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July 8 - Thkinking about Missions

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Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen. Acts 28:28, RSV.

The plain fact is that the earliest Seventh-day Adventists didn't think much about missions. Believing that the end-time commissions to take the gospel to all the world in Matthew 24:14 and Revelation 10:11 and 14:6 had been fulfilled by the Protestants in the early nineteenth century and by the Millerites in the early 1840s, they had a shut-door belief toward both foreign and home missions. Their rather limited mission was to other disappointed Millerites, who needed to be comforted and led from the first and second angels' messages to the third.

While it is true that Ellen White had a vision in 1848 regarding one portion of the Adventist work being like streams of light that went clear around the world and a couple of other visions that pointed to extensive mission, the shut door Sabbatarians had no understanding or seeming interest in the implications.

Their shut-door phase ended about 1852 when they realized that they had been wrong on the close of probation. From that point on, James White proclaimed that they had an "open door" to preach the Sabbath and third angel's message to everyone, whether they had been in the Millerite movement or not.

The door to mission had cracked open a bit, but not very far. It would still be nearly a quarter of a century(1874) before Seventh-day Adventists would dispatch their first overseas missionary. Meanwhile, the Sabbatarian approach to missions moved with the speed of evolution rather than with that or revolution.

While some calls to mission emerged during the 1850s, there were also many suggestions as to why the church should not send overseas missionaries.

One of the more fascinating solutions to the mission issue came from Uriah Smith in 1859. The delay of the Advent was leading soem to raise missiological questions. One Review reader inquired if the third angel's message needed to go outside of the United States.

Editor Smith replied that that might not be necessary since the United States consisted of people from all nations. Thus if the message reached one representative from each language group, that might be enough to say that it had gone to all tongues and nations.

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Lord, how patient You are as You guide us step by step through a shortsighted existence.
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