Both John Andrews and his church faced daunting challenges when the church decided to send him overseas as its first missionary in late August 1874. Procrastination repeatedly delayed the final decision as church leaders wrestled with various apprehensions. Andrews was on the brink of leaving for Europe on his own, with encouragement but no official action. Should missions overseas be a priority for the church at that time? Did they have the right person? Was he ready? Could the church in America afford the loss of his skills? Why had there not been some specific direction from the visions? Did they have enough resources? Eventually, in a rather awkward conclusion to the debate, on the very last night of the 1874 General Conference Session, wearied delegates voted “to instruct” the General Conference Committee to send Andrews ASAP. Mission to the world should become a priority.
Getting Started
Andrews left Boston with his family less than a month later, on September 15. But as a harbinger of the financial ambiguities and constraints to come, he had to himself pay the fares of his two dependent children, the freight for his library, and the expenses of mission work stops en route.
Increasingly aware of the need to reach out to foreign language groups, the church had struggled since 1870 to prepare simple tracts suited for foreign language translation. Then it struggled some more to find competent translators. The project had dragged on because other seemingly more important local priorities intervened, such as serious conflicts among the senior leadership team and unmet demand for local evangelistic projects.
The lack of personnel threatened to derail Andrews’ mission even as he arrived in Switzerland. The expatriate preacher, who himself, on arrival, would need to learn to converse in the local language, had planned on the assistance of two full-time Swiss workers (one French-speaking and the other a German speaker). They were not available. His French-speaking assistant, quickly discouraged at the difficulty of evangelism, withdrew and eventually went back to watchmaking. His German-speaking helper, Jakob Erzberger, had fallen out of fellowship over some conflict, left town, and gone into private employment. For several months Andrews had to labor intensively to rehabilitate his German-speaking colleague, heal the breach with the Sabbathkeepers, and get the mission back on track. He never did succeed in getting his other Swiss candidate into full-time service.
Meeting the Challenges
And there were yet other challenges. The network of Swiss Sabbathkeepers who were to resource the mission had found themselves going deeply into debt in an effort to revive their watchmaking business just before Andrews arrived. Seemingly more important family obligations claimed priority. They helped as generously as they could, but local mission resources were inadequate. Andrews also found to his distress that evangelism was expensive in Europe. Renting a hall for meetings, for example, cost up to three times more than in America.
Andrews bravely launched a journal to overcome barriers of culture and geography. It too was not cheap. Battle Creek leaders had expected the mission to become completely self-supporting in a short time. It took the best part of a decade. In the meantime the situation frustrated leaders in Battle Creek, and Andrews had to deal with unfair criticism and misunderstanding. With limited resources he struggled to keep his focus on outreach and growth as the priority.
He learned to speak French. That took much more time than he expected and was much more difficult for his 45-year-old brain than he could have imagined. But he persevered. It was critical to his success—a priority. And he succeeded. And he learned to cope with culture shock—the hard way—by battling through discouragement and disorientation and learning from mistakes.
The most serious threat to the success of his mission enterprise was the deep financial depression that had begun to overwhelm Europe and America by the time Andrews arrived in Switzerland in 1874. It lasted until 1879. Economists called it “the first truly international crisis,” and it added huge complexity to Andrews’ task as he set out to launch his missionary journal, Les Signes des Temps, 18 months after he arrived.
What economists call the “long recession” began with the collapse of the Vienna stock market in 1873. The financial contagion spread across Europe and infected America, leading the country to adopt the “gold standard” for its currency. Panic ensued, banks closed, and across America 18,000 businesses and 289 railroads went bankrupt. Unemployment mushroomed, and household income diminished. Church finances shriveled.
Innovating for Mission
By 1879 the times had become “perfectly terrible,” and James White could see that “there was no money in the country.” The crisis led to a period of uncertainty, confusion, and a sense of panic. Workers were laid off at the General Conference office. The Review and Herald took on huge expensive loans from East Coast insurers to keep operational even as it cut salaries by 17 percent. Management added a wool-knitting business to occupy vacant floor space to try to generate added income. Ellen White could see the Pacific Press heading for bankruptcy. The large new church building project in Oakland, California, became a financial embarrassment, and the huge debt yet to be paid on the new 3,000-seat Tabernacle in Battle Creek seemed overwhelming. Ellen White lamented that the church had stepped in “too deep” in the many new projects it had undertaken.
At first she advised that the “foreign missions should not be hampered.” It was a priority. But then as the crisis deepened, she too called for retrenchment and for a hold to be put on foreign work. The “means are needed more at present” at the heart of the work, she urged. Foreign mission slipped down the list of priorities. The new press planned for Switzerland was postponed. Then advice came that the Swiss work should be closed and relocated to England, where it could be consolidated with Loughborough’s work. This would be less expensive, and people speaking English would theoretically respond to the Advent message more quickly. Any new press could be built there if the British eventually developed a large enough constituency. The new planning struck Andrews like a body blow.* Had they forgotten that Providence had opened the work in Switzerland?
Through these confused times Andrews held on to his faith that mission could be done in foreign languages, and he prayed and labored for his work in Europe. He and Stephen Haskell launched into 1879 with a New Year’s Day meeting in the new Battle Creek church, focusing on prayer and stewardship. The two leaders introduced new plans for church finance. Tithing was to replace the inadequate Systematic Benevolence plan, a major change made urgent by the financial crisis—a silver lining. Church members responded sacrificially with large donations. As the months of 1879 passed by, the financial crisis began to wane.
At the end of his report on the European Mission at the March 1879 General Conference Session, just before he returned to Switzerland, Andrews proposed another groundbreaking initiative. A new “officer” should be appointed for the General Conference leadership team, one specifically to take care of the “foreign work.” The new role would “expedite correspondence” to avoid the frustrating delays and misunderstandings previously experienced, and, more important, help keep mission truly a priority. His proposal was approved and adopted a few months later. Further choppy seas lay ahead for the church as it struggled to continue to learn how to do overseas mission and to keep it a priority. It is a task in which it succeeded. But it is a task that presents itself anew in each generation.
* For sources and more details about this challenging but reassuring period in Adventist mission development, see Gilbert M. Valentine, J. N. Andrews: Mission Pioneer, Evangelist, and Thought Leader (Nampa, Idaho: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 2019), pp. 630-638.