John Andrews Opens Adventism's First Overseas Mission In Switzerland

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 15 September 1874, John Nevins Andrews departed for Europe with his two children, becoming the Seventh-day Adventist Church's first official overseas missionary barely a decade after the denomination itself had organized at Battle Creek. He settled in Switzerland, the country that became the base for the church's first sustained missionary work outside North America.

Andrews did not simply preach; he helped found a publishing house in Switzerland and started the French-language Adventist periodical Les Signes des Temps in 1876, work he continued from Basel until his death there in 1883. Publishing gave the young mission a way to reach readers the way itinerant preaching alone could not, extending the church's reach across the French-speaking world beyond whoever Andrews could meet in person.

What Andrews's mission changed for Adventism's spread was reach beyond North America itself: a denomination barely organized for a decade had, through one missionary's decision to settle in Switzerland and build a publishing operation there, established a foothold in Europe that outlasted Andrews's own life by decades and set the pattern every later Adventist mission sent abroad would go on to follow.