Heralds of New Light

Another Prophet to the Remnant?

Many Seventh-day Adventists who arose on Saturday morning, July 17, 1915, felt a foreboding uneasiness as they prepared to worship at their churches. For at 3:40 p.m. the afternoon before, their prophet, Ellen G. White, had died in St. Helena, California, at the age of eighty-seven. For the first time in their history, Adventists had no living prophet in their midst. What would this mean for them as a people? HONL 5.1

Seventy years earlier this woman had been called to the prophetic ministry on an unknown day in December 1844, just barely seventeen years of age (her birthday was November 26), and scant weeks after the “Great Disappointment” which followed in the wake of Christ’s failure to return to earth on October 22 as predicted by William Miller and his followers. HONL 5.2

A handful of ex-Millerites, accepting the genuineness of Ellen’s gift and call, and also the observance of the seventh-day Sabbath, coalesced around the leadership of Mrs. White, her husband, James (an ex-Millerite preacher), and Joseph Bates (a retired sea captain). Sixteen years later, in 1860, they numbered some 3,500 baptized members as they formally organized their Seventh-day Adventist Church. HONL 5.3

In the next seventy years Ellen received some 2,000 prophetic dreams and visions, and 25 million words flowed from her pen in dozens of books and thousands of periodical articles (to say nothing of an incredibly voluminous private correspondence). By the time of her death the worldwide church that resulted from her leadership numbered in excess of 130,000 members in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the islands of the sea. HONL 6.1

And now she was gone! There had not been another prophet in the church during her lifetime, though some had arisen making such claims. Would God now call a new one? These questions were on everyone’s lips as the church pondered its future. HONL 6.2

Yet troublesome as they were, the questions were not new. During the final decade of her ministry Mrs. White was asked repeatedly about the possibility of a successor should her life not be spared to see Jesus come. HONL 6.3

Invariably she replied with a two-part response: (1) the Lord has not revealed to me whether or not there will be another prophet; but (2) “whether or not my life is spared, my writings will constantly speak, and their work will go forward as long as time shall last.” ¹ HONL 6.4

The Lord revealed to her that what she had already written was sufficient to carry the church through triumphantly to the second coming. HONL 6.5