Impact On Education

Prescott developed a master list of Adventist teachers (church employed or not) and began a program of teachers’ training institutes. Two significant conventions were held, one in 1891 at Harbor Springs, Michigan, and one in 1894 at another lo-cation. Both focused on making SDA education more Bible centered. At the 1891 gathering a four-year curriculum was first developed for ministerial training. At the 1894 meeting, Prescott and A. T. Jones produced a four-year syllabus of Bible teaching for non-ministerial students. Plans were even laid for a graduate program (which was not realized for another sixty years) and an education journal (which took three years to begin).DHF 6.2

At the January 1893 GC Session Prescott reported that the Harbor Springs meeting “marked a remarkable change in the history of our educational work. Our minds were impressed there as never before with the idea that the purpose of educational work was to teach us of God in his revealed word and his works, and in his dealings with men, that all education should be planned upon such a basis and carried out in such a way that the result would be a more intimate knowledge of God, not merely as a theory but as an experience.”DHF 6.3

He further observed, “...The Bible should be studied as the gospel of Christ from first to last; and in which it should be made to appear that all the doctrines held by Seventh-day Adventists were simply the gospel of Christ rightly understood, and that the basis was the proper understanding of the whole Scriptures, and not merely a limited study of a few portions of the Scriptures.... It has not been the purpose to put in the back-ground those doctrines which distinguish us, but to make it appear that these are simply the doctrines of the Bible as a whole; that the third angel’s message is simply the gospel, and that the message properly understood is an understanding of all the Scriptures, and that all of our doctrines have their basis in a proper knowledge of the gospel, and grown out of a belief in Jesus Christ as a living personal Saviour.” (GC Bulletin, 1893, p. 350) (Ibid., pp. 5, 6).DHF 7.1