Avondale School
297
“Above all, how shall missionaries be trained? How shall workers
be prepared to enter the opening fields? Here is now our greatest bur-
den. Therefore our special anxiety is for our school in Avondale. We
must here provide suitable facilities for educating workers in different
lines. We see young men possessing qualifications that, if they can be
rightly educated, will enable them to become laborers together with
God. We must give them the opportunity. Some are placing students
in our school, and are assisting them in defraying their expenses, that
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they may become workers in some part of the Lord’s vineyard. Much
more should be done in this line, and special efforts should be made in
behalf of those whom our workers shall send from the islands to be
trained as missionaries.
“In the future, more than in the past, our school must be an active
missionary agency, as the Lord has specified.... Workers we must have,
and in twenty-fold greater numbers, to supply the need in both the
home and the foreign field. Therefore, the Avondale School must not
be restricted in its facilities.”
(Australasian) Union Conference Record,
January 1, 1900
After Many Years
From 1901 to 1909 Prof. C. W. Irwin acted as principal of the
Avondale School; and in his report to the General Conference of 1909
he bore witness of the fulfillment of that which had been said would
come to pass on the Avondale estate, as follows:
“As time has gone on, and we have had an opportunity to watch
the work develop, we can say most assuredly, from our experience,
that God led in the selection of this place. Everything that has been
said about the location of the school in this place, has been fulfilled,—
everything.”
Professor Irwin declared further: “The brethren, in counsel with
Sister White, had made such broad and liberal plans for the school,
that through my eight years’ connection with it I have never yet needed
to change a single plan they had laid down. God guided in the estab-
lishment of the work there; and all we have endeavored to do during
these eight years, has simply been to develop more fully the plans
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already made. I believe the working out of this has proved that God’s
instruction was true.