The
Adventist Story TRANS-EUROPEAN
DIVISION
J
ohn G. Matteson, first Adventist missionary to the territory of what is now the Trans-European Division (TED), arrived in his native Denmark in May 1877.
William Ings John Matteson
Origins
John Matteson was born in Denmark in 1835; in 1854 he emigrated to the United States, where he became an Adventist in 1863. Before the end of that year he wrote to the official church journal, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, urging that the Adventist message “be carried to the ends of the earth.”1 He was ordained and started working for his fellow migrants, translating Adventist tracts into Danish and Norwegian, and beginning a new journal, Advent Tidende (“Advent Herald”). By the mid-1870s many of the 800 Danish-Norwegian Seventh-day Adventists were regularly sending the Adventist publications in their own languages back to family members in their homelands, raising awareness of the Seventh-day Adventist Church within Scandinavia. Matteson himself increasingly yearned to work in his homeland, not just among those who had emigrated from there. In May 1877 his dream came true; for the next 11 years Matteson poured himself, body and soul, into the work. He maintained an unrelenting schedule of travel and preaching; started a journal, Tidernes Tegn (“Signs of the Times”); began a publishing house; and even wrote some of the hymns for an Adventist hymnbook in Norwegian, which he published. Sadly, by 1888, Matteson’s health was broken and he returned to the United States, where he died in 1896. But by the time he departed, conferences had been organized in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; and in 1901, the Scandinavian Union, including the Finland and Iceland missions, was organized. As Matteson worked in Scandanavia, another emigrant to the U.S.A.-turned missionary to his homeland, William Ings, arrived in England in May of 1878. Ings had been sent to work under J. N. Andrews in Switzerland, but during a two-week holiday with relations in England he won two people to the Sabbath. His success prompted the General Conference to assign a missionary to Britain: they sent J. N. Loughborough who arrived on December 30, 1878. Loughborough was one of the most experienced and prominent Adventist leaders and a very successful evangelist in North America. But he found the British, masters of an empire “on which the sun never set,” prejudiced against what they perceived as an imported American sect. Not until 1883, just before he returned to the USA, was the first Seventh-day
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Adventist World | July 2013
William H. Meredith John Loughborough
By David Trim Else Luukkanen
Plans for a
Larger
Work
Adventism in the Trans-European Division