Our Roots, Pt. 36

The 1903 General Conference Session opened on Friday, March 27. It was expected by many to be a difficult one, and in that respect it did not disappoint. The touchy issues surfaced quickly, with the very first resolution calling for the creation of a committee to make a plan to bring all institutions of the Church under direct Church ownership.

This was a sensitive issue because it was intended to end the independence of the International Medical Missionary and Benevolent Association, Dr. Kellogg’s auxiliary. It was not a new idea. As early as June of 1902 there had been moves at the union conference level to keep newly built health facilities under Church control rather than turning them over to the Benevolent Association. Dr. Kellogg objected strenuously to all such measures. He did not believe that the health work ought to be under the jurisdiction of ministers. Really, he didn’t think it ought to have any legal association with the Church at all. He had for some time been expressing a desire that the health reform work be “undenominational.” You can imagine, then, his reaction to this move in the opposite direction.

On the afternoon of Monday, March 30, 1903 Ellen White addressed the delegates. This sermon presented the fires at the Battle Creek Sanitarium and Review and Herald Publishing House in the context of the reformation undertaken by King Josiah in the fear of the Lord’s threatened punishments for apostasy. In the immediate aftermath of the sanitarium fire she had cautioned against jumping to any conclusions about its having been a divine judgment. But after a vision on the matter two nights before this sermon she now emphatically described these calamities as coming from the hand of the Lord and urged the delegates to search out the meaning of this judgment and engage in the work of reform that it called for.

On the Thursday of that week, in response to Ellen White’s call to search out needed reform, the president of the Atlantic Union Conference presented a recommendation from the delegates of that union that the General Conference and Review and Herald offices be relocated to somewhere on the east coast of the US. Discussion of the proposal began the following morning with Daniells asking Ellen White to comment on it. Her response was that she had no specific light on whether the Atlantic Coast was necessarily the place they should be moved to, but that to move these entities out of Battle Creek was in accordance with divine instruction she had been receiving for the past fifteen or twenty years. Action on the recommendation was not taken until later in the Session, but the final decision was that these two entities should move.

The committee considering the ownership of institutions turned in its recommendation a week after the Session opened. The recommendation was that all institutions be owned directly by some level of the Church organizational structure. It was acknowledged that this would be binding on new institutions, but that the existing ones would have to be persuaded to arrange themselves to comply with this decision since the Church had no direct control over them. This recommendation initiated a rather extensive debate, during which Kellogg tried very hard to defeat it. Despite his efforts the measure was eventually passed.

Another major debate came toward the end of the Session. This one was over how the officers of the General Conference were to be elected and what the chief officer was to be called. The challenge to Daniells’ authority at the preceding Autumn Council had convinced many that the method of electing General Conference officers needed to change. In order for the executive committee to function smoothly and focus on the issues facing the Church, rather than devolving into political infighting over the leadership position, the responsibility for officer selection needed to be returned to the General Conference in Session. While they were at it, the instigators of this change sought to ratify the return to the use of “president” as the title for the chief officer. This did not go over well with Jones and his associates.

To Jones and Waggoner, who believed that the best form of organization was no organization, a step which strengthened the position of the organization’s chief officer was a step in the wrong direction. The plan to do away with the title of president and have the officers elected by the executive committee had been their particular contribution to the organizational reforms of 1901, and they were not a little bit dismayed at the proposal to do away with these changes, especially since they considered them essential to their theological view of organization.

The arguments Jones and Waggoner advanced in favor of their views on organization, however, sounded all too familiar to some of the delegates. During the course of the debates on these changes several of the senior delegates such as J. N. Loughborough and G. I. Butler pointed out that the arguments being used by Jones and Waggoner were identical to those used by the original opponents of organization from the early 1860s. They also reiterated the reasoning and inspired guidance from the Spirit of Prophesy that had defeated those arguments.

It took a different approach to silence the objections about the title for the chief officer, but here Daniells and W. C. White were ready. They simply pointed out the context of the statement from Ellen White on which Jones and Waggoner based their theory. The statement in context read, “It is not wise to choose one man as president of the General Conference. The work of the General Conference has extended, and some things have been made unnecessarily complicated. A want of discernment has been shown. There should be a division of the field, or some other plan should be devised, to change the present order of things…. The president of the General Conference should have the privilege of deciding who shall stand by his side as counselors” (Testimonies to Ministers, p. 342). When taken as a whole, the emphasis was clearly on the need to delegate labor, rather than a rejection of the title "president."

Jones and Waggoner weren’t actually convinced by any of these arguments, but a majority of the delegates were. These measures also passed. After the vote Jones claimed that he would support the decision of the majority, but this commitment was short-lived. It was not long before Kellogg, Jones, and Waggoner were once again in open opposition to the rest of the Church’s leadership regarding their various cherished positions.

Next: Confrontation