"I give you my word of honor," Elder A. G. Daniells repeated to the plumbers, the plasterers, and the lumber merchants. "When the draft arrives in May from our General Conference in the United States, we'll pay you off immediately."
Little did Daniells realize the trial, or triumph, that his words would entail. [1]
It was the spring of 1899. Five years earlier a series of apparent miracles had encouraged the believers in Australia to establish a college that should in due course send out overseas missionaries as truly as the colleges in America were beginning to do. The idea seemed almost impossible, even foolish, to the members in attendance at the Middle Brighton camp meeting near Melbourne in January 1894 when Mrs. White urgently recommended it. How could a constituency of 1000 build and operate a college?
Ellen White pressed ahead, with the brethren reluctantly following after.
Soon 1450 acres were selected at the fantastic price of about $3.00 an acre. But even $4500 seemed unattainable. Besides, a government expert said the soil was sour, soggy, and sandy. "If a bandicoot tried to cross it," he added, "he would have to carry his lunch with him."
But in her visions Ellen White learned that God could make it fruitful beyond belief. To help convince the leaders, He showed her in vision a clean-cut furrow "about two yards long and about a quarter of a yard deep," plowed mysteriously in a forest clearing on the property; and when on May 24, 1894, the brethren went out to the place to look it over, the miraculous furrow was there to greet them. Next morning as they sought God's guidance with unusual earnestness, Elder Stephen McCullagh, near death from tuberculosis, felt a shock pass through his body and was completely cured.
Still, doubts persisted; and still Ellen White begged the brethren to believe God and buy the land. Somehow they made a couple of payments. Then in January 1895 members of the diamond-rich Wessels family (whom we met in chapter 23) arrived from Africa and were impressed to donate $5000. On March 6 a kind of preliminary College opened with a handful of students. In July, to demonstrate her faith in the enterprise, Sister White purchased 66 of the 1450 acres and began to build "Sunnyside," a home for herself and her helpers.
But when the school term closed in October or November, which is springtime in Australia, the project nearly folded. To worsen matters, their attorney lost an unnecessary lawsuit at an appalling cost of $2000.
The next July Ellen White in a dream received new arguments to present to the brethren and persuaded them to resume construction. Teen-agers and older members felled trees and sawed them into planks. They drained swamps and planted an orchard. They labored into the night, with some holding candles while others drove nails.
In early 1897, after the girls' dormitory was finished and the dining hall was well begun and all available money had run out, Ellen White called for volunteers to work for nothing, and thirty agreed. In April 1897 the Avondale School for Christian Workers opened on schedule, with four teachers and ten students. Attendance climbed rapidly. The need developed for a church building adequate for Sabbath services. Non-Adventist businessmen donated supplies, laborers contributed part of their time, and soon the building was up.
By 1899 enrollment had grown to 100, and more buildings were needed to complete the complex. And, once more, funds were exhausted.
A. G. Daniells, president of the Australasian field, was in charge of raising money. With Sister White's encouragement he requested the General Conference in Battle Creek to match Australia dollar for dollar, and the leaders in America agreed. Reassured, the Australian Adventists gave again, down to their last penny, then pledged even more. They wanted their youth to have a Christian education at any cost.
It was then, when the members had gone their limit, that Elder Daniells asked the plumbers, plasterers, and lumber merchants to furnish supplies and labor on credit and promised that he would pay them all as soon as the General Conference sent its generous draft in May.
On Tuesday, the second of May, 1899, an envelope arrived bearing the return address of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Battle Creek, Michigan. With what eagerness was it opened!
With what consternation was it found to contain no money!
Daniells was stunned. He read that the American brethren were faced with multitudinous needs at home at a time of continuing national depression. They were sure that the Australian believers would understand. And as a matter of practical counsel, knowing that Australia was suffering a severe drought, they recommended that building plans be suspended until better days.
As news spread rapidly, someone likely remembered something that had been happily forgiven and forgotten; namely, that this was not the first time that the American leadership had let them down. Back in 1894, when they had needed money so urgently to purchase the 1450 acres, Ellen White in the name of the Lord had asked S. N. Haskell to find donors in California. He had responded by raising $10,000 in pledges, but when the first (and only) $1000 came in, an administrator on the west coast, entirely without malice but also without thinking of Australia, applied it to the very real needs of the California Conference. [2]
Sister White had responded at that time with earnest correspondence, and the administrator had tried to make things right.
But if the leadership in the United States, not fully sensing the needs of a faraway mission field, let Australia down, it appears that God did not. In 1895 He impressed the Wessels family to help. In 1899 He performed wonders to assist Elder Daniells.
The entire night after the money failed to arrive Daniells spent in prayer under the eucalyptus trees. He prayed until the sky grew light in the morning and an assurance came over him as an assurance had once come early in the morning to Hiram Edson, that his prayer would be answered and that God would solve their problem.
At eight o'clock that morning Daniells was on his way confidently to Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide to find the money he knew God had already placed in reserve for him.
Scarcely had he left when a cable arrived from New Zealand asking if the school could use $2500!
Over the next two weeks Daniells enjoyed a succession of answered prayers. For instance, on Thursday morning his mind was strongly impressed with the words in Daniel 6:16, "He will deliver thee." In the margin he wrote, "7:30 a.m., 5/4/99." As he and a friend passed a bank at four o'clock that afternoon, a full hour after closing time, they noticed the door ajar. They walked in and were astonished to find the banker and his clerks surrounded with piles of cash, securities, and checks, the vault wide open, and no one standing guard.
The banker looked up and his face turned pale. "How did you get in here?" he stammered.
"The door was open."
"But it couldn't have been! I bolted it, turned the key, and hooked the chain with my own hands." Then sensing that these men must have had extraordinary assistance, the banker asked meekly, "Is there anything that I can do for you?"
Was there indeed! One hour later the banker was smilingly handing them 300 Australian pounds, counted out as shiny golden sovereigns, satisfied to take no other security than a promissory note backed by their word of honor.
That evening Elder Daniells wrote beside Daniel 6:16, "Fulfilled, 5:00 p.m., 5/4/99."
More money came in under other surprising circumstances, and within two weeks every current obligation had been met. Avondale went on to become everything God had said it would: an excellent college, a training base for hundreds of missionaries, and a farm so prosperous that experts came to learn the reason for its success.
But what had gone wrong in America? Why was it that not once but twice in the 1890s the leadership there had let down a promising young mission field?
There is perhaps no simple answer. Our title, "Sixteen Years of Crisis" (1888-1904), suggests the breadth of the problem. "Crisis" may be defined as a period when basic decisions are made affecting all future events, and as a situation when antagonistic elements sharply oppose one another. The 1890s, as we may roughly designate the years under discussion, were both a time of decision and a confrontation between the tragic and the glorious in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
The glorious, first. Minneapolis 1888 introduced an emphasis on Jesus and righteousness by faith more wonderful than any that had preceded it in the story of the church; and with 1888 paving the way, the General Conference sessions of 1893, 1895, and 1897--not to mention many a camp meeting, ministerial institute, and local revival--were occasions for especially stirring addresses on the Heart of the gospel. Here was a message to tell to the world; so it was that as overseas personnel in mission stations read reports in the Review and the General Conference Daily Bulletins, hearts thousands of miles removed were strangely warmed and vows were renewed.
Not unrelated to this phenomenon was the appearance of Ellen White's masterpiece, The Desire of Ages; also her Steps to Christ, Thoughts From the Mount of Blessing, and Christ's Object Lessons.
As we have seen, educational advances were notable during this period. In 1891 the first nationwide teachers' institute focused on "Christian education"; soon collegiate education began to move seriously into the country; and in 1897 church schools started to spring up by the hundreds. Entry into many new lands and the first mission stations for non-Christians also marked the 1890s, as did the second highest annual growth rate (9.8 percent) for any decade. In addition, several administrative reforms of consequence were implemented, of which we shall hear in the next chapter.
Then what was so bad? Viewed from some standpoints, nothing really! No Adventist of note is known during this period to have placed a bomb in a mailbox, held police at gunpoint, or kidnapped a tycoon's heir. Apart perhaps from working Sundays here and there in defiance of blue laws, they were undeniably good citizens; nonetheless, in articles and letters that were subsequently published in Testimonies to Ministers, their prophet said some very grave things about them.
Repeatedly in these communications Ellen White presented the sublime beauty of Jesus Christ and then, in stark contrast, the evidence that leadership, laity, institutions, conferences, mission fields, and the church as a whole, were desperately in need of reformation. Over and over she stressed that "not a few, but many" (emphasis hers) have been losing their spiritual zeal and turning away from the light. There has been an "astonishing backsliding" among God's people. The church is "frigid," its first love frozen up. Leaders in Battle Creek have turned their backs to the Lord; many church members also have rejected His lordship and chosen Baal's instead. Conference presidents are behaving like medieval bishops, while "whole conferences" and "every institution" are being perverted with the same principles. Some leaders actually "boast" that they will not follow the testimonies. A "strange blindness" has come upon the General Conference president so that even he is acting contrary to the light. So serious is the situation at the publishing house in Battle Creek that "all heaven is indignant." Indeed, the Lord "has a controversy with His people," and will soon "overthrow in the institutions called by His name." [3]
It was a serious series of charges. But what exactly were they doing wrong? Here is an answer from Testimonies to Ministers, page 441: "If you harbor pride, self-esteem, a love for the supremacy, vainglory, unholy ambition, murmuring, discontent, bitterness, evil speaking, lying, deception, slandering, you have not Christ abiding in your heart, and the evidence shows that you have the mind and character of Satan. ... You may have good intentions, good impulses, can speak the truth understandingly, but you are not fit for the kingdom of heaven."
Gossiping. Complaining. Doubting God. Jockeying for first place. That's all. They were acting like ordinary Christians, when they should have been cooperating with Christ in blotting out sins, reflecting to the world the beauty of Jesus, radiating the glory of God's character in Sabbath holiness, and preparing themselves, by His grace, to be clean vessels for the outpouring of His Spirit to the world in the latter rain.
They had received tremendous light--in 1888 and, for that matter, since Millerite days. They reminded each other with tears of joy at their testimony meetings that they loved this light. But too many of them didn't live the light. "Let our ministers and workers realize that it is not increased light that they need ..., so much as it is to live out the light they already have," [4] cautioned Ellen White. Mrs. S. M. I. Henry analyzed the situation another way to the General Conference of 1899: "As the sweetest things, when they turn sour, become the most offensive, so to turn against the greatest light and truth is to fall into the greatest darkness and evil. This people have had wonderful light." [5]
It has been said that, unable to tempt the saints with vice, the devil gets them on their virtues.
The biblical call to separation from the world (1 Corinthians 6) was perverted by the enemy into drawing Adventists into colonies, especially at Battle Creek. As early as 1879, when Battle Creek counted 700 or 800 believers, the leadership published in the Review an appeal for no one else to move there without prior consultation. [6] In vain. Numbers increased by the 1890s to 2000. Crowded together, instead of telling the message to the world, they expressed their concern for the success of the cause by discussing other members' faults. Around 1900 a proverb passed current among the saints that if Gabriel paid a call to Battle Creek, even he could not escape their wagging tongues.
The wholesome desire to lead people to think well of the Adventist message by doing things that would "give character to the work," led to the construction of ever larger facilities and the purchase of ever more modern equipment until, perversely, size itself undermined the character of both work and workers. The Review became, with stereotype, electroplating, and bindery departments and fifty steam presses, the largest publishing house in Michigan; but it failed to ask if it was necessary to be so big. What came to be necessary, in order to keep the expensive machinery running and the large staff employed, was to publish almost anything that came by Common novels, liquor ads, and even a spiritualist work were not turned away. [7] Ellen White said that God wanted Dr. Kellogg to win his patients to Jesus and the last-day truth; but the sanitarium, with all its floors one atop the other and all its buildings one beside the other, occupied too much of the doctor's time.
With the largeness came "worldly policy" and a lowered sense of mission. After 1897 Kellogg insisted that his sanitarium was "undenominational." At the Review the managers, especially Captain Clement Eldridge early in the decade and Archibald R. Henry later, managed to raise their own pay steeply while keeping the employees' wages low. Out went the simplicity of the early days when everyone felt that he or she was making an equal sacrifice. Inequity bred discontent, complaint, suspicion. When Henry was relieved in 1897, he turned on the publishing house and sued it for $50,000 [8]--quite a contrast to the spirit of the Rochester model and the founding of Avondale.
One of the blemishes of the Sixteen Years of Crisis was, in fact, a series of lawsuits among believers. In anguish Ellen White invoked the early days of mutual dedication and cited Paul: "There is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? Why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?" 1 Corinthians 6:7. She cautioned, too, as the Lord's messenger, that they were insulting Jehovah and might as well" stop praying to God, for He will not hear their prayers." In reference to at least one lawsuit of the times, Ellen White acknowledged that the suing party plainly had been wronged but insisted that injustice did not justify going to court. God will avenge, she reminded. "Have faith in God; for He has promised that He will hear the prayer of faith." [9]
On a broader scale, the words of Christ calling for unity (John 17) were perverted by the enemy into a kind of overcentralization, known by contemporaries as "kingly power," which took its particular form from the basic structure of the church at the time.
You will remember that the first organization voted by Seventh-day Adventists was a publishing association. Two years later the General Conference came into being, modeled on the simplest possible constitution and legally separate from the publishing association. When the Western Health Reform Institute was founded in 1866, it was backed by an association also separate from the General Conference. This was the way the members wanted it. By the late 1890s the press, now very large, was still separate; and the Health Institute, which had grown into a chain of twenty-seven sanitariums, was administered by the International Medical Missionary and Benevolent Association, independent of the General Conference.
The International Tract and Missionary Society and the International Sabbath School Association, both of which stemmed from the late 1860s and early 1870s, and the International Religious Liberty Association, founded in 1889, also had headquarters separate from the church's central leadership.
In a few words, by the 1890s there were both too little organization and too much. There was too little in that too many separate associations and societies operated more or less independently and sometimes actually in competition with one another. There was too much, because all major decisions and a great many minor ones were made in Battle Creek, either by the General Conference or by the appropriate "association" or "society" leadership residing there. Only limited freedom to make decisions was left to local conferences, associations, societies, or missions.
The tendency was, in fact, toward further centralization. In the early 1890s steps were begun to merge the Review and Herald with the Pacific Press. Ellen White wrote strongly against such institutional consolidation and saved the day. She said the Lord wanted more, not fewer, men in decision-making positions, and she gave three reasons why: (1) to prevent one man's weakness from debilitating the whole work; (2) to develop more leaders by placing responsibility on more men; and (3) to cause more men to lean on God rather than on one another. [10]
In 1896 Ellen White wrote from Cooranbong, Australia: "The arrangement that all moneys must go through Battle Creek and under the control of the few men in that place is a wrong way of managing. ... What do these men know of the necessities of the work in foreign countries?" In the same document she recommended that a representative of the General Conference be assigned to work in each country, so that decisions could be made where the people lived. This representative, she added, could be a layman and should be assisted by a team of counselors. [11]
The custom of making all decisions in Battle Creek was especially harmful because the committees that made the decisions were so small, relatively speaking. For example, the 1863 General Conference executive committee of three was adequate when the membership was 3500. It was expanded step by step, reaching 13 in 1897, but by then the church was stretching around the world, and membership was racing past 70,000.
It was such an overall situation as we have described that explains the empty envelope that arrived in Australia on May 2, 1899. Yet in spite of the central leadership's ungenerosity with distant mission fields, finances were not in good shape at home. By 1901 the General Conference was driven to borrowing money even to support its missionaries. The Battle Creek Sanitarium was in debt an uninflated $200,000. The various schools and colleges owed $330,000. And in Europe, the publishing house at Oslo (then Christiania), Norway, was bankrupt and in imminent danger of passing, like Czechowski's, into the hands of its creditors.
In the emergency, Ellen White pleaded with the children of the church to forego their Christmas presents and to ask their parents to donate equivalent cash to the cause. [12] In April 1901, looking sadly and earnestly into the faces of the leaders assembled for the General Conference session, she lamented with tears in her voice, "O, my very soul is drawn out in these things. ... That these men should stand in a sacred place, to be as the voice of God to the people, as we once believed the General Conference to be, that is past. What we want now is reorganization. We want to begin at the foundation, and to build upon a different principle." [13]
Notes: