Nov. 4 - The Rise Of The Missioanry College

How are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? Rom. 10:14, RSV.

That is a good question. And both the larger Christian community and Seventh-day Adventists in the 1890s began to take unprecedented steps to spread the teachings of God's Word as the seedbed of faith.

Part of the preparation for broader mission among Protestants was the development of missionary colleges and Bible institutes. Such schools aimed to prepare large numbers of workers as quickly as possible to staff mission outposts both at home and overseas.

The new institutions focused on practical training and Bible knowledge. The first such school appeared in 1883 as the Missionary Training College for Home and Foreign Missionaries and Evangelists.

Events within Adventism paralleled those in the evangelical educational realm. Thus mission outreach had a direct effect on the expansion of the denomination's schooling. The church looked to its educational institutions to supply staff for its rapidly expanding worldwide program.

John Harvey Kellogg was apparently the first Adventist to develop a missionary school. He established the Sanitarium Training School for Medical Missionaries in 1889, followed by the American Medical Missionary College in 1895.

Meanwhile, the Avondale School for Christian Workers (1894), the training schools founded by E. A. Sutherland and Percy Magan, and the Adventist missionary colleges (such as Washington Missionary College, Emmanuel Missionary College, Southern Missionary College, and the College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda) soon were dotting the Adventist landscape--all of them similar in intent to the institutions spawned by the evangelical mission movement.

Mission expansion affected Adventist educational growth in at least two ways. First, it greatly increased the number of schools and students in North America, since most of the denomination's early workers came from the United States. Second, Adventists began to establish schools around the world so that the church could train people in their home fields. By 1900, therefore, not only had Adventist educational institutions exploded in number, but the system had been internationalized.

No one can doubt the mission orientation of Adventist schools in the 1890s. The challenge in our time is to keep that focus at the forefront of our schools at all levels. The nature of mission has changed in the past century, but not the need to tell a world about hope in Christ.