If you have a chance to witness the Parade of Nations that culminates each quinquennial General Conference (G.C.) Session, you will get an awesome sense of how global the Adventist Church is. This year in St. Louis, more than 200 countries will be represented.
Early Seventh-day Adventist believers were slow to catch the global mission vision. As immigrants came to the U.S. and accepted the Adventist faith, some wanted to return home and share the message. M.B. Czechowski, a Polish Catholic who joined the Adventist movement in 1857, approached church leaders with a request to return to Europe as an Adventist missionary.
Receiving no encouragement, he applied to another Adventist denomination, which sent him to Europe in 1864. Czechowski avoided telling his converts who was sponsoring him or where his Sabbath teachings came from; however, some of his Swiss converts discovered by accident the address of the Adventist headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan. After receiving literature from Battle Creek, they requested an Adventist minister be sent to Switzerland to teach them.
In response, church leaders invited the interested group to send a delegate to the 1869 G.C. Session. That year the G.C. voted to form the "Missionary Society of the Seventh-day Adventists." The June 15, 1869, edition of the Review and Herald reported that the purpose of the new mission society was to send the Adventist message "to foreign lands, and to distant parts of our own country, by means of missionaries, papers, books, tracts, etc."
However, it was several years before the church united behind a mission program and sent John Nevins Andrews, the first church-sponsored missionary, to Switzerland in 1874. In 1888, S.N. Haskell was sent on a two-year itinerary around the world to survey the possibilities for opening mission work.
In 1890, the ship Pitcairn was built with Sabbath school offering money to carry missionaries to the South Pacific islands. The ship made six missionary journeys between 1890 and 1899, visiting the Cook Islands, Pitcairn, Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. The Pitcairn became a mission symbol, inspiring greater financial support for missions.
During the last part of the 19th century, Adventist missionaries went to India, Australia, and various countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Adventist pioneers organized churches, schools, and hospitals in these countries, establishing home bases that would eventually sponsor their own missionaries.
Today, Adventists send missionaries from all the world to all the world. There are endless opportunities for mission service through student-missionary programs and organizations like Adventist Volunteer Service, Global Mission, Adventist Frontier Missions, Maranatha Volunteers International, Adventist World Aviation, and Global Evangelism.
The church’s educational system is designed to prepare youth in each world division for service at home or abroad. Every Adventist is a missionary—at home, at school, across the street, at work, or on special assignment in a foreign culture. Adventists take Christ’s commission seriously when He said, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation" (Mark 16:15 TNIV).
Ann Fisher writes from Walla Walla, Washington.
