Foreword
Welfare Ministry presents spirit of prophecy instruction in the del-
icate work of reaching hearts and winning souls through neighborly
kindness. This is a type of soul-winning ministry with which many
Seventh-day Adventists are but casually acquainted—yet a work or-
dained of God as the most appropriate means of bringing Christ and
Christianity to the attention of the peoples of the world. It is a work
that promises rich rewards
.
Not only by concise, well-worded precept has the author set before
us this type of ministry, but through the years, although busy with her
home duties and her responsibilities as the messenger of the Lord, she
often unwittingly set an example as her heart was drawn out to the
needy about her. The autobiographical record of the unselfish ministry
of Ellen G. White as a welfare worker, drawn from her diary and
letters, as found in the appendix of this volume, will be perused with
eager interest and well might be read before the counsels found in the
body of the text are studied. Be that as it may, the reader will soon
observe that the welfare ministry to which the church is summoned
is not merely a community service but a kind of loving ministry and
soul-winning endeavor—the highest type of welfare evangelism
.
In the assembling of Spirit of Prophecy counsels relating to this
important field of endeavor, excerpts have been drawn from the vast
reservoir of precious instruction penned through seven decades. They
have been gathered not only from currently available published books
but also from the thousands of E. G
.
White articles which were pre-
[10]
pared for the journals of the denomination, the special testimonies
issued in pamphlet form, and the E. G. White manuscript files. Se-
lected as they are from these various sources written at different times,
they inevitably bring the reader over the same path he has traversed
before, to emphasize some important point vital to a full development
of the subject. Such repetition, though reduced to a minimum, cannot
be avoided entirely in such a compilation as this, for the compilers
vi