Department Reports by William Ambrose Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · May 18, 1905

Department Reports

By William Ambrose Spicer

A Review of the Work of Various Departments of the General Conference as Presented by the Secretaries

A Review of the Mission Fields

ONLY general statements are called for in this review of our work in mission fields. Here are brethren, as delegates from every continent and the islands of the sea, who will tell what their own eyes have seen and their hearts have felt of the progress of this message in other lands. Their presence, as representatives of a growing body of believers, of many nations and tongues, at every point of the compass, is assurance that we may claim for our time that word of God through Isaiah:— “Fear not: for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth.” Isa. 43:6.

How hearts would have been stirred, even twenty years ago, at the suggestion of a conference made up with such delegations from the uttermost parts of the earth. Truly there is danger that many will fail to read the significance of the things now becoming common among us in the evidences of the rapid spread of this movement from land to land.

Twenty years ago is not a long time, even to some of the younger of us. The cause of this message was a great work in those days. But, brethren, our fellow believers rejoicing in this truth to-day in fields outside of North America are a larger body than our entire membership was twenty years ago. So mightily has grown the word of God and prevailed in a score of years.

In that valuable little sketch of the growth of this advent movement, put out by Elder Daniells during the last week of prayer, it was shown that our denomination has doubled its membership with each passing decade of its history. Still more rapid is the advance in the mission fields. In the last ten years the number of believers in other lands has quadrupled. It has risen from 4,739 in 1894 to 19,965 in 1904. Last year the increase in the home land of the message was 1,325, while the increase in the mission fields was 2,842.

This is to make no comparison as though there can be any rivalry in the putting of statistics as between home and foreign fields. The growth in new fields is some of the fruitage of the planting and the prayers of the older fields. Their triumphs abroad are our triumphs at home, and our hope of seeing the work finished in the land where it began is bound up in seeing the truth piercing every dark corner until the whole earth is lightened with its glory. But in the fruitfulness of the work in new places we have the manifest signal from God to press into the unworked fields. Until these have heard the message, the work can not be finished in the older fields.

Some mission fields are not represented here, as Bermuda, Porto Rico, Cuba, Central America, Panama, and the Gold Coast of Africa. There has been growth in all these fields, a gain during the conference term of one hundred and fifty-six members. In Porto Rico and Cuba the first churches have been organized. From Hayti, where for many years one brother and his wife have been calling for laborers, there now comes reports of new accessions, and a spreading work in the hands of a young public-school teacher. One entire church asks to be taken in, meeting-house and all. They call for a French laborer to instruct and baptize believers, and lead the work in that French republic.

New Work

In the two years of this conference term one hundred workers have left our shores, sixty in 1903, and forty in 1904. It was early recognized that with the natural growth and increased demands in stations already established not much new work could be safely attempted. Yet much new work has fairly forced itself in.

Japan and China will report new territory annexed, new stations opened, with providences that stir our hearts with new hope for the populous East.

Polynesia has added a most important field in the Malay Straits. India adds Burma and Ceylon to the permanent list. Africa has laid the foundations for two

new missions, one farthest yet into the heart of the Dark Continent. South America has located workers in the long-closed lands of Ecuador and Peru. Latin Europe has added three great countries, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba, closest of all to our coasts, waited until last year for the first messengers to bear the advent warning.

Many of the additions to the force must have been deferred had not special help come from conferences that have released workers and continued their salaries. The growth of this sentiment and plan is a token of the oneness and solidarity of the world-wide work that has gladdened hearts in all the fields. It is a new reserve force wheeling into line with the advance of missions. It has brought relief to many a hard-pressed point. Like beleaguered garrisons at last relieved, workers in some of the fields have wept tears of joy as they saw the fresh faces of the new recruits coming to their help. And still the Macedonian cry comes from over every sea. As in the siege of Lucknow the Scottish maid listened with her ear upon the ground and caught the far-off notes of the Highland bagpipes, and the tramp of Havelock’s men coming to the rescue, so, and we may know it, our comrades in far-off lands are listening now to hear if from this missionary conference shall come the sound of marching re-enforcements.

Even as they fall in death, their thoughts are with us. What a word is that which comes to this conference from Inland China! Dr. Maude Thompson Miller has fallen in death, meeting the crisis as the true and loyal soldier of the cross that she ever was in life. She fell swiftly with her face toward the front, and with words of cheer upon her lips. With all that pressed upon her in the last moments—thoughts for her loved ones, thoughts of God and of the eternal world—it was yet in her heart to pause on the threshold of eternity and think how the news of her death just at the time of this conference might weaken or discourage the sending of needed help. And she sent her salutation to this missionary conference in the message to the Mission Board: “I gladly give my life for the work in China. While it would have been a pleasure for me to have worked till the work was finished, yet if my work is ended for this people whom I love, I hope others will take up the burden.”

There was no faltering or weakness there. Such appeals from the falling workers shall but send the line of advance forward more swiftly than ever.

Britain claims the admiralty of the waters by virtue of her dead that sleep beneath every sea. The graves of our missionary dead now mark our way into every continent, from that of our first foreign missionary, J. N. Andrews, in the heart of Europe, to the last mound of consecrated earth in far Honan. The issue is joined. The whole world is marked for this message. It is ours to take possession of all fields in the name of the Lord.

The Opening of the World

And how grandly the way has been prepared. The great prophetic period of twelve hundred and sixty years ended in 1798, and ushered in “the time of the end.” Round that date cluster the events which Professor Warneck, of Halle, recently summed up as marking “the beginning of the missionary age.” Another great prophetic period ended in 1844, and brought the rise of this advent movement. Round the same time cluster the events that have definitely prepared before us the ways through the foreign lands in which we are walking to-day. A divine providence on earth has moved the train of world-events to fit the great time-table of divine prophecy.

The year 1845, in which Joseph Bates found the Sabbath truth, was the year in which Livingstone, pressed by a force he could not understand, turned his face definitely northward to open the secret of the Dark Continent. It has been one swift succession of opening doors. The revolutions of 1848 changed the face of Europe, and began a new era of constitutional government that has made for liberty and progress. In the five years between 1853 and 1858, as this message was gathering strength, seven vast, closed countries, representing half the population of the world, opened wide to missionary effort. As late as 1888, one year after our work reached Cape Town, South Africa, Professor Henry Drummond said in his “Tropical Africa:” “The Africa of Livingstone and Stanley is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look upon our maps.” Now the steam locomotive waits to carry our missionaries into several points within that very African interior. In 1888 no one could pass the customs line of Ecuador with a Bible. To-day Brother T. H. Davis is selling all our literature in that land, and people ask why we did not come before. As late as 1888 edicts forbade the public teaching of Christianity in Korea. Now think of what God is doing for us there.

The whole world is laid at the feet of this message. We can get the measure of the whole field to-day, and keep in touch with its daily history. Dr. Tydeman, of Holland, said at the recent St. Louis meeting of the World’s Inter-Parliamentary Union: “There is now no Old World, no New World, but one world—the whole world.” And that world is our parish. At the meeting of the Geographical Congress in New York last autumn, the following resolution, introduced by Sir John Murray, was unanimously adopted:— “The eighth international geographical congress, realizing that the only untouched fields for geographical discovery are the regions immediately surrounding the poles of the earth, desires to place on record its sense of the importance of forthwith completing the systematic exploration of the polar areas.” It is an announcement to us that the end of the habitable earth has been laid bare, and the angel flying in the midst of heaven points us to every nation and kindred and tongue and people, literally spread out before us and within ready reach of our effort.

Our Work Shaped to Meet the Time

All through the years of our missionary effort the work has been shaping to meet such a time as this. It has a foothold of its own in all the older foreign fields. You can see that while these, as bases of operation for the work still beyond, need help from the home land, the plant of this truth has a root of itself deep down in the fields abroad. Older fields are now turning out trained workers to join in the finishing of the work.

The sowing of earlier years is bearing fruit. At the entrance of some of the most populous areas we have strongly organized bases from which to work. In Australia there has grown up a very tower of strength for work among the populous fields of Southeastern Asia and the islands of the Pacific. The South African conferences are a base of operation for the future development of the vast interior. In Northern Europe, with its influences touching the uttermost parts, the growing work is as an organized army coming on to the field, and helping in Asia and Africa. Ten years ago the first mission was opened in heathen lands. Matabeleland is now sending trained helpers into other fields. These ten years have been years of constant growth everywhere, and our missions girdle the earth. There are wide gaps to be filled in, and the fields long to see the breaches made up. Asia has but nine ordained ministers for its eight hundred millions of souls—which is as though there were one minister in all the United States. On the west coast of South America two ministers hold a line that stretches as far as from Maine to California. Our battle plan must be like Gideon’s—not a large body together but a slender line thrown out until it surrounds the entire field of conflict. Then shall quickly come the showing of the light, and the shout of victory. We must work to the plan that will win. One military authority recently said that Japan had won her victories not because she had the most men in the field, but because she had the most men in the right place. That is it. God must guide our forces to the right place for winning the speedy triumph. Just one thing will do it. When this gospel of the kingdom is preached as a witness unto all nations the end will come.

A Quick Work

It will not take long. Our workers from the most populous and neglected fields will say it. The Spirit of God is preparing hearts to hear. There is a conviction all abroad that a great world-crisis is at hand. At a meeting of the International Missionary Union last summer, Mr. Fry, who has traveled extensively in the East, spoke of the growing expectancy with which people, Mohammedan and heathen, were looking for the end of the age and a coming Deliverer. We have found it so in India. And we have the message of the Coming One to give. A few weeks ago a Methodist missionary in Burma reported the conversion of a man with a band of followers on the far frontier, between Burma and China. He had forsaken idolatry, and taught his people that the Lord who made the world was soon to come again, and they were to get ready to meet him. He, with a band of his followers, accepted the teaching of the missionaries with a glad heart. But it was this advent message that they were evidently looking for.

Some of the greatest fields yet to be warned are heathen, it is true. But we have a message that the heathen can understand. Do not fail to catch the significance of the fact which Dr. Selmon reported in the REVIEW a few weeks ago. The heathen of Honan have begun to call our mission in Inland China the mission of “the true doctrine.”

I have myself heard it from educated heathen, that this message is of a convincing order, new in the story of missions in India. While Brother W. H. Anderson was with us in Washington, I asked him if he had ever heard, through the up-country natives, anything of our Brother James, who, eleven years ago, penetrated the far interior, from the east coast. He laid down his life in Africa ere he could tell us the story of his wanderings and labors. “Yes,” Brother Anderson replied, “some natives from beyond the Zambesi, years afterward described to me the very features of the man. They told of his having a box that could sing,—the violin he carried with him,—and besides all that, they said that he ‘kept the right day as the day of rest.’”

Thank God for the simplicity of this truth. Simple souls can understand it. There is a compelling conviction that goes with the truth of the Sabbath and of the coming of the Lord, where minds are open and unprejudiced. The true-hearted among all the nations are waiting for this third angel’s message. And the same message that has made us a people is the message that will finish the work. It will not take long for the news to go when once the witnesses are placed throughout the earth. In all the darkest and most populous lands news passes swiftly from lip to lip. Rumor sweeps over dark Asia as on the wings of the wind. In Africa information travels through the wilds from village to village and tribe to tribe. When caravan meets caravan, every man asks his neighbor, “What have you heard?” “What do you know?” This message will be talked about in all the earth one day, and God’s Spirit will convict honest hearts, so that as they see the signs of the great day breaking upon the earth, they will look up to God. “And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be delivered: for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord hath said, and in the remnant whom the Lord shall call.” We can answer the world’s Macedonian cry by the grace of God. We can carry this message to every nation within this generation.

This does not suggest throwing a large force at once into the fields abroad. Now we must place the few who shall be studying the languages, sowing the seed, and preparing to lead the little army that must soon follow. The fields abroad desire no lessening of power in the work at home. They want to see every home stake strengthened. They will stand loyally by the policy that shall clear away General Conference obligations, so that the General Conference Committee may be simply the great Mission Board of the denomination, with no embarrassments to hinder a straightforward, progressive missionary advance till the work is finished. They

will gladly see the army of workers available from conferences sweep into unentered corners of the home territory and into the needy South. But let us keep our eyes upon the vast fields, and prepare for the movement that will finish the evangelization of the world by the third angel’s message. In 1893 the message came to us by the spirit of prophecy:— “If those to whom light has come, had received, appreciated, and acted upon it, they would have been channels by which his blessing would flow into the world. Nations that sit in midnight darkness would have had light through God’s appointed agents and instrumentalities,—the members of our church, the influences of our institutions. We would have seen these nations doing a greater work than those who have had clearer light and more numerous opportunities.” It is a statement of what might have been. But is it not also a declaration of what will be seen in the dark fields now, for the generation is fast closing, and there must be delay no longer! In the bursting forth of the light in some of these vast fields, in the rapid development of fruit in places where we have not even sown, have we not an evidence that drops of the latter rain are even now falling on the destitute fields, and that there shall soon be a glorious harvest? The verdure quickly follows the latter rain in the Orient. Even as the moisture-laden winds begin to blow landward, the up-springing vegetation tells us that soon the monsoon will break and pour down the floods that insure the harvest. So now we see the signs of the coming flood of blessing that will suddenly prepare all the earth for the final harvest.

W. A. SPICER, Sec.