By hindsight it is very easy to sympathize with him but not so easy to accept his judgment. Near the end he confessed repentantly that he had done wrong. [2]
Yet God wonderfully blessed him. And He used his dauntless spirit of resolution to impress thousands of other earthen vessels to serve devotedly in faraway places.
Mary's sacrifice also had an influence. Her funeral called out the largest congregation to that date in the history of Battle Creek and, along with her father's solemn appeal to the youth on that occasion, impressed many a young man and woman attending Battle Creek College to emulate her consecration someday. [3]
Living in the jet age, it is hard today to conceive that shortly before the Andrewses' departure for Europe, General Conference President George I. Butler had excused missionary reluctance on the part of some by remarking that "our young men would look upon such an undertaking with fear and almost with horror." [4] Ten years later, when Butler was again in office as General conference president, he had so far overcome his trepidation as to undertake a trip to Europe himself, during which he helped establish publishing houses in Switzerland, Norway, and England, and improved the emerging organization of the whole work there. That was the year following J. N. Andrews's death. By then there were a thousand European Seventh-day Adventists, and missionaries were at work not only in Italy, France, and Switzerland (lands where Andrews and Czechowski pioneered), but also in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, where the John Mattesons and others were laboring, and in England, under the William Ingses and the John Loughboroughs and others. In 1882, Stephen Haskell of Tract and Missionary fame helped convoke the first European Council of Seventh-day Adventist Missions (initially, the European Conference) in Basel, with representation from the British, Scandinavian, and Central European fields.
To tell the story of Adventism in each new country would literally require many volumes. Almost every land had its own "Joseph Bates," reduced perhaps to the equivalent of a York shilling but advancing against more or less overt or subtle opposition through doors opened by God's divine providence. [5]
Like Andrews, John G. Matteson followed the Rochester model in his ministry to Scandinavia. He had learned something about printing in America. When his converts there asked for tracts in Danish and the Review office discouraged him, he had raised $1000 from his handful of Danes and Norwegians, taken the train to Battle Creek, learned how to set type, and prepared the publications himself. In Norway he set up a press in the building where his family lived. Unfamiliar with local products he mismatched ink and paper for his first issue and the copies were slow to dry. With the help of his family he hung the pages on clothes lines for a week. But minor inconveniences didn't keep Matteson and his associates from laying a firm foundation for Adventism in Scandinavia.
Among the first Seventh-day Adventists in Russia were Romualdo Bartola, [6] an Italian merchant traveler, and Gerhard Perk, a former Mennonite. Either Andrews or Czechowski had helped win Bartola; German-speaking relatives in America had sent papers to Perk's German-speaking friends, who had taken one look at them and warned, "That literature is so dangerous it would deceive even a Mennonite." Curiosity won. Hiding in a haymow, Perk read a copy of The Third Angel's Message, accepted its argument, and applied to Battle Creek for more.
Working in Germany at the time of Perk's conversion was L. R. Conradi, a young German who had migrated to America, accepted the Sabbath while cutting wood in Iowa, graduated in record time from Battle Creek College, and quickly demonstrated an astonishing gift for winning large numbers of other immigrants. The General Conference asked him to return to Europe to assist Elder Erzberger. Attracted by Perk's correspondence, Conradi took the train on into Russia and did a strong work there along with Perk, finding Sabbath keepers waiting for them in many places, baptizing them, and, among many adventures, getting thrown (with Perk) into jail. Subsequently Conradi became for decades the leader of Adventism in central Europe--and a world missionary in very truth, conducting evangelistic missions in Africa and South America as well as in Germany, and writing a number of important books.
The first Seventh-day Adventist in Turkey appears to have been Theodore Anthony, a Turk who, like Conradi, had left his birth-place and accepted the Sabbath in America. He was repairing shoes in San Jose, California, when the Spirit summoned him back to his home.
Hong Kong became an Adventist mission field under circumstances that have become widely known. Abram LaRue, sometime sailor and shepherd but currently wood chopper in Sonoma County, California, heard John Loughborough preach the third angel's message during the early days of Adventism in the Golden West. Burdened with the needs of China, he begged the brethren to authorize him for work among the millions of that vast country. He asked no wages; only endorsement. But the leadership declined on account of his age. He was sixty.
Defeated but undaunted, he secured an alternative assignment to "one of the islands of the Pacific." Because he had formerly lived in Hawaii, it was assumed he would go there; and he did colporteur in Honolulu for a while, raising up such an interest that evangelist William Healey was dispatched to reap his harvest. Then he quietly moved on to the place his heart was calling him, to Hong Kong, a very Chinese island of the Pacific.
Africa, the continent many think of first when someone says "missionary," hosted its earliest Seventh-day Adventist in 1863! Miss Hannah More, while visiting Connecticut, received from Stephen Haskell a copy among other things of John Andrews's new work, History of the Sabbath. When she returned to Liberia as a missionary of some other denomination, she studied everything through carefully, and also all the other publications that Haskell made sure she received through the mail.
Devoted to Sunday, she found it hard at first to make the change, but by the time she wrote her first letter published in the Review, on January 2, 1864, she had already won another missionary to the third angel's message, the Australian, Alexander Dickson. Oh, she assured the readers of the Review, your people have "whole-hearted Seventh-day Adventists" out in Africa! It's summer here, she continued (in January): "The birds are singing, frogs peeping, insects humming and flowers blooming, and all nature smiling.
Man alone is vile. Oh what a pity that vile man should forbear while all nature sings." [7]
What a pity, too, to tell the sad end of this attractive lady. Her own missionary society, on discovering her new convictions, relieved her. But discouraged not at all, she visited the other mission stations on the west coast of Africa and left literature at each one. Returning to America, she was baptized in South Lancaster, Massachusetts, and continued to distribute literature, some of which bore fruit, on her way to Battle Creek. [8]
At Battle Creek, however, she found the minds of the believers set on earthly things. The Whites were away. Miss More, financially destitute, sought employment among folk who didn't care. Too late she found a home with another former missionary of her former faith far up the Michigan peninsula and passed away before her time, bewildered by inhospitality but a wholehearted Adventist still.
Hearing of her bitter experience, Sister White hewed the church in Battle Creek like a true prophet, not for being worse than others but for not being a whole lot better. They had failed to entertain an angel unawares. [9]
Perhaps Hannah More, a missionary in Africa, sharing her faith in the Christ of Sabbath and sanctuary in 1863, should be honored as the first Seventh-day Adventist overseas missionary. Why not?
The torch of "present truth" was rekindled on the African Continent by Romualdo Bartoli, whom we met a moment ago in Russia and who raised up a company--and baptized them--during a business trip to Alexandria. Then the torch was carried by Dr. H.P. Ribton, an English physician who accepted the Sabbath from the American missionary, Andrews, while living in the Italian city of Naples, and proceeded to Egypt in 1878 for his daughter's health. After doing a good work, Ribton was killed with two of his Sabbath keepers in 1882 during a riot against foreigners.
South Africa can tell of William Hunt, a miner who carried the Sabbath with him from the gold fields of Nevada to the diamond diggings of Kimberly. Like LaRue, he accepted the Sabbath while Loughborough was opening the work in northern California; and, like LaRue also, he served the Lord at his own expense. Meanwhile, in South Africa, Peter Wessels and G. J. Van Druten, Afrikaaner farmers, were learning about the Sabbath on their own. Wessels, a devout member of the Dutch Reformed church, became so concerned about milking his cows on Sunday that he got his neighbor, Van Druten, to study the Sabbath question with him in the Bible. Soon both men were observing the seventh day, unaware of any other Sabbath keepers in the world. Providentially they came in contact with William Hunt (either through literature or by a "chance" meeting in a diamond field--accounts differ), and through Hunt the two Afrikaaners to their delight discovered the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. Other members of the Wessels family besides Peter also became Seventh-day Adventists. Their generosity, based on the sale of a farm rich with diamonds, wrote a chapter in the story of Adventism not only in Africa but also in Australia and even in Chicago, too, where they helped Dr. Kellogg finance his outreach to the urban poor.
So far, the African work in Egypt, Liberia, and the South had been conducted chiefly for Christianized immigrants and their descendants and other nonblacks. The first worker specifically dedicated to African non-Christian blacks was George James, an English violinist who became a Seventh-day Adventist in America. In the early 1890s, when he volunteered for missionary service, the General Conference Foreign Mission Board (which had replaced the executive committee in this capacity) declined to send him on the basis of insufficient funds.
Forthwith, James sold everything he owned except his violin and his clothes and paid his own way. For two years in the heart of the dark continent he attracted native people by playing his "box that could sing." His heart lighted up at the news that the denomination had inaugurated a regular mission station at Solusi, and he set out with joy to greet his brethren there. But on the way aboard a little river steamer he died of malaria, and in a lonely, unmarked grave by the riverbank he was buried.
On the way to Solusi. In 1894, the year in which, on land authorized by Cecil Rhodes, Seventh-day Adventists opened their first regular mission station among a non-Christian people (the Matebeles). [10] Twenty years past 1874. Half a century after 1844.
The next year they opened a second station for non-Christians (the Hindus) in Calcutta.
The limitations of this book prevent our saying much about the origins of Adventism in most places, even in Australia, that biggest of islands and smallest of continents, to which Alexander Dickson took the message, warm from the heart of Hannah More, and preached it in the 1860s, only to grow discouraged at his results and give it up. In 1886 the ubiquitous S. N. Haskell with his family and a fine crew of associates with their families and, predictably, with a printing press, got the message moving there. From 1891 till 1900 Ellen White labored there herself.
But back to Africa for a moment. At about the same time that George James went there on his own, the General Conference asked Elder Lawrence Chadwick to survey the missionary potential of the west coast. When his vessel glided into the tiny port of Apam, Gold Coast (now Ghana), he was welcomed enthusiastically by three or four dozen Seventh-day Adventists! Indeed, their leader, Francis Dolphijn, a native of the Fanti tribe, rowed out to the steamer to meet him and fairly leaped up the rope ladder several rungs at a time shouting at the top, "Is Elder Chadwick here?"
Chadwick had also found other groups of converts awaiting him, one in Sierra Leone led by a Pastor Coker, and another in Liberia, by a Mr. Gaston. Dolphijn and, apparently, Coker had read themselves into the truth through publications shipped out by Tract and Missionary Society members in the U.S.A. Gaston had heard the Word on a trip to South Africa and returned to tell it to his people. [11]
We referred back to Africa only as one way to call attention, again, to the work of laymen in the missionary endeavor of Seventh-day Adventists. Dolphijn and Gaston were not ministers, but they effectively shared their faith before ever meeting an ordained missionary. Ribton, LaRue, Anthony, Bartoli, Hunt, all left home and became foreign missionaries without being ordained--or even paid! It is axiomatic, a simple truism, that most persons won to the Christ of Sabbath and sanctuary in America and around the world have been won wholly or in part through the missionary outreach, home or foreign, of unordained persons, earnest Christian laymen.
This reminds us to pay tribute to that special breed of layman minister, the literature evangelist, honorably titled for centuries, the Christian "colporteur." In many countries he was the pioneer.
In Chile, for example. The very first believers in Chile were French-speaking immigrants who had adopted the Sabbath after reading Les signes des temps in Algeria! But the first "workers" (1894) were Claire Nowlen, a colporteur from Argentina, and Frederick Bishop and Thomas Davis, colporteurs from California. Bishop and Davis sailed through the Golden Gate with little more than the clothes on their backs and some books in a box. They knew no Spanish and carried hardly any cash; but among their converts were the remarkable Thomann brothers, Edward and Victor, whom God introduced to them by a dream. Edward and Victor became colporteurs themselves, enduring such close times for a while that they were reduced to a single pair of shoes between them. But they took turns wearing the shoes one canvassing while the other stayed home to pray. Later Edward became a leader in his own country, and both served as missionaries.
If Claire Nowlen left Argentina for Chile in 1894, then Argentina was a "home base for Seventh-day Adventist foreign missionaries" in 1894! Indeed. Italy had become an unofficial Seventh-day Adventist home base in 1865, when Czechowski persuaded Geymet to accompany him as a foreign missionary to Switzerland. Under Czechowski, Switzerland became the unofficial home base of Erzberger and Albert Vuilleuimier for their labors in Germany and France. It became an official home base when B. L. Whitney and G. I. Butler organized the Swiss Conference in 1884.
In the 1890s Ellen White prophesied that Australia, too, would become a home base for foreign missions. [12] It was partly to implement this exciting prediction that the sparse and impoverished Australian membership sacrificed so much to make its college a reality.
Under L. R. Conradi, Germany became a home base that commissioned a great many missionaries, especially to the German colonies in Africa. When these colonies fell to the British Empire in the first world war, Britain became a great home base, bleeding itself almost white. In 1920 alone some twenty couples were sent out, and many more in 1922, among whom W. T, Bartlett and S. G. Maxwell became particularly prominent.
So vigorously grew the work "overseas," that already by the late 1920s more Seventh-day Adventists lived outside than inside North America. From the standpoint of the 1970s, this means that Seventh-day Adventism has been predominantly a non-American religion for half a century. Today over 80 percent of the membership lives outside the land where the church was born.
Whereas in 1863 there were 3500 members located almost exclusively in the northeast and central United States, today over 2,500,000 members live in more than 190 countries, a very large number of which have become home bases for foreign missionaries.
Seventh-day Adventism is today a world missionary movement. And since Jesus said, "This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come" (Matthew 24:14), is it not natural to expect Christ's return very soon? Perhaps within a week or two at most? Perhaps, who knows, even tonight?
In 1892 Ellen White warned Seventh-day Adventists not to say at that time that Christ would come back within one or two or even five years. [13] In 1892, when they were operating in only a score of countries, they were expecting Him momentarily! They didn't seem to understand.
Do they understand today? Jesus said the gospel must go to every "nation." The Greek word employed here in the oldest manuscripts is ethnos. A curious misunderstanding in the English-speaking world, based perhaps on the King James? translation of this term, has misled many eager Christians to anticipate the second advent long before the conditions have been met. Although the word ethnos as used in Jesus' day did mean "nation," it also meant "people," "company of people," "class," "caste," and "tribe." It even meant "nation" in the limited sense of a "nation of copper-smiths," that is to say, a guild or local labor union. The plural form, ethne (and this is what we have in Matthew 24:14), meant "foreigners"--to the Greeks, "non-Greeks," and to the Jews, "Gentiles."
Quite obviously, Jesus was not talking merely about the 200 or so countries, commonwealths, colonies, dependencies, territories, and possessions listed in modern almanacs. And He certainly didn't mean that as soon as a missionary family arrives in a country, commonwealth, colony, dependency, etc., and distributes a few tracts, that entire land, with all its population, language groups, tribes, subnations, and subcultures, can be checked off as having had the gospel preached to it. India has half a billion people speaking 880 distinct languages and dialects and Jiving in 550,000 villages. Nigeria, with 80 million people, counts 250 separate ethnic components, each speaking its own language, only a very few of which are Christian.
"Never lose sight of the fact that the message you are bearing is a worldwide message. It is to be given to all cities, to all villages, [14] says the heavenly Messenger.
In the broadest and most gracious sense, Jesus meant that the gospel is to be preached to every Jew, to every Gentile, to every person, and only then can the end come.
Of course! How could it be otherwise? God so loved the whole world that He gave His only-begotten Son. Jesus died that whosoever might be saved. He didn't die for Americans as a people, or China as a nation, but for every single sinner whose lungs draw breath. He loves each soul as distinctly as if there were not another one for whom He gave His life. And He is not willing to come again until every person living at the time has had a chance to hear and (if he will) to believe and live. "Preach the gospel to every creature," He commanded in Mark 16:15. "Go and tell it to the world!"
But when Ellen White, in 1892, cautioned the Adventists not to place Christ's return so soon as one or two or five years in the future, she also warned against speaking of it as ten or twenty years away.
In 1892. Think of it. It seemed reasonable to the prophet, who more than anyone else was aware of the worldwide task facing the church, that the end could arrive within ten or twenty years after 1892.
"Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord." (Zechariah 4:6) God smashed the language barriers at Pentecost in a single instant and when He has a people ready, He'll do it easily again. He won't finish the work all by Himself; if doing that were in His plan He might have done it long ago and had it over with. The commission is, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel." (Mark 16:15) When God's true believers dedicate themselves to mission service, in their neighborhoods as well as in the whole world, when Christians feel the passion for lost souls that Jesus feels for them, when they "remove the rubbish" from their Laodicean lukewarm Christless hearts and let Christ the Saviour in, His Spirit will fill them as never before, and the work of God will spread through the earth like fire in the stubble.
Jesus is in the business of blotting out sins. He is at work cleansing sin and selfishness out of people's hearts and lives. And when they let Him clean their sins and selfishness all the way out, He will bring Himself all the way in. He will fill them with His Spirit--but not as water fills a cup. He will fill them as water under pressure fills a hose! He will lavishly pour out His goodness through them to the world. And when He has a movement of men and women, boys and girls, worldwide, filled as dedicated instruments, consecrated tools in His hand, then men will say, "See, the latter rain is falling; the earth is being filled with the glory of the Lord."
"Cod will do the work," Ellen White promised near the close of her life, "if we will furnish Him the instruments." [15]
Notes: