p. 6 (294) | CONFERENCE NOTES

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 8, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 19.

CONFERENCE NOTES.

THE work of reorganization, referred to in our last, goes on well. It is constructive in character, not destructive. While it contemplates and inaugurates radical changes, they will not be violent changes. Nothing will be upset; there will be no hindrances or obstacles to the work, unless the perverse human shall stand in the way. This is not anticipated. While there has been questioning as to the advisability of some of the steps proposed, as naturally there would be, there has been no decided opposition.

FORMER tendencies were toward centralization. It is the nature of humanity to strengthen the original center. As it took earnest labor and planning to make a successful beginning and secure a center of operations, it would be a natural tendency to continue to strengthen and build up that center. And to a degree this is right; but beyond that degree in Christian life and work it is wrong. While of old Jerusalem was the center of God’s work, the Master did not design that it should be the only center. From it men should have gone out, taught of God, to establish other centers of light and influence, until the Gentile nations had all become enlightened. Thus it was in the early age of Christian effort. Jerusalem, Ephesus, Antioch, Corinth, Rome, Alexandria, and other cities became so many centers of light and influence, the true authority of the city depending, not on the position of the city, but on the light and power which God gave thru His servants dwelling there. Jesus Christ was the Head. No one had predominance over another.

EVEN SO God designs His closing work of the Gospel to go to the world. Every evangelizing agency is to be used. Centers of Gospel light and power and influence are to be established everywhere,—not alone in America, but in other lands, from which centers shall go forth laborers for God to win lost souls to the light of life. The evangel of life and of health, the Gospel evangelist and the medical missionary worker, with all their necessary helpers, will work together for the furtherance of the Gospel of Christ.

THE administrative authority of the conference is vested in the executive committee of twenty-five. Six of these come from the Medical Missionary Association, and the remainder are elected by the General Conference. It is generally understood that the presidents of the Union Conferences will be members of the executive committee of the General Conference. The committee is empowered to organize itself, and to employ such agents, secretaries, etc., as shall be needed. The Foreign Mission Board will give way in time to the executive committee, who will of themselves constitute a mission board of far greater strength and scope. Sabbath-school work, Religious Liberty work, etc., will be carried on thru secretaries and departments.

THIS conference is pre-eminently a missionary conference. State lines are fading away. Funds will not find church walls and conference line-fences the obstacles they formerly were. In the year 1885, the writer, with a dear friend, who now sleeps, listened to Gounod’s great oratorio, “Redemption,” in Royal Albert Hall, London. Two poor missionaries were not able to secure a seat in the pit, not to speak of a box. They were content to stand in the great gallery at two and six each, thru the three hours or more of the rendering of the great masterpiece. We recall the Son in creation, the fall, His ministration as the Angel of God’s presence, the Word made flesh, His manifestation of God, His suffering, the agony of the garden, the darkness of the cross, the triumph of His resurrection, and the grand triumphal chorus of a thousand voices singing in glorious procession the victory of His ascension in the courts of glory, as given in the latter part of the twenty-fourth psalm. This closed the second part of the oratorio. Such seemed the work of our conference on the tenth day of its continuance, just before the Sabbath, when the Spirit of God came upon Brother A. G. Daniells of Australasia in a glorious, thrilling appeal for the great needy world, the field which God has given to His servants. It was not in its language, tho that was proper and to the point, but it was in the God-given power of the message for that moment. It was another step in triumph over unbelieving conservatism, let us hope, in all hearts, and a broader outlook from comfortable home fields to the great, dark, dying, needy world.

BUT just as beyond the resurrection and ascension of Christ was lying the great field of the world in which His body, the church, was to labor, to minister His life, to witness to the power of His resurrection, to carry on the struggle begun by her adorable and self-sacrificing Head; so after the outward triumph of the principles in this conference which make it thus far a true missionary gathering, there lies before this people the great, broad, needy field of sick bodies and dying souls. After the transfiguration of the mountain came the giving of the glory of His life to the needy, demon-haunted multitude in the valley below. So beyond us lies the labor, the travail, the pain, and, praise God, the triumph of saving souls. May the Spirit which has given the principles baptize God’s children with His power.