28 January 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. As you will read, the flame of the missionary spirit lives on in the Trans-European Division.
“The unwarned millions make their pathetic appeal, and in view of the nearness of the coming of Jesus, we must certainly lay plans for a larger work.”
— Adventist Church leaders in Northern Europe, November 1928
The final day of 1928 was also the last day of the European Division of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. On New Year’s Day, 1929, four new divisions came into existence: the Soviet Russian, Central European, Southern European, and Northern European Divisions. In 2025, the last of these is the only survivor from 1929 and celebrates its ninetieth anniversary. While its name and territory have changed, the Trans-European Division (TED) as it is now called, is the only division of the four that has enjoyed a continuous existence ever since. The TED is an enduring feature of the ecclesiastical-organizational landscape of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, its influence felt far beyond Europe’s shores.
Continuity in Changing Currents
The continuity embodied in the TED is noteworthy not least because the nine decades since it was created have been ones of enormous change, both in the Adventist Church and in the wider world. When the Northern European Division (NED) was created, the European Division had existed for nearly twenty years, one of the first ‘divisions’ created by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Conceived of as sub-divisions of the General Conference (GC), the overarching organisation of the Adventist world church, three divisions were created in 1909: North American, European, and Asiatic. In 1928, the European Division was one of eight world divisions of the Adventist denomination. Nine decades later, the TED is one of thirteen world divisions. At the time the European Division was divided, Adventists in Europe totalled 32 per cent of the global membership and were equivalent to 80 per cent of the membership in the North American Division (NAD).
With just over 24,400 members, the newly created NED was the third-largest world division in terms of membership. But, excluding its African mission fields, the division’s membership in Europe (the territories of which are still with TED today) was just over 21,000. With members in Hungary and the Balkans, the 1929 membership in the TED’s territory today was just over 24,300: this constituted 8 per cent of the global membership, equivalent to 19 per cent of the North American membership.
Today, the number of church members in TED has increased by 260 per cent, but ninety-six years on, its 92,000 members are (approximately) 0.4 per cent of the world’s reported membership, equivalent to (approximately) 7 per cent of the membership in the NAD. The Seventh-day Adventist Church in the TED has grown in absolute terms, but its relative position in the denomination worldwide has diminished.
In wider society, the NED came into being as Communism and Fascism were challenging traditional Christianity for ideological dominance in Europe. Ideology itself became passé, however, and individualism, materialism, and postmodernism are predominant today in the Trans-European Division, as across Europe as a whole.
In 1929, European empires ruled or dominated most of Africa and Asia, and Adventist Church structure reflected the Age of Imperialism. The three divisions with ‘European’ in their titles incorporated much of Africa, the whole of the Middle East, and parts of the Far East, with colonial territories assigned generally to the division of the respective imperial powers. For example, the Southern European Division (SED) had as its core the Latin or Romance-speaking countries, and so it included the Italian, Belgian, and many, though not all, of the French colonies.
The Northern European Division included Britain, and so British East and West Africa were assigned to the NED, along with those parts of French West Africa that adjoined Ghana and Nigeria. The attachment of mission fields, especially in Africa, to nominally European divisions continued well into the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the passing decades brought independence to what had once been colonies — and recurrent surges of emigration from them into the countries to whose empires they had once belonged. Thus, ethnic diversity was created in what once were largely monochrome societies. Despite that influx, population growth in Europe has slowed in the last ninety-six years; one result is that whereas in 1929, Europeans were one in three of the global population, they now are (approximately) one in ten.
Perhaps most significantly, the last nine decades also witnessed a world war that was disproportionately destructive in Europe; a decades-long ‘cold war’ during which it experienced no combat but was divided and polarized as never before; and the creation, for the first time in centuries, of a supranational authority over much of the continent. The European Union has brought economic unity to much of Europe (including most of the current territory of the TED), yet has not erased all the social, cultural, and economic fault lines created by sixty years of ideological conflict.
Territory and Name Changes
The world into which the TED was born has altered immensely. As conditions change, church structure changes; two of the four divisions born in 1929 merged in 1971. The Soviet Russian division had already, in the early 1930s, ceased to exist in any meaningful sense, while the limited overarching structure in the USSR was dissolved in 1960; the Euro-Asia Division was established in 1990, covering the former territory of the Soviet Union, but as a new creation.
And yet, the NED (now TED) lives on in spite of seismic shifts in its social, cultural, economic, political, and ecclesiastical contexts — and despite a number of changes, too, in its title and territory. It has been known as the Northern European Division, North Atlantic Division, Northern Europe–West Africa Division (NEWAD), and Trans-European Division. Its geographic boundaries have been redrawn frequently; and yet there has been considerable continuity.
To Reach 208 Million
The same headquarters, located in England for eighty of the ninety six years, has guided Adventist mission and ministry in Northern, East-Central and South-Eastern Europe, the large islands and smaller archipelagos of the North Atlantic, and associated vast African and Asian mission fields. The work done in the TED’s territory and under its direction has, quite literally, been for a ‘great multitude [. . .] of nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues’.[1] While its territories have fluctuated, there has been a core group of seven countries (as discussed later in this chapter).
As of 2025, the division headquarters provides leadership, strategic direction, and resources to some 92,000 Seventh-day Adventists, worshipping in 1,400 congregations, organised in eleven unions and three attached fields. The division encompasses twenty-two sovereign nations and six autonomous polities.[2] Their populations amount to almost 208 million people, mostly living in the littorals of five seas: the Adriatic, Aegean, Baltic, North, and Norwegian.
The history of the Trans-European Division is a history of passion for mission.
Despite an extraordinary degree of diversity, church members in the TED have much in common. They are bound together by their shared devotion to distinctive Adventist doctrines, in the face of indifference, apathy, antagonism, or outright hostility; and European Adventists share, too, a passion for proclaiming the ‘everlasting gospel’ to those who have not heard it (Rev. 14:6). Their passion for mission — their fervent desire to share Adventism’s distinctive, prophetic message of wholeness and hope, both in Europe and beyond — has profoundly shaped the division and Adventists living in it, from church leaders to church members, throughout the last ninety-six years. The history of the Trans-European Division is a history of passion for mission.
[1] Rev. 7:9 (KJV), cf. 5:9, 10:11, 14:6.
Featured image: Courtesy of David Trim
Book launch photo: tedNEWS
Membership graph: Robert Csizmadi
Political Spectrum graphic: Shutterstock
South England Conference Expo: David Neal
Article edited, abridged and updated for tedNEWS with kind thanks to Dr. David Trim.
