Adventist News Networks weekly segment on Seventh-day Adventist history (http://news.adventist.org/)
Dr. David Trim:
Welcome to this week in Adventist history: a week of "firsts" in far-flung mission fields.
On March 12, 1882, eight delegates from three Seventh-day Adventist churches in Sweden, which had a total membership of just 88 members then organized the Swedish Conference, electing the Danish-born American missionary John G. Matteson as their president.
Also on March 12, but 48 years later, in 1930, the first Adventist church in Cameroon was organized by French missionary Marius Raspal, who had baptized the first Cameroonian converts the previous year.
On March 14, in 1858, while staying in Lovett's Grove, Ohio, Ellen White had her first vision of the "great controversy between Christ and Satan," a two-hour vision in which she shown the millennia of history from the fall of Lucifer up to the new heaven and the new earth.
On March 16, in 1861, the second ever Conference was founded: the Southern Iowa Conference.
On March 16 in 1901, American missionary A. W. Bartlett organized the first Adventist Church in Bermuda: the Hamilton Church, which had ten members.
And on March 17, in 1923, in the city of Mosul, German missionary W. K. Ising organized the first Seventh-day Adventist church in Mesopotamia, as it was then known, modern-day Iraq, after baptizing seven local men.
That was this week, in Adventist history.