General Conference Secretariat and the Mission Enterprise of the Seventh-day Adventist Church

founded at the first General Conference Session in May 1863, many things have changed in the Church. One of the few that has remained the same is the office of Secretary, which is as old as the General Conference (GC) itself, but of course the role of the GC Secretary has changed. One of the changes is that he (and thus far the Secretary has always been a “he”) gradually acquired a staff—and its role, too, has changed over the years. This is the second of two papers on the history of the GC Secretariat and of what Arthur G. Daniells, 111 years ago, called the Adventist “mission enterprise.”1 The two papers are connected by the role of Secretariat. As I just observed, however, that role has not been an unchanging one in Adventist history. The Secretariat’s role underwent organizational evolution. Part of its story is that, after a long period of being primarily focused on foreign mission, its main concerns came instead to be policy, governance, and administration. Mission was still in the portfolio, but it did not have the same priority, even while successive Secretaries and their Associates insisted that it did. In the first paper, I considered the origins and development of what today we call the ISE program. In this paper, I discuss the development of GC Secretariat. In this paper, I sketch the stages of Secretariat’s history. I show that in Secretariat’s first four decades it was chiefly a conduit for communication and collection of information, before then becoming what might be termed “mission control”: the world church’s center for recruiting, training, and deploying of missionaries worldwide. The promotion of mission was an important and largely forgotten part of this General Conference Secretariat and the Mission Enterprise of the Seventh-day Adventist Church D. J. B. Trim