Mission150

David and Sam tell the story of how Adventist church leaders, in the depths of World War II, when some might have retrenched, instead adopted a bold plan to prepare missionaries for the first moment that missionaries would be able to be sent out again. And they focused on mission to the Islamic Middle East and to China––preparing for mission to non-Christian peoples.

David and Sam are joined by the distinguished Adventist historian Alberto Timm to talk about the origins and early history of Adventist mission in South America. The work began with a dedicated self-supporting lay missionary.

Sam and David are joined by Mildred Castillo, who talks about working in foreign countries for eighteen years, living in seven different countries on three different continents, and about helping to the children of trainee missionaries to understand what mission service will mean for them.

David and Sam are joined again by Adventist Church world president Ted Wilson. In this episode, Elder Wilson shares his vision for the future of Adventist mission, inspired by 150 years of history.

Sam and David are joined by Ronald Kuhn, who has worked as a missionary in ten countries for many years. He shares how the best way to learn to adapt to a new culture is by humility and learning from mistakes; and his love for the people he worked among is obvious. He shares about his current job, training new missionaries for intercultural assignments.

Sam and David are joined by Elder Ted Wilson, president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, who talks about his and his family's experiences as missionaries in West Africa and the former Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s.

David and Sam are joined again by historian Michael Campbell to talk about early Adventist mission in the South Pacific islands, and especially in Fiji. They discuss not only early missionaries but also early indigenous converts, thanks to whom the preaching of the Adventist message really took off.

Sam and David are joined by historian Michael Campbell but this time not to talk history, instead to talk about Michael and his family's history of ministry, incliuding as missionaries for six years in Southeast Asia

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