BY BRIAN E. STRAYER
HEN THE CLOCK STRUCK three that crisp autumn day in 1868, four women gathered in the Haskell parlor in South Lancaster, Massachusetts. This was no sewing circle, no bridge club, no conversation group. Roxie Rice, Mary Priest, Rhoda Wheeler, and Mary Haskell met each Wednesday to pray for their children, for backsliders in the church, and for their neighbors.
By the following spring the earnest prayers and visits of these four women drew 45 more into the prayer circle at Mary Priest's spacious home. On June 8, 1869, with the encouragement of Mary Haskell's husband, Stephen, they formed the Vigilant Missionary Society (VMS), the first lay-organized ministry of the young Seventh-day Adventist Church. The VMS members elected officers, established some simple operating procedures, and soon began mailing hundreds of Adventist tracts and booksCat their own expense-across New England.
Within two years the rapidly growing ministry developed international contacts as president Maria Huntley taught herself French and another VMS member tackled German in order to correspond with foreign inquirers. Before 1870 ended, these zealous women, aided again by Stephen Haskell and James and Ellen White, formed the New England Tract and Missionary Society.
The idea caught on like wildfire in dry stubble. When Haskell explained the Tract and Missionary concept to the 1871 General Conference session, leaders saw the advantages of sending literature where preachers could not go. A five-person committee chose Haskell as ambassador-at-large to promote Tract and Missionary societies in every conference, while the VMS (now a women's auxiliary) concentrated on forming local church Tract and Missionary groups, each with a president, secretary, treasurer, and librarian.
Powered chiefly by the prayer and passion of hundreds of Adventist women, district Tract and Missionary societies (with a director and associates) and conference societies (with a superintendent and corresponding secretary) organized quarterly meetings to promote literature distribution, evangelistic correspondence, neighborhood visits, and welfare work. By 1874, when the General Conference Tract and Missionary Society was formed (and the church sent its first official missionary overseas), nearly 5 million pages of Seventh-day Adventist literature were being distributed each year. Adventist leader John Loughborough credited the Tract and Missionary societies with "creating and increasing a missionary spirit . . . of direct labor for the salvation of souls" in church members' hearts. The results were inspirational as well: from 1871 on, as many souls were won through tracts and literature ministries as by public evangelists, according to Loughborough.
To fan the flame of missionary interest, the church printed three magazines for believers to circulate: The True Missionary, Voice of Truth, and Signs of the Times, the first of which featured progress reports, statistics, letters, and stirring experiences of souls won through the tract ministry. While district and conference Tract and Missionary leadership posts were increasingly held by males, women almost always occupied the crucial post of each society, that of corresponding secretary. Jennie Thayer in Michigan wrote 200 letters a month; Mary Priest of Massachusetts sent 6,000 letters-each with a prayer-during her lifetime. Women also pioneered Tract and Missionary work abroad in Switzerland (Mrs. B. L. Whitney), Norway (Mary Heilsen), New Zealand (Elizabeth Hare), Australia (Jose Baker), and South Africa (Maud Sisley Boyd).
The state Tract and Missionary societies also took on the task of recruiting and training the colporteurs who sold Adventist literature door to door. In 1880 a Mrs. Godsmark suggested that Canadian George King, whose lisping delivery made him unsuitable for preaching, sell some of the 20 books and 50 tracts for the Tract and Missionary Society instead. Persuading the Review and Herald press to combine Uriah Smith's Thoughts on Daniel with Thoughts on the Revelation, King proved remarkably adept at canvassing work. For nearly 30 years until his death in 1906 he trained hundreds of book salesmen in North and South America and the West Indies. King's methods influenced pioneering leaders in literature ministry around the globe, including William Arnold in Australia, Abram LaRue in Hong Kong, Albert Stauffer in Brazil, Herbert Meyers in Burma, and Robert Caldwell in the Philippines. By 1886, when the church's ministerial workforce was still counted in dozens, 400 Adventist colporteurs around the world sold books and penny tracts door to door.
The International Tract and Missionary Society (ITS), formed in 1882, expanded several witnessing methods pioneered by the original Vigilant Missionary Society in 1869. Responding to Ellen White's call for urban evangelism, Stephen Haskell and others established missions in 25 major cities, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., as centers for tract distribution, ship ministry, and welfare work. These progressive institutions helped supply the urban poor with food, clothing, and medical care, and served as the first centers for Adventist urban outreach. Before the 1880s lapsed, the International Tract Society was doing more than any other church agency to spread Adventist literature and promote Adventist lifestyle around the world.
Canvassers sold an ITS publication, Bible-Reading Gazette (later Bible Readings for the Home Circle), door to door and placed it in public libraries and reading rooms. By 1886, 11 "ship missionaries" had distributed 260,000 pages of literature on 5,700 ships in eight ports. When the new century dawned, the ITS had established branch agencies in several foreign countries, three of which-Advent-Verlag (Germany), Stanborough Press (England), and Oriental Watchman (India)-soon became independent publishing houses.
As part of a larger restructuring of the denomination that occurred in 1901, the General Conference reorganized the ITS as a branch of the new Publishing Department, where it remained until 1918. In that year the new Home Missionary Department took charge of the lay missionary and welfare work formerly supervised by the Tract and Missionary Societies. Instead of the selective membership previously practiced, the local church organizations-now called Home Missionary societies-included all church members in their weekly meetings, 10-minute Sabbath mission services, and Home Missionary Day activities on the first Sabbath of each month. Tract and Missionary librarians became Home Missionary leaders, who searched the pages of the new Church Officers' Gazette (1914) for ideas on how to conduct motivational programs and organize witnessing bands.
Recognizing the formative role that women had played in organizing what by now was one of the most successful features of the church's global outreach, the 1913 General Conference appointed Edith Graham as secretary of the Home Missionary branch of the Publishing Department that it formed that year. (The branch became a department in 1918.) At each level-local, conference, and union conference-Graham was supported by an army of women who served as secretaries of their respective organizations. Graham edited the Home Missionary Manual, a monthly magazine packed with program ideas for Home Missionary Day. Articles featured practical counsel on lay evangelism, welfare work (through the church's Dorcas Society), conducting home Bible studies, tract distribution, the annual Ingathering campaign, home nursing and cooking classes, and the King's Pocket League. Noting the goal of the Home Missionary Society to enlist every member of the church in service as a living missionary, General Conference president Arthur Daniells described it as "a revival of pure religion in the church."
To train church members in witnessing methods, the General Conference Home Missionary Department produced audiovisual aids during the 1920s and 1930s. A textbook, The Art of Giving Bible Studies (1922), was followed in 1930 with filmstrip Bible studies. In 1934 the Lay Preacher's Manual was published to guide the many church elders who took their turns in the pulpit, and in 1937 the Lay Preacher's Magazine emerged. After World War II other activities rapidly gained popularity: radio and television Bible correspondence courses, branch Sabbath schools, visitation Sabbaths, the Gift Bible plan, prison ministries, and Vacation Bible Schools, among others. All involved some form of literature distribution.
During the 1950s and 1960s, laymen's congresses (the first in 1951 at Grand Ledge, Michigan) and manuals such as Training Light Bearers and Lift Him Up helped home missionary leaders inspire church members to witness. Active laymen and laywomen watched motivational films and filmstrips, engaged in motel evangelism with Your Bible and You or The Desire of Ages, and placed gospel literature in laundromats, doctors' and dentists' offices, and in bus, train, and air terminals.
In 1966 the denomination's Home Missionary Department was reorganized as the Lay Activities Department. Church members were now urged to keep a record of their witnessing and caring ministries by filling out pink slips each Sabbath morning that recorded the number of tracts, Bible studies, and articles of clothing given away; missionary contacts; and hours of Christian help work tallied during the week. Owing in part to this concentration of lay ministries, the denomination gained 450,000 members, many of them through lay witnessing, from 1970 to 1975.
While it helped to stimulate lay witnessing and literature ministries, the 1918 creation of the Home Missionary Department also brought about greater specialization in the church's publishing efforts. By 1924 the conference Tract and Missionary societies became Book and Bible Houses, usually directed by male business managers elected from the conference constituency. The Book and Bible Houses received their stock from the denomination's publishing houses, selling trade books directly to church members and subscription books to the general public through canvassers in the field. These colporteurs included hundreds of Adventist high school and college students, who frequently earned most or all of their tuition and fees for the next academic year by commissions on intensive summer sales. Their stories and experiences of sacrifices and challenges, often in remote regions, have become an enduring part of the lore of North American Adventism.
What made the colporteurs' task doubly difficult was that they had to cover their territory twice: once when they sold the books and again when they delivered the product and collected the money. In the late 1950s Arthur Sutton, assistant publishing secretary of the Pacific Union, developed the plan that became the Home Health Education Service (HHES). Reducing costly revisits to a minimum, HHES shipped the purchased books directly to the customer, who sent in monthly payments by mail. By 1965 this plan had boosted literature sales to more than $3 million in just one North American union. The HHES plan also made it easier to attract elementary, academy, and college students to the summer literature evangelist program, selling colorful Mylar-covered books for all ages to families around the world.
In the 1990s new initiatives expanded the kinds of products and methods used by the HHES, even as business and financial challenges increased. Large numbers of summer literature evangelists began offering an innovative range of magazine-style books (called "magabooks"), often in preparation for regional evangelistic efforts or as part of conference attempts to plant new congregations. Major technological changes in the publishing industry, the rise of Internet book sales, and greater difficulty in securing full-time, year-round literature evangelists left the HHES program financially troubled, even as restructuring efforts abounded.
The original conference-level Tract and Missionary societies-renamed as Book and Bible Houses and eventually Adventist Book Centers-began selling a much wider range of products in the 1970s, including Christian music records, cassette tapes, Sabbath school supplies, and vegetarian food products. By the 1990s, reflecting a desire to reposition the stores for a wider audience, some ABCs adopted identities as Christian Book Centers.
The diligent and courageous women who organized that first Vigilant Missionary Society would surely have supported any effort that kept the focus of Adventist witnessing in print or in person on the world outside of the church's doors. Against the natural grain of inwardness and institutional self-concern, they focused on outreach and innovation. Their legacy to the movement they loved is visible in Adventist congregations around the world that sponsor Discover Bible correspondence schools, distribute gospel literature door-to-door in season and out, fill the literature racks at laundromats and bus stations, and share the Scriptures in neighborhood Bible fellowships.
"When the roll is called up yonder," many of those who answer will rejoice in the fellowship of the redeemed because someone, somewhere, is still handing along the truth-filled literature that sprang from a long-ago parlor prayer session.
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Brian E. Strayer is professor of history at Andrews University, in Berrien Springs, Michigan.
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