Mission150

David and Sam tell the stories of two missionary families: the Cotts, who served in the 1920a and 1930s among the indigenous people of Guyana; and the Haydens, who served for nearly four decades in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. For more information, read D. J. B. Trim, Living Sacrifices (Pacific Press, 2019).

Sam and David continue looking at the importance of the General Conference Secretariat in the mission advances of the early twentieth century, and how the Church, from an early stage, used data to help strategically plan for the Adventist Church's worldwide mission. For more information, read "We aim at nothing less than the whole world": The Seventh-day Adventist Church’s missionary enterprise and the General Conference Secretariat, 1863–2019 (General Conference Archives, 2021) available at Amazon.

A new Adventist motion picture is being released this April 2024, The Hopeful, which tells the story of the origins of the Adventist Church, from William Miller to John N. Andrews, and features Andrews and his children. In this episode, Sam and David talk with Kyle Portbury, director of The Hopeful about the movie and what Kyle hopes it will do.

David interviews Sam about his fascinating career that has taken him to serve mission in Brazil, Britain, and now the United States of America, where Sam serves the world Church.

This episode explores in more detail how the General Conference Secretariat established complex structures and proceesses that made it possible to greatly increase the numbers of missionaries sent out by the Seventh-day Adventist Church all around the world. Without the administrative infrastucture, frontline missionaries could not work.

People love to hear stories about missionaries' courage, self-sacrifice, and trust in God. What we don't want to hear is about bureaucracy. But without a strong administrative infrastructure, it would be impossible to recruit, dispatch, sustain and return missionaries--the stories we love to hear about missionaries on the front line are essentially only possible because the church established a bureaucracy to manage mission. That is the subject of this episode.

This episode focuses on two more missionary families, the Appels and Longways, who committed to nearly life-long service in the mission field, serving in the Far East (especially China) and the Middle East.

This episode focuses on Merritt and Wilma Warren, who spent 47 years as missionaries, most of them in China. Merritt is thought to have hiked 25,000 miles across China!

In this episode, David and Sam finish telling the story of George Keough, who is still a legend among Adventists in the Middle East for his incarnational ministry in the region for 33 years.

This episode tells the story of the most important Adventist missionary most people have never heard of: George D. Keough. It covers the first ten years of his and his family's mission experience in Egypt from 1908 to 1918, when he won extraordinary numbers of people to the Seventh-day Adventist message. It also examines how he achieved his remarkable success.

Sam and David are joined by a native of Kenya, Dr. Oscar Osindo, director of the Adventist Church's Institute of World Mission, to talk about his many years of experience as a foreign missionary for the Church, about his years of involvement in ministry to Muslims, and his current work with the Institute of World Mission, training, resourcing and supporting current Seventh-day Adventist missionaries.

Sam and David interview a modern missionary, Amy Whitsett, about her experiences of ten years of missionary service in the Lao Democratic People's Republic, and then six years in Thailand; and about her current work as Associate Director of the Church's Institute of World Mission

In this episode, Sam and David talk about some of the early missionaries to the Middle East, about the sacrifices they made, about what historic photographs can tell us about Adventist history, and about the tendency to over-work among Adventist pastors and administrators. Some of the stories shared in this episode appear in D. J. B. Trim, A Living Sacrifice (Pacific Press, 2019).

This episode looks at how missionaries to China fell in love with the country and its people but had to face local diseases for which there were no cures, so that misssionaries took terrible risks in their service. For more about the stories shared in this episode, see D. J. B. Trim, A Living Sacrifice (Pacific Press, 2019)

This episode looks at how missionaries to China fell in love with the country and its people but had to face local diseases for which there were no cures, so that misssionaries took terrible risks in their service. For more about the stories shared in this episode, see D. J. B. Trim, A Living Sacrifice (Pacific Press, 2019)

The 1901 Reforms of the Adventist Church, discussed in Episode 24, were not an end. The work of reforming the church was completed att the 1903 General Conference Session, which laid the foundations for mission expansion in the following decades. To find out more, read chapter 4 of A. L. Chism, D. J. B. Trim, and M. F. Younker) "We aim at nothing less than the whole world": The Seventh-day Adventist Church’s missionary enterprise and the General Conference Secretariat, 1863–2019 (Silver Spring, MD: Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, 2021), available from Amazon.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church got back on track after the problems of the 1890s by undertaking very major organizational reforms at the famous 1901 General Conference Session, where Ellen White urged that change was needed "right here ... right now". More information can be gained from A. L. Chism, D. J. B. Trim, and M. F. Younker) "We aim at nothing less than the whole world": The Seventh-day Adventist Church’s missionary enterprise and the General Conference Secretariat, 1863–2019 (Silver Spring, MD: Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, 2021), available from Amazon; and Barry David Oliver, SDA organizational structure: Past, present and future (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 1989)

In the 1890s, the expansion of the Adventist Church slowed down as personal clashes, administrative difficulties, and a wrong-headed approach to managing what had become a worldwide movement, all took effect. This episode examines how and why Adventist mission growth stalled at the very end of the nineteenth century, and draws some comparisons to the digital world of the early twenty-first century.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church is a major force in the Inter-American region today, but it wasn't always so. In this episode, Sam Neves and David Trim explore the lives of the Baxter family, which provided two generations of missionaries to Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

In this episode, David Trim and Sam Neves tell more stories of missionaries who gave everything so that people could hear about Jesus; this time they focus on Southern and Eastern Africa. The stories come from David's book, A Living Sacrifice (Pacific Press, 2019) which is available at adventistbookcenter.com