ERZBERGER: BEGINNINGS AND BELONGINGS

It all began when he tore his favorite and only pair of pants. Young Jakob Erzberger was doing his compulsory practicum as a student missionary evangelist. It was part of his seminary course and he needed to complete it to graduate. He was traveling and preaching near the little town of Tramelan in Switzerland when the disaster took place. He looked around for a tailor and got more than what he bargained for. Not only did the man mend his pants, but while he waited the tailor also gave him a detailed Bible study on the second coming, the end of the world and the validity of the Sabbath. Erzberger was a captive and captivated audience.

He was blown away by what he heard, especially because the message came out of the mouth of a humble tailor to educate an almost-graduated Seminarian. Erzberger went back to his seminary in Basel and shared what he had learned with his lecturer and fellow students. The result was far from promising. “My friends all turned their back on me” he later wrote, recounting the incident “to them I was nothing more than a heretic”

But Erzberger had the gumption to bounce back. Perhaps it was his poverty-stricken childhood that helped or the fact that he had weathered the storm of losing his father as a young man or perhaps it was the deep piety of his mother. Maybe it was a combination of all three but whatever the case may have been Jakob Erzberger decided to cast in his lot with the small, doctrinally peculiar group he had found in Tramelan.

He decided to pastor them a short while later when Czechowski had left Switzerland to work in other parts of Europe. It wasn’t an easy undertaking to pastor a small group that believed, among other things, that they were the only group on earth that held the doctrines they did. It wasn’t long however before Albert Vuilleumier, one of the members of the church, discovered a copy of the review and herald among some of the belongings Czechowski had left behind.

The church at Tramelan was overjoyed to find that they were not alone but were, in fact, part of the established Seventh-Day Adventist church in North America. Correspondence flowed between the brethren at Battle Creek and the church in Tramelan and before long it was decided that Erzberger should go to America and make first contact with the church there.

Erzberger was game to go but he was extremely brave to do so. He didn’t speak a word of English and had no contacts or friends in America. He was warmly welcomed into the home of James and Ellen White and soon surrounded by a gaggle of eager Adventist brethren willing to help him.

John Kellogg tutored him in English while James White gave him Bible studies. He was then ordained by White and John Andrews at a camp meeting in  South Lancaster, Massachusetts. He returned to Europe shortly after that having been commissioned to continue to serve in Europe as an Adventist missionary.