Our Roots, Pt. 29

In July of 1898 the General Conference president George Irwin chaired the gathering which created the European Union. The constituency of this new union elected their own five member executive committee, but the president of the union was appointed by the General Conference. The former General Conference president, O. A. Olsen, was chosen for the job. It seems that this was the only union conference that was created in response to the decision of the 1897 General Conference Session that union conferences should be organized in Europe and North America.

There was great talk of the 1899 General Conference Session being an agent of further organizational reform, but that hope fizzled. George Irwin, who as General Conference president was chair of the Session, was too preoccupied with matters of procedure to give any focused leadership to the matter of organizational reform.

W. C. White had not made the trip from Australia to attend this meeting. His three associates in reform at the 1897 Session, Jones, Waggoner, and Prescott, tried to keep the forward motion alive. They made impassioned appeals for reform—and repentance for previous mismanagement. For these three organizational reform had always had a more spiritual and theological slant than a practical function one. Their appeals for repentance and reform bore fruit in that there was extensive praying and talking about reform during the 1899 Session, but there was no actual action taken toward a tangible solution to the organizational problems of the Adventist Church.

No further progress was made between the 1899 and 1901 General Conference Sessions.

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