A Panoramic View
Withour introductory preliminaries we invite you to circle the globe in a rapid survey of field development for prospective ministers and Bible workers in our training schools, beginning first with America:
Washington Missionary College
W. M. C. has a seminar membership of about seventy, as well as nine active Bible workers in the Bible workers' band. Elder B. G. Wilkinson, dean of theology, writes: " We have thirty-five students enrolled in our theological department, and others are constantly enrolling. This is quite different from previous years, when we had from six to nine in the department. Very nearly all the thirty-five are in actual field work, or moving in that direction.
" First in line of battle come the pastoral training students, the second and third year students constituting the firing-line troops. The twenty-one first year students are in camp training, and their work is largely in the class room. The second and third year students are about twelve in number. They are in charge of eleven teams of students working in the eleven districts into which the northern half of the city population about 400,000 has been divided.
"I hold meetings Sunday nights, and in the same hall we have our Sabbath school and church services. This provides a place where the eleven teams can bring interested persons who wish to come for the first time to see a Sabbath meeting without being lost in a church of large membership. Only two weeks after opening this new center the teams were very busy, Bible reading circles were going on in six districts, and in the other districts they had more names of interested ones than they could visit. Each second and third year student has a goal to build in Sabbath school a class of his own, composed of interested ones, whom we hope to baptize later. Credit is given for field work, which is required of these advanced students."
College of Medical Evangelists
A new work conducted under the leadership of Elder Fries, is that of street meetings held in two near-by cities. Using an automobile specially fitted up for the purpose, with platform for the speakers and a set of chimes for attracting the crowd, their plan is to have " three or four of the students take twelve to fifteen minutes each, presenting both the health message and the spiritual message. We will open with prayer, have a quartet, then introduce the first speaker, who will present a spiritual message. The second speaker will give a,health talk, the third a spiritual message, and the last a medical talk. After a song, a question service will follow. After speaking, the students will mingle with the audience and do personal work.
Names of interested persons will be secured, and literature will be distributed. On some night (previously announced) we will put on a demonstration of simple treatments, and another night a practical food demonstration, etc. We are praying that the Lord will give us His wisdom in planning so that we may be able to save souls."
Broadview College
" We have more than twenty-five members in our Ministerial Association," says W. B. Ochs, dean of the department of theology. " Several cottage meetings and hall efforts will be held during the winter. As a result of the schoolhouse meetings held by two of the students last year, one lady was baptized and taken into the church a week ago, and another will be baptized soon. Other efforts are reporting many interested ones.
River Plato Junior College
The ministerial seminar of our South American school recently voted the following expression: " That the members of the Colegio Adventista del Plata seminar pass on to the members of other like seminars scattered throughout the world, friendly greetings from the Continent of Opportunity.' We are made to feel that we belong to the same brotherhood of seminars as we scan the pages of ' Just Between Seminars' when it gets to us. We believe we are all training for one and the same common cause,— that of soul winning for our Master. We sincerely trust that the great Leader of these organizations will personally attend the efforts of all the seminars in the carrying out of their plans in a successful way during the school year of 1927-28. That Heaven's choicest blessings may be had in all the different activities of the seminars in training men for the ministry, is our sincere wish and prayer."
