The SDA Church has just launched a new online Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists.

The SDA Encyclopedia first appeared in 1966, and was updated in 1996, but since then the church has become more international in membership and outlook, its historians have become more sophisticated and, perhaps most importantly, the Internet revolutionized reference works, rendering most printed and bound reference works obsolete.

In 2014, Elder Wilson tasked David Trim, director of the Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research to produce a new SDA Encyclopedia. Because it was to be a new work rather than a revised edition, it was given a new title: the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists. Trim has overseen the project, with the day-to-day management role being filled first by Benjamin Baker and, since 2018, by Dragoslava Santrac, Ph.D, who is also an adjunct professor of religion at Washington Adventist University.

The articles are being researched and written by hundreds of researchers and authors, and dozens of editors from around the world. All articles are being peer reviewed, a process that has brought many more Adventist scholars, administrators, and church members into the project.

The project’s stated goals are to:

Supply reliable and authoritative information on Adventist history, crucial events and themes, organizations, entities, institutions, and people
Strengthen Adventist identity in a fast-growing worldwide movement, heightening awareness of distinctive doctrinal and prophetic beliefs
Provide a reference work for those new to Adventist faith, mature in the faith, and not of Adventist faith, to learn about all aspects of Adventism
Bring out the role of denominational organization in fulfilling the church’s mission
Highlight the challenges still remaining in order to “reach the world” with the Advent message
Reflect the nature of the world church today, both in subject matter and in those who write and edit the encyclopedia

The encyclopedia is launching with 2,100 articles and 3,600 photos, but thousands more are already in the process of being written or peer reviewed. At least another 6,000 more articles will be added, along with many more photographs, plus video, audio recordings, and original documents.

The advantage of the Internet-based format is that the project will be constantly updated with new articles, while existing articles can be easily corrected, and augmented with additional source documents and photographs. A print version will eventually be published, but the online version will always be more flexible and far more accessible via cell phones, tablets and computers.

Although Internet-based, the ESDA is not an “open source” encyclopedia like Wikipedia, where anyone can write articles, and articles about current events or political events tend to be extremely biased. ESDA articles are peer reviewed, or “refereed.”

Trim states,

“because this is a refereed work of scholarship, there is quite an involved process for an article to be added to the website. We have a team of 20 regional editors around the world, and a number of other thematic editors, who are responsible for finding authors to write articles that relate to their theme or their part of the world. This means that articles reflect the global nature of the church, with authors from around the world. That is really exciting!

But we have also had to use writers who have never written history before, and some have even never been published before. That means the regional editors sometimes have a lot of work to do on articles, even before they are sent to referees for peer review.

Often revisions are requested, which the regional editors moderate. Once they are signed off by the regional editor, then in many cases they are translated. (Early on we determined that the best person should write on any topic, not the best person with good English.) We have received a huge amount of assistance from the church’s world divisions in making translations. Once we receive the articles at the main office, they are reviewed, then sent to be copy edited, and then formatted, and then uploaded.

There are several types of entries. As you might expect there are many biographical articles about prominent Adventists from all over the world. There are also many entries about entities and institutions, such as conferences, unions, divisions, hospitals, schools and colleges, independent ministries, etc.

The types of entries are: biographies, church administrative unit, educational institution, medical institution, periodicals/book/electronic text, supporting ministry, country (based upon SDA membership), and “issue.”

Entries are arranged alphabetically, with the name of the article, the name of the author, the world division it pertains to, and the type of entry it is. For example, the entry for S. E. Allen, Jr., is:

Allen, Sydney Earl, Jr. (1929-2009)

Edward Allen

North American Division Biographies

So you know that this is an article about Sydney Allen, Jr., written by Edward Allen, the entry pertains to someone who worked in the North American Division and the entry is a biographical entry.

If you click on the name of the entry, you go to the full article. There you can also click on the name of the author of the article and get a brief bio of that person. In this case the bio is:

Edward Allen, D.Min., Ph.D., served the Seventh-day Adventist Church as a pastor from 1975 to 2005. In that year he joined the faculty of Union College where he began serving as Chair of the Division of Religion in 2017. His areas of interest are the Sabbath and Church History. His doctoral dissertation at Fuller Theological Seminar was on, “Nicholas Bownde and the Context of Sunday Sabbatarianism.”

It is obvious that Edward Allen is S.A. Allen’s son. I’m guessing there will be a lot of articles about parents written by children, since you can always pull out the “life sketch” you wrote for dad’s funeral and add a few notes.

Entry types are separately searchable. So you can click on “biographies” and then search for the name of the person you are interested in (although that would be too restrictive a search parameter, because, at least for now, there are many people mentioned in connection with colleges, hospitals, church administrative units and “issues” that do not currently have their own biographical entry).

But you might want to click on, for example, “issue” to see what issues are covered. Some of the issues are, “Adventists and hair-plating in Africa,” “Black unions,” “Cargo cults in Melanesia and the SDA Church,” “Chamberlain legal case and SDA Church, SPD,” “Dateline issues in the South Pacific,” and “the legacy of Adventist martyrs in Europe.”

Very few of the “issues” articles have been completed, but these type of articles will be the best indicator of the ideological direction of this project.

At present, there are obvious gaps in coverage and it is easy to believe that only about a quarter of the planned articles are currently online. There is an “issues” article about Brinsmeadism, but no biographical entry for Robert Brinsmead. There is an “issues” entry for the Glacier View Conference of 1980, but no biographical entry for Desmond Ford. There is as yet no “issues” article on “Last Generation Theology” nor a biographical entry for M. L. Andreasen or Herbert Douglas. There’s an article on Sanitarium Foods, and a separate article on Weet-Bix, the Sanitarium breakfast cereal popular in Australia and New Zealand, but no article on Loma Linda Foods.

The new Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists will provide many hours of interesting reading, as well as much controversy and many occasions for disputation.

News