Ellen G. White in Europe 1885-1887

The World Concept of Missions

So in the providence of God, the concept of an international church gradually developed upon the Adventist consciousness, and J. N. Andrews was dispatched to Europe. EGWE 31.7

When Andrews arrived in Switzerland in October, 1874, clearly Providence had already prepared the way for his coming and for the extension of the Advent message on the continent of Europe. B. L. Whitney, who was sent to Europe in 1883 and who served as head of the Swiss Conference, wrote of neutral Switzerland as the natural place to locate the headquarters of the work. EGWE 31.8

“In this free republic Switzerland, so centrally situated, and so admirably adapted, by its political relations, to become a center for the great work among these various nationalities, the Central European Mission was to be established. With three tongues, the French, the German, and the Italian, as its national languages, with no sectional barrier of prejudice to stand between it and the surrounding nations which were to be united with it in the common brotherhood of truth, no other locality could have been selected so well adapted for this work as the one which, it would seem, Providence had thus prepared for it.”—Historical Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Seventh-day Adventists, 14. EGWE 32.1