A Heritage of Faith

As the sixty-second General Conference Session approaches, we in the Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research wanted to take a look back at previous sessions—through photographs! Here are four pictures of earlier sessions, along with a brief description of each one.

This photograph captures Ellen G. White (1827-1915) speaking at the thirty-fourth General Conference Session, held April 2-23, 1901, in Battle Creek, Michigan. The 268 delegates at the session voted to reorganize the Seventh-day Adventist Church, essentially creating the administrative structure that the denomination still uses today. You can learn more about this process in the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists.

The forty-first General Conference Session, held May 27 to June 4, 1926, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, saw 577 delegates. Some of the delegates, along with a few young visitors, pose in this photograph taken outside the venue where the session was held. The fourth man from the left in the first row is William H. Green (1871-1928), the first African American to direct a General Conference department. He ran the North American Negro Department from 1918 to 1928.

This group of people were some of the delegates to the forty-second General Conference Session, held in San Francisco, California, from May 28 to June 12, 1930. The session was the first to really display the global nature of Adventism through its delegates from overseas fields. Here are some of the delegates, along with the places they worked:

Front row, left to right: James Malinki, Central Africa; G. Ogbasgki, Abyssinia (now Ethiopia); Antonio Torres, Mexico; Ratu Jiali Tuilakemba, Fiji; Ratu Setareko Cevaca, Fiji; Luciano Chambi, Peru; Ne Keun Ok, Korea; Flaviano Delisay, Philippines; Philip Giddings, Haiti.

Back row, left to right: D. C. Theunissen, South Africa; T. Kobayashi, Japan; Y. Phang, Celebes (now Indonesia); H. C. Shen, China; Elsie Liu, China; Anna Segel, Hawai’i.

(ASTR has turned this photo into a puzzle! Stop by our booth at the 2025 General Conference Session to help put the pieces together!)

The United Nations declared 1975 as International Women’s Year. The Seventh-day Adventist Church took note and decided to honor Adventist women at the fifty-second General Conference Session, held July 10-19, 1975, in Vienna, Austria. As reported by the Review, a special service on July 15 honored women in various fields, including Bible instruction, communication, education, evangelism, health administration, home, literature and research, medicine, music, nursing, office work, and welfare services. A total of 18 women—13 of whom you see in this photograph taken during the session—were brought on stage during business meetings and presented with certificates honoring their work. These women were: Natelkka Burrell, C. Joan Coggin, Eva B. Dykes, Liisa Heljevaara, Mazie Herin, Carol Hetzell, Elizabeth Larsson, Olga Monnier, Rosa Muderspach, Lydia Ngaruyia, Margarete Pieringer, Eila Pikkarianen, Ella May Stoneburner, Gloria Thomas, Maimu Vali, Hannelore Witzig, Ethel Young, and Alice Zorub.