TY - BOOK AU - Chism,Ashlee L AU - Trim,D.J.B. AU - Younker,Michael F TI - "We aim at nothing less than the whole world": the Seventh-day Adventist church's missionary enterprise and the General Conference Secretariat, 1863-2019 T2 - General Conference Archives Monographs SN - 9781736989449 AV - BX6127 .C45 2021 PY - 2021/// CY - Columbia Pike, MD PB - General Conference Corporation of the Seventh-day Adventists KW - General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists KW - Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research KW - Seventh-Day Adventists KW - Missions KW - History N1 - From the library of Ronald L. Numbers; Includes bibliographical references N2 - The founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church was based upon a prophetic understanding of Revelation 12-14 in which the gospel must be proclaimed to all "that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people" (Rev. 14:6 KJV). The church was about mission and mission was deeply rooted in the DNA of the Church. Historically, the Adventist Church, particularly the General Conference Secretariat, was central to the mission expansion of the church wiht the recruiting, training, and dispatching of missionaries as its core business. Yet somewhere along the way, as mission rapidly expanded, generaly busy-ness and the call of the urgent trumped the important business of the church; the strategic focus on mission gradually and imperceptibly was neglected. The church became a victim of its success. David Trim and his co-authors have done a masterful job as astute scholars, piecing the historical facts together from archives. The message of the book is clear: that no organization is exempt from mission drift, no matter how lofty its original mission may have once been. It takes constatn vigilenceand renewal for an organization to stay the course of mission because organizations by nature are prone to obsolescence and irrelevance. Thus, regular review and evaluation should be instituted to ascertain mission effectiveness as a church.-- Preface ER -