OYC 2011: Wellness Reformation

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Oregon Youth for Christ

OYC 2011 Seminars

Dave Fiedler

The Long Campaign: Lucifer, Lies, Love & Logic

Kellogg vs. The Ministry: A Century of Collateral Damage

Costly Words and the Value of Understanding

Allen Lloyd

The Holy Spirit and Emotional Health

Picking Up the Pieces

Father, we ask now that as we begin looking at the life and work of those who've gone before us, we ask that you would guide our understanding and our thoughts.

Give us clarity of understanding, but give us charity, because we make mistakes too.

Pray that you would help us to gain lessons that will be useful and enable us to be a blessing to someone else.

Okay This 1 is called Kellogg versus the Ministry.

And the subtitle there is A Century of Collateral Damage.

Well, you know, I don't think I read this statement until the last year I was a classroom teacher.

I wish I'd read it long before, but after 19 years of teaching in the classroom, I finally got around to reading this 1.

It says this, As religious teachers, we are under obligation to God to teach the students how to engage in medical missionary work.

That's something that if you don't do, you're in trouble.

The word of the Lord lasts forever, but human languages change.

And we're going to be looking at the term medical missionary.

The very first time Ellen White used that in a review in a Herald article wasn't until 1893.

You might have expected it earlier than that, but it wasn't until 1893.

The first time it shows up in the testimonies wasn't until Volume 6, published in 1901.

That doesn't mean that the idea wasn't around though.

It's just that she didn't call it medical missionary work.

I don't know what Oliver else, but anyhow, it's a it's a Latin word root.

It means well or good and we get words like benefit and beneficent and we'll be looking at benevolent.

Okay, it's the key word we'll be looking at.

Before it was called medical missionary work, it was called the benevolent work.

This is a term used by Seventh-day Adventists from the late 1860s on to describe efforts to help people, especially the Poor, disadvantaged, sick, and to do so in practical, tangible ways.

A synonym, another term that they used for this was Christian help work.

But in Ellen White's writing, at least, an even more common way to refer to the idea was just to make a reference to Isaiah 58.

Share your bread with the hungry, bring the poor to your house, clothes the naked.

Well, The Seventh-day Adventist Benevolent Association was formed in 1868 to foster this sort of work.

This was largely in reaction to the failure of the church to provide for a woman by the name of Hannah Moore.

If you've ever read volume 2 of the testimonies, you've read her story.

Hannah Moore was a Baptist missionary to Africa.

Came back to the United States, ran into Stephen Haskell.

She read it when she got back to Africa, accepted the Sabbath, thought her Baptist missionaries would just be overjoyed to learn this great new truth.

They fired her and did not pay for her return to the United States.

So she kind of hitchhiked her way back home, which is a little more complicated when you have an ocean in between.

And eventually made her way to Battle Creek.

Unfortunately for her, she got to Battle Creek when James and Ellen White were not in town.

Hannah Moore was in her 50s, I think, by that time.

She had some health problems from overwork, diseases that she'd contracted in Liberia.

She had some challenges, but she wanted to be with God's people and she wanted to help, but she needed a job.

She needed a room to stay in, and the problem was that she hadn't really spent much of her money on clothes, since a couple of times back when she'd been in the United States.

A lot of clothes were about 15 years out of date.

And somehow that prejudiced a lot of people against her.

So she never found a work or never found a job.

She never found a house, never found a room.

And eventually, as her money was all being used up, she wrote to former co-workers who were now living in northern Michigan, Stowe Baptists, and said, could I come and work for you?

So she went up to northern Michigan and died there that winter from tuberculosis.

And we lost the opportunity to have our first foreign missionary.

We could have had somebody who actually had, by that time, like 20 years of foreign missionary experience joining our work.

She said, In this testimony I speak freely of the case of Sister Hannah Moore, not from a willingness to grieve the Battle Creek Church, but from a sense of duty.

I love that church, notwithstanding their faults.

I know of no church that in acts of benevolence and general duty do so well.

I present the frightful facts in this case to arouse our people everywhere to a sense of their duty.

Not 1 in 20 of those who have a good standing with Seventh-day Adventists is living out the self-sacrificing principles of the Word of God.

She would later write that in the case of Sister Hannah Moore, it was shown that the neglect of her was the neglect of Jesus in her person.

Had the Son of God come in the humble, unpretending manner in which he journeyed from place to place when he was upon earth, he would have met with no better reception." And so, as a response to that, The benevolent work was begun.

By 1887, there were 37 Adventist city missions in operation.

Does that mean that 15 significant operations went out of existence?

No, what it means is that this was a rather small, informal work and that the reporting was kind of sketchy.

And the idea that 15 big operations folded that year, no, it didn't happen.

It's just that Adventists were kind of stumbling their way into this whole idea of benevolent humanitarian work.

It was, it wasn't something that we embraced wholeheartedly, let's put it that way.

For both good and bad, Seventh-day Adventist benevolent work would never be the same.

John Harvey Kellogg was clearly the most colorful character in Adventist history.

Frankly, he could run circles around most any other Adventist on matters of general intelligence and obviously medical work.

He was a little bit insecure all his life.

And it's kind of like he always wanted to be 6'1".

In fact, in his office, he had a wall in the office that was a little cubby hole cut into the wall.

And there was a wooden bench built right into this cubbyhole and mounted permanently flush with the back wall was a yardstick.

And when you walked into his office, he had very good eyesight.

Series

OYC 2011 Seminars

Kellogg vs. The Ministry: A Century of Collateral Damage

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Dave Fiedler: Thoughts on Thinking - A Brief History of Adventist Thought

Kellogg vs. the Ministry: A Century of Collateral Damage

58m

Christian Service: A Religious System

1h

ASI 2012 Seminar: Evangelism

Gospel-Medical Evangelism: 1891-1900 and Today

1h 9m

Morning Devotional

A Challenge to the Consecrated Physician

1h 28m

Plenary

Ellen White Finally Exposed

51m

The History of City Evangelism

1h 28m

Excellent Service

2h 2m

Acts: First Generation Lessons for Last Generation Believers

8. First and Second Barcelonians

52m

Plenary

Loving Service: The Heart of the Early Christian Faith

50m

Breakout Session #2

The High Priest and the Second Advent Movement

1h 14m

Medical Missionary Work and the Loud Cry

58m

The Crisis of Authority in the SDA Church

3: The Crisis of Authority in the SDA Church: The Misuse of the Bible

1h 22m

Sound Doctrine