Robinson Asa T.
Solusi, Present day.
Born in 1850, New Brunswick Canada , Robinson Asa Theron was not at first a Seventh Day Adventist. At the age of twenty in 1870, he set off for Cornish Flat, New Hemisphere to confront his older brother Dores Robinson on the mistake he was making in keeping Saturday as the sabbath. Instead, Dores influenced him and he became a Seventh Day Adventist as his older brother who had accepted the faith and had been baptized earlier.
He married in 1876, Lorretta, the daughter of William Farnsworth, a pioneer sabbath keeper in Washington. Loretta was the twelfth born of her siblings.
Lorreta was 10 years old when James and Ellen White conducted a revival at the New Hemisphere church in Washington. She and 13 others were baptized in the ice on Millan Pond. In 1882, S. N Haskell invited the couple to begin mission work in New Bedford, Boston and Brooklyn, New York. Lorreta became the first female bible instructor in Adventist history because of her participation in this campaign.
Robinson was ordained in 1886 and subsequently chosen the president of the New England Conference. In 1891, he and Loretta sailed for Africa. They pioneered the work in the South African country where he innovated the conference which would later adopted by the GC in 1901. The innovation entailed a pattern of departmental responsibilities.
In 1894, he sent Peter Wessels to Cecil John Rhodes, the prime minister of Cape Colony and chair of the charter company to request for land to set up a mission. Rhodes wrote to Dr. L. S Jackson gifting the missionaries as much land as they would wish to have. This sparked skepticism as it was not clear whether the land should be accepted as a gift or if the lad should be purchased. After the aqusition of 12000 acres of land as a gift from Rhodes, Robinson was asked to write and to the charter company and explain that the land would be more satisfactory if it were purchased. F. M Wilcox wrote concerning this matter to W. C. White to seek for the counsel of his mother E. G. White. Elder S. N Haskell also wrote to E.G. White who responded on January 30 1895 with : ‘ Dear Brother: You inquire with regard ti the propriety of receiving gifts from gentiles or the heathen. The question is not strange, but I would ask who is it that owns our world? … The Lord would move upon worldly men , even idolaters, to give of their abundance for the support of the work , if we would approach them wisely and give them an opportunity of doing those things which it is their privilege to do. What they would give, we should be privileged to receive.” The land was used to start up Solusi mission, the first permanent seventh day Adventist mission in Africa for the Africans.
When invited to relocate to Australia (1898-1904), Robinson brought with him ideas about administrative structure that he had proven in South Africa. Robinson served as president of the Queensland Conference 1902-1903. Upon his return to the United States in 1904, Robinson served successively as president of three conferences: Nebraska, Colorado, and Southern New England. In 1921, aged seventy-one, Robinson accepted appointment as chaplain of the New England Sanitarium and his wife served by his side as spiritual counselor to the patients. Aged eighty, Robinson retired to northern California. He died on 11 August 1949, just shy of his one-hundredth birthday.
Robinson Asa T, far right.
