25 February 2025 | St Albans, UK [David Trim with tedNEWS]
For over 150 years, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has been dedicated to its mission. Members of the Trans-European Division (TED) are deeply grateful to those who first brought the Adventist message to Europe. Over the past 96 years, more than 500 TED missionary families and thousands of volunteers have served and shared the love of Christ worldwide. Later this year, Newbold College of Higher Education will host the TED “Mission 150” Conference. This event will provide an opportunity to strategically explore how TED’s 92,000 members can expand their mission work to reach 208 million people across Europe—136 million of whom identify as non-religious or secular.
In the run-up to this conference, tedNEWS is reproducing excerpts from the first chapter of “A Passion for Mission” by David Trim (Director of the Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research) to capture just a glimpse of the story which tells of our 96 years of faithful mission. In this second installment, Trim considers the importance of the need to ‘remember’ and examines the stereotype of those traditional missionaries.
Commemoration and Evaluation
Ninety-six years after the founding of the NED is a further moment to pause and take stock of the TED’s history. It is the anniversary not merely of an organisation, but of a major shift in the Church’s approach to working in and beyond Europe. It represents over nine decades of sustained and common effort, by Adventists in a common core of European countries, to uplift Jesus Christ as seen through the lens of distinctive Adventist doctrines. It is a moment for thanksgiving and reflection.
The anniversary is, furthermore, an opportunity; in the Holy Scriptures, understanding the past is always a potential springboard to success in the future. The same is true in the writings of Ellen G. White (a corpus that Adventists traditionally have familiarly referred to as the ‘Spirit of Prophecy’). In words that church leaders and church members alike have often quoted, she affirmed: “We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history.” Here she makes explicit the potential to learn lessons from history.
At times, however, it is as though Seventh-day Adventists feel that, by quoting her words, they have done all that is required — that there is no need to invest financial or intellectual resources in recovering and understanding their collective past. A distinguished Adventist historian, Floyd Greenleaf, observes: “The urgency and the momentum of today often encourage us to neglect the meaning of what happened yesterday. [. . .] It is easier than we think to overlook how we have arrived at our juncture in history.” Greenleaf is too charitable to observe that this propensity is particularly true of his own faith community. Yet on the whole, Adventists, by inaction and ignorance, in fact do “forget the way the Lord has led” and, in practice, learn from “our past history” only intermittently.
The situation is changing, and this book, commissioned by the TED officers, is an example. Yet in light of the lack of scholarly engagement with many aspects of Seventh-day Adventist history, it is perhaps worth stressing that Ellen White’s well-known statement about “nothing to fear” was not an outlier, but typical of her thought.
To cite just two striking examples, which could be multiplied, in a text first published in 1900 she declared: “The past history of the cause of God needs to be often brought before the people young and old.” In 1901 she wrote to the then GC president, Arthur G. Daniells: “Again and again I have been shown that the past experiences of God’s people are not to be counted as dead facts.”
Ellen White also was clear that histories of God’s people should not be hagiographies (lives of saints) nor should they whitewash unfortunate facts. In 1876 she argued that “one of the best evidences of the authenticity of the Scriptures” is that in its narrative “the truth is not glossed over nor the sins of its chief characters suppressed”. She returned to this theme near the end of her life. Biblical narratives, she wrote, give a rounded picture of God’s people, because they recount “the struggles, the defeats, and the victories”.
The upcoming anniversary of the TED is an ideal occasion for Adventists in the division (and beyond) to look back and honour those who came before. Honouring them, however, can and should include applying Ellen White’s counsel. We should be realists, rather than triumphalist, about the TED’s almost nine and a half decades, acknowledging the struggles and setbacks, as well as celebrating the successes.
Only with knowledge in the round of the Adventist Church’s past will church members and church leaders in the TED fully comprehend its current position and future prospects. Seventh-day Adventists in South-Eastern, East-Central, and Northern Europe can and should be inspired by their heritage, but at the same time they can analyse it, applying the lessons learned from “past history” to the present and future of the Trans-European Division…
Themes
For most of its history, the Adventist Church in the TED has been characterised, among church leaders and members alike, by passionate enthusiasm for evangelising the world. But what does a passion for mission entail? What arises from it? What are its sub-themes?
Mission is susceptible to different interpretations, but in Christian history generally (and particularly in Adventist history), mission has tended to connote what Seventh-day Adventists for the first century of their history usually referred to as ‘foreign’ or ‘overseas’ mission. This requires people who go on a mission, so thinking about the implications of a ‘passion for mission’ inevitably gives rise to thinking about missionaries. The problem is that the words ‘missionary’ and ‘missionaries’ are no longer well understood. There simply aren’t as many missionaries as there used to be and neither are mission boards or mission societies as prominent as they once were. When the term ‘missionary’ crosses many people’s mental horizons, it comes heavily freighted with ambiguities, assumptions, insinuations. It comes shrouded in myths.
‘The Missionary’: A Modern Myth
There is a cliché in modern Europe and America of the missionary as a white man, clad in khaki drill or white linen and a white pith helmet, cutting his way through the jungle with a machete, suffering malarial fevers, fighting off crocodiles or the odd hippo, before finally arriving at a native village.
Assured of his personal superiority, supremely confident in his own abilities, and certain of Western moral, theological, and technological rectitude, the missionary confronts the natives with the gospel of Western culture, condemning their pagan behaviours and beliefs. He is a figure of terrible anger and smug hypocrisy, of awful self-righteousness and sweeping self-confidence, seeking to abolish traditional attitudes and ancient customs, thanks to a formidable range of ingrained cultural assumptions and powerful biases, all disguised by the rhetoric of Christianising and civilising.
This missionary never doubts that he has nothing to learn and everything to teach. He is there to get the natives to abandon nakedness, to make the women put on blouses, and the men, trousers; most ominously, he’s really there to get the savages to accept imperial government and economic exploitation.
The truth is, this purportedly unbiased view of the missionary is fruit of a prejudice as powerful as any held by supposedly bigoted missionaries — a prejudice arising partly from ignorance, since most Europeans now have only the merest acquaintance with Christianity and few know any missionaries. To ignorance can be added deeply felt suspicion of organised religion and a postmodern scepticism of ‘conversion’. If past generations constructed heroic myths around Christian missionaries, creating distorted pictures of fallible men and women, in the twenty-first century, myths are still being fashioned — it’s just that now they are negative. But the end result is still a caricature, not an accurate picture.
There were unquestionably some missionaries who equated the gospel with Western culture or commerce (or for that matter with male and female fashion). There were others, however, who actively resisted imperialism on behalf of the people they were missionizing, educating them and enabling them to improve their lot and cast off colonial rule. This was, moreover, particularly true of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries, due to their characteristic emphasis on education and public health, typically paired with considerable sympathy for the people they worked for and with. The work ethic, agricultural techniques, and technical skills Adventist missionaries imparted were often empowering. As to the pith helmets, the machetes, and the crocodiles, there is a certain degree of truth to this perception, including for Adventist missionaries to Africa.
But as to the rest, it simply is not a recognisable picture of most Adventist missionaries, especially those from Europe and Australasia. There have been times and places where some Americans working overseas have been, or appeared, too self-confident in their cultural superiority — a point made by experienced and successful American Adventist veterans of mission service. Of course, missionaries from other regions, including some, unquestionably, from the NED, have fallen into the same trap, which is always ready to ensnare the unwary. Among the Adventist missionaries from the TED have been a few bigots, and some fools and knaves, but to fixate on them is to distort the reality.
What is striking is how many Adventist missionaries who went out to serve from countries in this division were forward-looking, open-minded, and well aware that they could learn from their local hosts, the people with whom they lived and for whom they laboured.
Article edited, abridged and updated for tedNEWS with kind thanks to Dr. David Trim.
Trim, D. J. B. (2019) A Passion for Mission. Newbold Academic Press. ISBN 978-1-91628888-0-5.
Featured image: British Union Conference archives. (British Missionaries. Poor quality as taken from printed material with a recognition that Brits were not the only European missionaries).
Photos: Camping trip – Stanley Maxwell private collection.
Engaged in Mission graphic: Maria Ćirin
