‘We aim at nothing less than the whole world’: The Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Missionary Enterprise and the General Conference Secretariat, 1863–2019

The subject of this book is how the Seventh-day Adventist Church organized for missionary purposes, in order to carry the gospel to the world, and the structures the denomination put in place to be able to send help to foreign fields. The zeal of pioneer Adventist missionaries and those who came after them is part of the story related in this short book. Yet, it tells not the personal stories of outstanding missionaries, but rather the story of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s formal efforts to organize global missions; the story told here, then, is the collective, shared, Adventist story.Accordingly, the present goal is more modest than a comprehensive history of the global mission enterprise. It is a study of how the Adventist Church, corporately and collectively, organized itself to manage a global missionary enterprise—and did so with considerable success—before, in the last half century, the very organizational structures set up for that purpose gradually came to focus on other matters. Alongside that shift, not coincidentally the number of missionaries deployed internationally and cross-culturally went into a decades-long decline; recent signs suggest that trend has been arrested, but has it been reversed, or will the 2010s prove to be merely a blip? The future of the Seventh-day Adventist global mission enterprise awaits the decisions of today\u27s and tomorrow\u27s Adventist leaders and members.https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/books/1288/thumbnail.jp