Dr. Jeanne Andrews Willumson had a rich heritage of Adventist mission. Her father, John Nevins Andrews, was the grandson and namesake of the first official missionary to serve overseas. Her mother, Dorothy, was the daughter of William and Georgia Spicer, pioneer missionaries to India. Born in China in 1922, Willumson served as an associate professor of pediatrics at Loma Linda University in California and passed away in 2016. The following snippets of conversation are from an interview she had in 2014 with Gary Krause, director of the Office of Adventist Mission.
T
he earliest thing I remember [in China] was an eclipse of the moon. The whole town in those days believed that a dragon was eating it.
They pounded on cans and pans, and the racket was terrific. Gradually, they chased the dragon off the moon.
When I was about five, there was an anti-foreign movement in China, and we got a call saying we needed to go to Shanghai, which was an international settlement and safe.
My father commandeered a bamboo raft, and we all floated down the river until he found a wooden boat. The boat developed a leak. I remember our Chinese servant getting down with big wads of cotton to put in the holes of the boat.
We finally got near Chungking, where Merritt Warren was a missionary. We didn’t dare make any noise, and we didn’t have any lights. We just floated in. They were going to butcher all the foreigners in town, so we slept on mats at an American Consulate. The river was deep enough that America and England sent a couple of warships that turned their guns on Chengdu, so we had time to escape. Steamers came, and they took the foreigners to Shanghai. It was very dramatic.
All the missionaries and their families were moved into barracks on the mission compound. It was my first time going to school because my mother had homeschooled us. I remember the first grade at the nice church school. We all took music lessons. I had my first taste of “civilization”—cornflakes with banana—which my father fixed for me.
We lived in Shanghai until they could send us back. So, we were all on these boats. I remember all the parents talking about chicken pox. I was so disappointed because I expected to see little chicks jumping around on the deck. We all caught it.
As we sailed up the Yangtze River in the middle of the night, the boat struck a rock. A fire broke out, and it blistered the place around my baby brother’s crib, but he was all right. My mother was trying to figure out how to put him in some kind of tub if we had to swim ashore. Then the river went down, and we sat in the middle of the river on top of this rock. The boat wouldn’t move either way. They tried to lighten the load so the boat would come off the rock. But there we sat for about three weeks. Finally, the river rose, and the boat floated upstream again.
On either side of the deck, there were iron railings. Since we didn’t have enough iron railings to hide everybody, they put the baggage all in a row because bandits on the river would shoot at the boats as they went by. I wanted to see them, so I crawled on my hands and knees around the baggage. I finally did see one, but he was just an old, ragged laborer. I was so disappointed.
My father managed to get a printing press because he had worked in printing. He learned Tibetan and printed tracts and the Bible. On the weekends, when the caravans would come down from the mountains, we would distribute the tracts.
My father felt that this was where he belonged. But after our next furlough, my mother felt it was time to go home. The kids were growing up, and she couldn’t homeschool anymore.
There was a war going on between Japan and China when we landed in Shanghai. I remember my first ride in an automobile. We went 30 miles an hour—like Disney Land is nowadays! The Japanese army used to march through the street, and you could get out on the conference building and watch the airplanes trying to bomb downtown Shanghai.
My father had tucked away a bunch of things [letters and artifacts from the Andrews and Spicer families] in a big, plastic box, and we didn’t know he had it. He had it in a little office where he lived in Loma Linda. After he died, we found it. We sat and read them all, including some from J. N. Andrews and Ellen White. We felt this should go into a museum, so we gave them everything [Andrews University’s Center for Adventist Research] because somebody needed to know these things.
How our international mission movement grew
- By the 1890s, the Seventh-day Adventist Church had a presence on every inhabited continent.
- By 1897, the church had sent out a total of 148 international missionaries.
- In 1908, the church sent out an additional 140 new international missionaries.
- In 1909, the church sent out an additional 138 new international missionaries.
- In 1913, for the first time, the number of new missionaries sailing to the mission field exceeded 150.
- During the 1920s, the church sent out more missionaries every year than the total number in service in 1897. Every year throughout the 1920s, 150 or more new missionaries were sent each year.
- The quarter-century following the war, 1946–1970, was the golden age of the Adventist Church’s foreign missionary program. In these 25 years, the number of workers sent to mission fields totaled 7,385. In 1969–1970, new missionaries totaled 970—by far the largest number of new missionaries sent into service in any two-year period in the church’s history.