SEVENTH-DAY EUROPEANS?

"Born in India, raised in Australia, educated in the UK, employed in the USA and travelling all over the world for his current work – it's a good CV for someone giving the March Diversity Lecture at Newbold College. Dr David Trim is Director of Archives, Statistics and Research at the Seventh-day Adventist world headquarters. His subject for the lecture was 'Seventh-day Europeans? American and European approaches to mission in Europe 1880-1940'.
This was more than just a nostalgic trip into the Church's past. A historian by training, Trim believes that going back to early Adventist history offers guidance for the modern Church. His lecture explored how Seventh-day Adventism took root in Europe and whether it remains 'an American implant'.
David Trim Diversity lectureWith quotations from early Adventist speeches and publications, Trim demonstrated that the first Adventists saw no need for foreign missions. They believed that 'going into all the world' simply meant evangelising the immigrant communities in mainland America. "The principal theatre for the third angel's message seems to be in our own country", wrote Uriah Smith in 1865.
It took the Church over a decade after its formal organisation in 1863 to send its first foreign missionary despite the fact that men and women of European origin and those converted to Adventism elsewhere offered to be missionaries. In the late 1860s, Adventists in Europe and America discovered each other. In 1869, the Swiss congregation in Tramelan sent their pastor Jakob Erzberger, to the United States to the General Conference Session where he was ordained. James White repeatedly tried to raise money for Swiss believers. He reported that Americans were willing to give to "circulate publications in their own land" but "to risk their money to help the cause in Europe does not look so clear."
In the early 1870s, repeated appeals from the Swiss Adventists persuaded the Americans to send J N Andrews to Europe in 1874. He found existing groups of Sabbath-keeping Adventists thanks to the work of the independent Polish missionary Czechowski. "Andrews", said Trim, came "as an heroic helper ‒ to lead, not to learn from Europeans." He did too much himself, was unsympathetic towards the new Adventists, and believed, said Trim, "that Americans were more godly than Europeans."
All of this earned him the strong rebuke of Ellen White who told him, "The very best general is not the one who does most of the work himself but one who will obtain the greatest amount of labour from others." Ellen White told early European missionaries, Loughborough and Cornell, that their attempts to start the work in England in the big tents which had been so successful in America's mid-west had not taken account of the local context.
"The work in Old England might have been much farther advanced now than it is if our brethren had not moved in so cheap a way..." she said in 1887.
When Andrews died in 1883 the European torch passed on ‒ most notably to the German L R Conradi. He saw the need to dispel the common perception that Adventism was an eccentric American sect and taught that Adventism was native to Europe – all the elements of it can be traced to the Reformation. He dedicated himself to producing a 'home-grown' Adventism in the mould of German Pietism.
David Trim - swiss imageThe results were impressive. In 1883 there were 223 Adventists in Europe. By 1914 there were 35,146, most of them Germans or German-speakers. Over this period attitudes were changing back in America too. Church leaders were now publicly asking: "Are we sending missionaries for America or for God?"
Sadly the German Adventist Church split largely over attitudes to participation in World War I. The Reform Adventists believed they could not support the German war effort. Conradi did not agree. He finally left the Church in 1932. After the Second World War, much of European Adventism needed once more to depend on American finance and personnel.
Trim concluded that much has now changed. American influence is steadily diminishing as the Church in other parts of the world becomes bigger. But the underlying question for mission remains the same as it was at the 1901 General Conference Session. Veteran missionary to India, W A Spicer told his audience there, "When Jesus knew He was sent from God, and went to God, He knew something that we need to know too. Too many are sent from America, and they go to America. We want to be sent from God, and to have God's house as our home."
"As Spicer spoke, there were so many 'Amens' ringing around the meeting hall, that they are noted in the minutes", said Trim. Many of the audience at Newbold's March Diversity Lecture clearly agreed."
- Original article: http://adventist.org.uk/news/2014/2014-buc/seventh-day-europeans#sthash.zt3b2hSo.dpuf