Chapter 37 German New York Seventh-day Adventist Church

When Ted Wilson hired me to work for Metropolitan Ministries, there was no open slot in the organization. He created a position just for me. It was a bold move on his part, but not utterly illogical. While I was at seminary I never met another Anglo student who had the slightest interest in going to New York City. In fact, I had never met any Adventist pastor anywhere outside New York who had any interest in moving to the City. So, while I was eccentric, atypical, a maverick as one of my professors put it, I did have this going for me: I had a demonstrated ability to draw people together in spiritual work, I had lived in the City before, so my dreams of ministry there had some anchor in reality, and I WANTED to live and work in New York.

It didn't hurt that my father was a generous supporter of the church and a long-time acquaintance of Ted’s father. I'm sure it didn’t hurt that my name was recommended to Ted by a woman I met at Andrews who gone to high school with Ted. (After getting the job, I married her!) Still, I think the decision to hire me evinced Ted's commitment to reaching New York City. He was himself pursuing a radical vision of institutional ministry. And he was willing to give another radical visionary a chance, even if that visionary did not fit the usual profile of Adventist clergy.

Our prophet had written specific prophecies about Adventist work in New York City. The church was to send its best workers there. She predicted the Adventist work in NYC would become a shining example of what God wanted to accomplish in the rest of the world. She offered detailed strategies—a network of retreat centers and medical facilities in rural areas outside the city linked with churches, vegetarian restaurants and treatment centers in the city. After a few early attempts to implement this vision, denominational leaders forgot the city.

It's not that there was no Adventist presence in the City. By the 1980s there were well over a hundred Adventist congregations in the City, some with over a thousand members. Most of these congregations had distinct ethnic identities. In the first half of the 20th Century, Italians, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, French, Japanese Adventists all had their own congregations. Over the decades as immigration patterns changed, these congregations switched to English as the language of worship. New ethnic groups coalesced. In the second half of the 20th Century, the ethnic makeup of the Adventist Church in New York City shifted dramatically, becoming largely Black and Brown—West Indian and Hispanic. All of this happened without any significant structural adjustments by the denomination. Congregations developed as they usually do. Pastors preached and conducted evangelistic meetings. People invited their friends and co-workers and sent their children to Adventist schools.

Occasionally, someone (usually white, usually from the West Coast) would read Ellen White's comments and feel called to come to New York to implement the prophet’s vision. Over the years these dreamers had established vegetarian restaurants and holistic health centers. They didn’t last—neither the people nor the institutions. They never had much impact on the city. But the history of failure appeared to have no impact on subsequent efforts.

Ted was not from the West Coast. And he had something going for him other visionaries lacked. His father was president of the world-wide Adventist Church. And his father had ambitions for his son.


In the mid-twentieth century, church leaders began to give attention to the fact that Adventist work world-wide was largely a rural and suburban phenomenon while the global population was migrating to the cities. We had to do something to reach the cities if we were going to be obedient to God's call to take our message to all people. The denomination purchased buildings in the center of several large cities to serve as evangelistic centers. The New Gallery Centre in London and New York Center in Times Square were the most famous of these centers.

The buildings did not effectively alter the church's visibility or effectiveness in these cities. A director would arrive. Church papers would publish a glowing article detailing the director's plans for creative outreach to the city. A few years later, another set of articles would appear detailing another incoming director's dreams and plans. There were never any articles about the realization of any of these dreams. The failure of the New York Center to impact the work of the church there was especially painful. Times Square was only four hours by train from the denomination's international headquarters outside Washington, D.C. And our prophet had specifically called the church to do noteworthy work in New York.

Eventually, Ted’s father, the General Conference President, led in the formation of a completely new organization to do something about the challenge of the New York City metropolitan area. Its director would report directly to the General Conference, thus bypassing the territorial jealousies created by the denomination’s administrative lines that separated Newark and suburban New Jersey from New York City and Westchester County from suburban Connecticut. Ted was appointed head of this organization. He came to his position absolutely persuaded that the key to doing effective outreach in New York City was “the blue print” mapped out by Ellen White. If we would only implement her vision, the church would experience dramatic, sustained growth. It would become a movement recognized by civic and business leaders as a boon to the well-being of the City.

Ted was assisted by a vice-president and treasurer and the usual secretaries. I was the first non-administrative person hired. My job was to give Bible studies, to do outreach in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood east of the Center, to assist in the running of monthly smoking cessation programs and be available for any other assignment that might support the denomination's evangelistic work. Ted talked with the Greater New York president about placing me unofficially in a Manhattan congregation where I could assist the pastor and gain ministerial experience.
I was assigned to the German New York Adventist Church on East 87th Street.

My first Sabbath there, I counted the people. Forty two. The occupancy notice posted on the rear wall read 455. The place looked empty. The building was very plain. Very high ceiling. The walls consisted of painted concrete block punctuated by cheap, aluminum-frame windows. The pews were white-blond oak with red cushions on a few of them toward the front. (Why buy cushions for pews that no one will sit on?)

The five English-speaking people there had their own Sabbath School class. During the worship service we sat in the back and Kurt Paulien, the head elder, translated for us. Actually, it was a loose paraphrase. I had no way of knowing whether the preacher was as boring as the translation.

The two things the church had going for it were the warmth of the old Germans–they were delighted to have visitors and made their delight evident–and the warm light flooding through the east windows.

The pastor said hello to me and that was the extent of our interaction. He never talked with me about the church or my work. He never invited me to attend board meetings. “Good morning, how are you,” at church on Sabbath morning was as far as we got. After I had been there a few weeks, the head elder (the leading lay person in an Adventist congregation) asked me to preach once a month. He explained that the German pastor did not feel comfortable preaching in English. I presumed he was speaking on behalf of the pastor, but the pastor never spoke to me about my preaching.

The congregation was wrestling with reality. They could not continue as a German-speaking church. German immigration which had built the church in the 30s and 40s and filled it with members in the 1950s was over. The last German-speaking person to join their church was a Romanian. Most of the kids who had grown up in the church had moved away from New York. Those who remained in the city no longer considered themselves Adventists. The average age of the Germans was somewhere north of 65. The youngest German was a single woman in her fifties. Still they treasured their German identity. They prided themselves on their industry and organization, their financial generosity, their strictness in observing all the Adventist rules. How could they surrender their church to people who would lower the standard? Still, it had to happen. The German identity and culture of the church could not be maintained without Germans. The English-speaking Sabbath School class and the English translation of the German sermon and now an English sermon once a month were their first steps toward a transition they dreaded.

While the pastor completely ignored me, the members made me welcome, at church and in their homes. They loved to tell me about their children–adults older than I was. These children of the German Church were were engineers and lawyers, doctors and teachers. They were attentive and generous with their parents. Most of the children were significantly better off financially than their parents. And their parents loved to brag about the ways their children helped to ease the challenges they faced as they aged.

Ursala’s daughter, Brita, was a lawyer. She did a fair amount of pro-bono work for indigent clients. Ursala was a brittle diabetic with frequent medical needs. Brita took her to the doctor. Ursala could get around the city by herself. She even had a car, but Brita insisted on driving her mother the doctor.

Ursala protested she didn’t need Brita to play taxi. She wasn’t helpless. But Brita brushed her protests aside. Ursala’s husband had left her when Brita was only a year and a half old. Together, they had struggled through lean years. Ursala had sent her to the Adventist School in Jackson Heights, then to the Adventist high school in Flushing. There was never enough money, but somehow they made it through.
Now Brita was a lawyer. She was married and had two boys. They were the smartest boys in the whole world. One played the piano. The other liked to tinker with things. He won first prize in his school’s science fair. She thought he was going to be a scientist.

Brita was a good daughter. “I couldn’t ask for a better daughter.” Ursala said. “I pray for her every day. And for her boys and her husband. I pray that she will come back to church.

“I don’t understand. I sent her to Greater New York Academy and Atlantic Union College [both Adventist schools]. When she was young she learned all her memory verses. She used to sing in church. But once she got out of college she just seemed to lose interest. She used to go to church sometimes, ‘just for you’ she would say. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

What could I say? I had no children of my own. I wasn’t even married. What did I know about why people grow up in Adventist homes then decide to be good people who don’t go to church? In the world I grew up in, people who quit going to church were bad people. They were people with moral problems–liars, cheaters, adulterers, people who were selfish, greedy and disrespectful of parents. I didn’t have a category for people who were good and no longer interested in church.


Over the months other English-speaking people began attending. Vincent and Marilyn Gardner worked for the “Van Ministry.” This was the brain child of Juanita Kretschmar, the conference president’s wife. Pairs of volunteers drove remodeled RVs to neighborhoods all over the city to offer free blood pressure checks to passers-by. They visited Wall Street and midtown Manhattan and desperate neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. They offered health information to everyone and urged people with elevated blood pressure to see their physicians. They looked for opportunities to pray with people and offered Bible study guides to those who seemed receptive.

It was the most effective outreach the church had ever done, touching far more people than the New York Center and the Adventist-owned vegetarian restaurants and book stores combined. Not that a lot of people joined the church through this ministry, though some did. The Van Ministry made friends for the church and helped the church turn its face outward.

Vincent Gardner was a physician who had left his comfortable practice in Colorado to serve God in New York. In New York he did not practice medicine, instead he acted as the medical adviser for the Van Ministry and gave health lectures in area churches and in health fairs and any other place that gave him an audience. He offered Christian counseling by appointment at the Van Center.

At the German Church, Vincent and his wife quietly welcomed visitors. She exuded a gentle graciousness that was magnetic. Vincent occasionally preached the English sermon. His sermons were thoughtful and ponderous. They had substantial content, but it was work listening to them.

Not long after I began attending, a young woman in her twenties showed up. In hind sight she was the first sign of the future of the German Church. We didn't know it then, of course. We were just thrilled to have young person among us.

Under Ted's leadership, Metro Ministries opened a lunch shop near Wall Street as the first institutional component of their master plan. Then, Ted and his vice-president began scouring the close-in upstate counties for a location for their country outpost, a compound where city workers could live while providing ministry in the City. It would provide an escape from the noise, filth and decadence of the city. At the same time he was working on a dissertation for a Ph. D. in religious education at New York University. His dissertation was a detailed business plan for doing evangelism in New York City based on the visions of Ellen White.
Ted finally found a defunct Catholic college for sale in New Paltz. I was invited along when the Metro board toured the place. Everyone was talking excitedly about how this could be remodeled into the perfect country refuge for church employees and for patients who would come to the health center they imagined. Setting it up would take millions of dollars, but that was God’s problem. All they had to do was to be faithful to vision God had given his people through the prophet.