July 17 - A Maturing Mission

What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden; and it grew and became a tree. Luke 13:18, 19, RSV.

By the early 1880s the European mission had reached its adolescent stage. Several factors indicate the mission's increasing importance to the denomination.

One of them was a series of visits by prominent Adventist leaders sent by the General Conference to tour the various European missions between 1882 and 1887. The first was S. N. Haskell in 1882. Haskell recommended publishing in more languages and helped the European develop a more functional organizational structure.

More important, however, were the tours by G. I. Butler (president of the General Conference) in 1884 and of Ellen White and her son(W. C. White) from 1885 through 1887. Such visits not only strengthened the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Europe-they demonstrated the denomination's interest in its mission program. Slowly but sruely Adventism was becoming a world church.

A second set of indicators regarding the growing maturation of of the European misson were organizational developments. Foremost was the first general meeting of workers from the different Seventh-day Adventist missions in Europe in 1882 "for consultation concerning the general wants of the cause." Closely related to the development of the European Council of Seventh-day Adventists was the commencement of publication of German, Italian, and Romanian periodicals in 1884. One in French had existed since 1879.

Outside of the European mission, the Adventists established General Conference-sponsored missions among the European Protestants of Australia and New Zealand in 1885 and of South Africa in 1887. It is of interest to note that all of those countries had had lay members prior to the arrival of official missionaries.

And those new missions would soon join North America and Europe as home bases for the sending of missionaries to other nations for the next phase of Adventist mission development-the taking of the three angel's messages to every nation throughout the world. That phase, beginning about 1889, was a logical outgrowth of the developing Adventist interpretation of the to-every-kindred-tongue-and-people passages of Revelation 14:6, Revelation 10:11, and Matthew 24:14.

The hope of Adventism is a completed mission. Come, Lord Jesus, the early Adventists prayed.