Development of Seventh-day Adventist Work
In 1869, William Hunt a gold prospector in California attended evangelistic meetings run by J. N. Loughborough in Healdsburg. Hunt accepted Adventist teachings and promised Loughborough to continue to share the message he accepted.
Later, He will leave America, travel to the gold-diggings in Australia and then to the Diamond fields of the Kimberley in South Africa. While in South Africa, William Hunt will become the first Adventist in South Africa.
As a transplanted Nevada miner who arrived in the late 1870s to work on the diamond diggings in Griqualand West, he made his most celebrated convert in 1885, a Beaconsfield businessman, G. J. Van Druten. In 1886, Van Druten and another convert named Peter Wessels appealed to the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church for a Dutch minister to further instruct and baptize them.This was the 1886 ‘Macedonian Call’ from South Africa.
When this letter was read at the 1886 General Conference session in the Battle Creek Tabernacle, its message electrified the assembled delegates, who rose and sang the doxology.
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Wessel and van Druten had not been idle while they waited for assistance from the General Conference and Wessels records that there was ―a company of ten or twelve Sabbath-keepers‖ in the Kimberley.
However it is recorded that Pieter Wessels was naturally disappointed when he learnt from the General Conference in Battle Creek that the missionaries that were coming to South Africa were not Dutchspeaking.
It also recorded by the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald that, J. H. C. Wilson, who was formerly a local preacher of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Kimberley stated that he and five other people, including his wife, had decided to accept Seventh-day Adventist beliefs as a result of literature they had received from William Hunt.
Among other Adventist pioneers in South Africa a daughter of William Farnsworth married A. T. Robinson; he and his brother DoresA. Robinson were pioneers in South Africa and India.
As matter fact, it has been recorded that the Seventh-day Adventist Mission in South Africa started under the leadership of American missionaries, C.L. Boyd and D.A. Robinson, who arrived in Kimberley in July 1887.
Missionaries were sent to South Africa in 1887.C. L. Boyd conducted the first Adventist baptismal service in Kimberley. And during the same year, a church was organized and South Africa and South Africa became the first country in the continent of Africa to register a formal church organization under the auspices of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with 21 members. By 1892, a local conference of 130 members had been organized, and a Cape Town Conference with a meeting hall on the second floor was acquired, and a school building was erected as well.
Three years later in May 1890, after many more Bible studies, with literature distribution and further evangelistic meetings conducted by C.L. Boyd in a tent which the local Adventist believers from Kimberley had purchased, a church building made of wood and iron was erected in Kimberley at a cost of 500 pounds.
According to the Adventist Encyclopedia, This church which became known as the Beaconsfield Church becoming the first Seventh-day Adventist church building to be erected on the African continent.The early work of the SDA Church in Southern Africa was solely among Whites.
W. Schwartz points out that,C. L. Boyd became interested in presenting the message of salvation to the African tribal peoples in the area, but his individualistic temperament kept him from gaining support among his fellow workers. Before he could develop a program for native Africans he was recalled in 1890 to America.
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