The Seventh-day Adventist Church: 3 of its sex abuse cases from 3 centuries. Part 3: 19th century
The Seventh-day Adventist Church: 3 of its sex abuse cases from 3 centuries. Part 3: 19th century
Trigger warning: CSA. Part 3: 19th century. SDA pedophile pastor Pieter "Peter" Wessels of South Africa. Ellen White wrote him "don't confess to police". Church covers it up, named library after him.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This post is long, for I am exhaustively proving:
The SDA Church covers up this SDA pastor pedophile’s CSA to this day.
The SDA Church honored this pedophile by naming one of their university libraries after him.
Adventist prophetess Ellen White slut-shamed, condemned to hell this pedophile’s multiple child victims.
This pedophile offered to confess to the police, and to tell his wife—he had seven children. Ellen White wrote him to not, because that would make Adventism look bad.
This pedophile pastor’s SDA boss wanted this pedophile to confess to his church. Ellen White wrote, prevented this.
Terminology:
CSA means “child sexual assault or abuse”.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church calls itself “SDA” and “Adventist” for short. My writings do too.
“Sex abuse” means any sexually inappropriate action committed by one person against another person. This is a deliberately broad definition for the purpose of this blog post series.
“Survivor” means anyone who's been sexually abused and didn’t die from it.
About Ellen White:
Ellen White (White) is the Adventist prophetess. They use the Bible verse phrase “Spirit of Prophecy” interchangeably to refer to her name and her writings. Her writings are also called “testimonies”, as in, she heard from god and testified. SDA Church belief 18 paraphrased is “Ellen White is god’s prophetess and proof Adventists are god’s last true church”.
Ellen White wrote reams. Don't be too impressed. She plagiarized much of it.
Here's a scholarly video source on her plagiarizing. https://youtube.com/@TesttheProphet
Here’s an exhaustive text version of White’s plagiarism. https://nonsda.org/egw/plagiarism.html
Adventists claim White didn’t actually plagiarize because reasons. Those “reasons” are obfuscations, excuses, and the fallacy called “appeal to authority” (for the SDAs claim they hired a lawyer who definitely proved White didn't really plagiarize. The lawyer did not prove this.).
This is the third, final case in my series examining how the Seventh-day Adventist Church handled three cases of pedophile SDA leaders. Three different cases. Three different centuries. The SDA deals with each case by silence, obfuscation, and cover up.
19th century case: Adventist pastor Pieter “Peter” Wessels of South Africa. This guy:
Photo from ESDA https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=ACDF
This person has multiple names in historic SDA publications. I found Pieter Johannes Daniel Wessels, Peter Wessels, P. J. D. Wessels, and Brother Wessels.
I used this Adventist archive.
https://documents.adventistarchives.org/Periodicals/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fPeriodicals%2fRH&FolderCTID=0x012000DDAC5B94CFBD234AB142FC5C311C732700042C85EA7C1C1A4DB8D75C62A7517A6E
This case is unique: It’s in writing, with second-hand quotes from the pedophile himself, and written advice from SDA prophetess White to the pedophile.
The SDA Church has followed White’s CSA advice ever since—using silence, obfuscation, and cover up.
Two main sources:
Source one: A letter by SDA prophetess Ellen White to a “Peter Wessels”, dated March 10, 1897. I'll call it the “1897 letter”.
This letter is broken up into two sources, best I can tell. Both sources are at EGWWritings.org. Both refer to a prior reproval letter from White to Wessels that, frankly, I don't have stomach to try to look up.
Some paragraphs are here: https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/122.620
Adventists and their ilk delete negative SDA internet things. Therefore I archived this here: https://archive.ph/lJiHi
Explanatory aside and rant about this source: This webpage is part of a published “compilation” book of Ellen White's writings.
Compilations were created like this: Adventists searched through all of White’s writings. They cut out paragraphs about [insert topic here] and printed books titled [insert topic here] made of all those out-of-context paragraphs.
Liberal SDAs frown on compilations as they’re used in Adventism to enable abuse and neglect. Converts and conservative born-and-raised Adventists aren't told about compilations. They naively, devoutly take the compilation books’s of out-of-context texts as general life advice from god’s last prophetess. This creates unnecessary self-neglect, anxiety, guilt, religious extremism, and child abuse.
List of Ellen White books and compilations here: https://whiteestate.org/books/booklist/
This webpage’s compilation book is titled “Testimonies on Sexual Behavior, Adultery, and Divorce”. It has a few paragraphs of one letter by Ellen White to Peter Wessels.
When one scrolls all the way to the bottom of that page, there is a hyperlink:
The rest of the letter: Clicking on that “Letter 120, 1897” hyperlink leads to this page, an online version of a book called “Letters and Manuscripts Volume 12 (1897)”.
This page has more of Ellen White’s 1897 letter to Peter Wessels. Yay, context!
https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/14062.5663001#5663001
I archived the page here: https://archive.ph/83sP
Explanatory aside about EGW Writings: This is part of the Ellen G. White Estate (White Estate), an organization made by Ellen White to translate and publish her writings worldwide.
The White Estate runs multiple Ellen White websites. Their main site is whiteestate.org. Its mission statement is: “The Ellen G. White Estate supports the mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in uplifting Jesus Christ and His Word by sharing Ellen White’s prophetic ministry and writings throughout the world.” https://whiteestate.org/about/estate/#faq15ec0d17-ff5c-42ac-b818-99c9230457ac
Side note on Adventist-supporting organizations: In plain English, that mission statement means the White Estate is not run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It’s Adventist-supporting, not actually Adventist. Adventists also call these “self-supporting ministries”. There's a good thread about them here: https://www.reddit.com/r/exAdventist/comments/r7jtgs/conference_vs_selfsupporting_rant/
Adventist-supporting organizations (SDAs call them “ministries”) in the USA are tax-free businesses who convert people to Adventism. They run themselves how they please without being accountable to the SDA Church. They tend towards abusive religious extremism.
The SDA Church loves Adventist-supporting organizations. SDA-supporting orgs bring in tithe-paying butts-in-pews enthusiastic converts who are easily coerced into marketing Adventism to other people. The SDA church recommends these orgs, and then hand-waves all responsibility for awful things the org does. “Oh, it’s not an official SDA ministry,” a suave-voiced SDA spokesman says after one of these ministries does a shitty thing that hits the news.
But I digress.
Source two: Pieter Wessels’s biography on an Adventist website: The Encyclopedia of Seventh-Day Adventists (ESDA) has a biography of “Pieter Wessels”:
https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=ACDF
This biography is archived here: https://archive.ph/fX4rj
Per ESDA’s About page:
“The Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists project is directed by and based at the General Conference [of Seventh-day Adventist] Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research (ASTR), Silver Spring, Maryland, USA.”
So my two main sources are:
An 1897 letter to Peter Wessels from Ellen White. It is on the White Estate’s website, an Adventist-supporting organization created by Adventist prophetess Ellen White to translate and publish her writings worldwide. (Her writings from Australia in 1897 are accessed by me here 128 years later, on the opposite side of the globe USA, so gotta say mission accomplished White Estate.)
Pieter Wessels’s biography on an official Seventh-day Adventist Church online historical encyclopedia, ESDA.
I'm a history nerd. I love how the SDAs have ALL THE THINGS online. Want to know about the 1897 SDA South African church? How many members, how many pastors, how much tithe received? That's online.
https://documents.adventistarchives.org/Statistics/ASR/ASR1897.pdf#search=Statistical%20report
So that's 300 members, four SDA ministers in South Africa in 1897. And $6,500 in tithes, mostly from the Wessels's family, going by what ESDA says. Notice the other foreign nations in that sections are giving tithes of $100 to a bit over $1000.
The money. Adventists kept wealthy, well-connected pedophile Wessels in the church after they knew of his pedophilia for he was extraordinarily wealthy, well-connected, and gave lots of money to the church.
Evidence that “Pieter Wessels” of ESDA is “Peter Wessels” of White Estate: Showing this is the same dude is necessary to show ongoing SDA Church cover up of this Adventist pastor’s pedophilia. Feel free to take this as read and scroll on by.
Both Wessels worked under an SDA Conference President named Robinson: Per the ESDA biography, Pieter Wessels worked under an SDA Conference President named Asa Robinson. (FYI: Pastor Robinson is the only somewhat-decent person in this entire horrific story.)
Ellen White, in the screenshot above, justified to Peter Wessels why she “let Brother Robinson have a copy of the [1897] letter” she originally sent to Wessels. Her policy was to send a copy of her written reproof letters to the pastor over the reproved person. A “Brother Robinson” was Wessels’s superior.
Both sites document Wessels received letters from Ellen White, while she was in Australia, in the late 1890s: Per ESDA, “Towards the end of the 1890s, he [Pieter Wessels] received several letters from Ellen White, who was in Australia at the time, …”
Per the White Estate, Ellen White wrote Peter Wessels from Australia in 1897.
ESDA states Wessels had his ministerial license removed in 1896.
White’s 1897 letter documents the church removed Wessels’s pastor credentials. White wrote “Do not feel that the worst thing for you is to lose your credentials.”.
So here we have either two men with phonetically identical names who worked for the SDAs in South Africa under an SDA pastor called Robinson, both got letters from Ellen White in late 1890s, and both had their pastor credentials removed in 1896.
Or, it’s one guy. I'm going with one guy.
That's enough evidence. Anyone who needs more can look it up themselves.
FYI: I first wrote about this case here. https://talesfromacult.substack.com/p/ellen-whites-written-policy-to-a
Since then I've learned more things about this case. For instance, my original post talks about just one victim. No. Wessels sexually abused multiple girls. He groomed them.
Timeline of events, just like the Adventist Bible studies have timelines.
1856: Wessels was born in South Africa, the eldest son of a large wealthy colonizer family.
Ages 14-21: Wessels owned two farms, made good money supplying food to nearby gold mining boom towns. At age 14, this kid already had more property than I'll ever own in my life. Wealthy kid is wealthy.
Black-and-white thinking, biblical literalism: Ages 14 to 21 Peter saw different churches popping up in the boom towns. He wondered why so many churches had such different beliefs? Why not one big Only Church with the Only Truth? His mom couldn’t explain why. This bothered Peter.
This is black-and-white thinking, inability to see others’ point of view (problems with Theory of Mind, see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind), inability to recognize there's many different ways to interpret Bible verses, and the underlying assumption that the Bible is The Truth with only one “correct” interpretation. This is the beginning of a fundamentalist.
1878: Wessels married Maria Van Zyl. She bore him seven children. Five survived to adulthood.
1884: Age 28, Wessels got sick with an unspecified chronic illness, started taking medications, couldn’t get better. His brother attended a Christian faith healer, brought a tract to Wessels. Wessels read the tract, decided faith healing was The Truth.
He got very sick.
Per ESDA, “Although his wife and his mother wanted to send for the physician, he refused, saying, “if there is a God, and if the Bible is His word, and if He convinces me that it contains the truth by healing me, then I will accept it. But, if, on the other hand, I die, I will do so believing there is no God and no truth in the Bible.”10 Before he went to sleep that night, he prayed, claiming the promises of James 5:14-15. He woke up the following morning feeling refreshed.”
Then he destroyed “his homeopathic medicine” bottles.
Much drama. Such miracle. This story implies god did a miracle for this pedophile. This is once way the SDA Church deals with this leader’s pedophilia: They insinuate god did miracles for him.
Homeopathy was a pseudoscience fad in the late 1800s and continues to this day.
Homeopathy claims water has chemical memory and diluting substances into water makes copies of that substance. The more dilute, the more powerful the homeopathic medicine. Very expensive, very dilute homeopathic meds? They’re plain water. (Yes, really.)
What we can know about pedophile Wessels so far: He’s an all-or-nothing dude. Falls for pseudoscience. Biblical inerrant literalist. Influenced easily by only one tract, doesn’t look up other opinions. Destroys things. Inconsiderate—he ignored his mom’s and wife’s pleas to get medical help. Didn't die when he medically neglected himself, decides it’s because god. He’s THAT awesome—god personally did him a miracle—and THAT right about everything.
This is narcissist behavior.
1885: Peter started keeping Saturday Sabbath, his church unsuccessfully tried to talk him out of it. He started his own home church. There’s zero info on if his wife Maria was ok being yanked out of the church she’d attended for years. Nothing about an ongoing support system for her as a mom of seven who’s lost two children to death.
News that Wessels ditched his church and started keeping Saturday got around, and somebody handed him an English Seventh-day Adventist magazine. He started learning English to be able to read that magazine. He made friends with the SDA magazine supplier.
1886: Wessels and magazine dude wrote the Adventists in Michigan to come to South Africa. Wessels funded tickets for SDAs to come on over. Wessels specifically requested a Dutch speaker, for that was his and his family’s language.
Adventists arrived. They stayed at Wessels’s dad’s farm. None spoke Dutch, so language barrier was a thing.
Wessels became an enthusiast marketer of Adventism, like new SDA converts do. He’d found The Truth(TM)! He converted his parents, some siblings. He moved to Cape Town, South Africa.
1890: The Adventists gave him a ministerial license. He worked converting folks to Adventism.
1891: Wessels’s dad found diamonds on his property, sold it to De Beers diamond company (Yes, THAT De Beers diamond company.), died shortly after. Peter Wessels, the eldest son, inherited big money. Per ESDA: “The Wessels family contributed the majority of tithes and offerings that supported the South African church in its early years.”
One can see above the record of some of that money in the 1897 $6,500 tithe from South Africa screenshot above.
1894: Rich colonizer Wessels turned hardcore colonizer. He got involved with the South African government to “establish an industrial school to teach the Matebele people in Rhodesia the different kinds of skills they would need to work in industries”.
Enabling the SDA Church to use local tribes for labor and forcing them into schools, that's Wessels’s thing. Colonizers had over 400 years of using local tribes for free labor by 1897. Horrible things were done at that school.
Wessels, his brother John, and his SDA cronies got 12,000 acres from the government and started the “first SDA mission station to be established among the non-Christian people in the world”. The school was called “Solusi Mission”. It’s still around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solusi_University
“The Wessels brothers temporarily settled near the mission station,” says ESDA. It's speculation but not too far of a stretch to assume that Wessels CSA’d indigenous children while he was there. Other, modern SDA pedophile missionaries do that. Here's one: https://archive.ph/u2mNB
1895: Peter was elected South African SDA Conference Vice President.
1896: Per ESDA, “Pieter continued to serve the church in various responsibilities, although his ministerial license was withdrawn in 1896.” ESDA doesn’t say why his ministerial license was withdrawn.
1897: Ellen White writes Wessels, says ministerial license was withdrawn because of his pedophilia. (All sentences in quotes are from White Estate sources listed above.)
Peter Wessels wrote a letter to Ellen White about his pedophilia. We're not privy to that letter. White begins her letter to him with: “I have just read your letter dated April 26.”
He complained to her because Adventists removed his minister credentials: “Do not feel that the worst thing for you is to lose your credentials. You are not worthy to be entrusted with the care of the flock. You must know this without my telling you.”
Wessels groomed, CSA’d multiple victims: White asked him, “What can the impression be upon those youth whose bodies you degrade by your actions?” (Emphasis mine.)
“You were doing great dishonor to God by lustful practices, educating the young girls in practices which are ruinous to their morals, and also destroying to their bodies.” (Emphasis mine.)
White says Wessels “educated” girls “in practices ruinous to their morals”. That's grooming. Therefore Peter Wessels groomed, sexually abused multiple “young girls”.
Ellen White slut-shamed, condemned to hell his victims: “Any youth who would submit her body to be handled by a man is in no way fit for the kingdom of heaven.”
White claimed his victims inevitably turned into sluts: “All who do such things are leading young women into abominable practices. I know what these things lead to. To lewdness, lustful practices.”
“These very ones you have educated will submit their bodies for others to corrupt. The restraints are gone.”
Ok, this reads like White personally knew survivors of CSA who became sexually promiscuous. And, yes, that is one coping method some CSA survivors use. It can help one feel in charge of their sexuality. It can help one feel loved. It’s fine, as long as one is practicing safe, sane, consensual acts with good personal boundaries with folks who treat them with trust and respect.
I’ve met Adventists who argue Ellen White was 100% correct in saying CSA victims go on to indulge in “lewdness, lustful practices”.
They are mistaken. Those are two vague words, easily applied to any sexual behavior the SDA doesn’t approve of. It’s too big of an umbrella term.
Per Wikipedia, “[CSA] Victims may withdraw from school and social activities and exhibit various learning and behavioural problems including cruelty to animals, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Teenage pregnancy and risky sexual behaviors may appear in adolescence. Child sexual abuse victims report almost four times as many incidences of self-inflicted harm.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse
So amongst seven specific consequences of CSA in children and teens, Ellen White was slightly correct about one, namely “risky sexual behavior”. That is, if one equates “lewdness, lustful practice” to “risky sexual behavior”. They're not the same.
Blaming children for being CSA’d: White is very, very certain every survivor of Wessels’s CSA “submitted” to Wessels.
“Any youth who would submit her body to be handled by a man…”
“The effect upon the mind of the one who submits herself to your touch cannot be measured.”
Relevant rant: I'm an adult CSA survivor, CSA’d as a young girl. Contrary to what White wrote about young girl CSA survivors, I didn't “submit” to the SDA teacher pedophile who sexually abused me. He trapped me alone in a room to forcibly CSA me.
As a teen, I experienced three of Wikipedia’s seven listed “learning and behavioural problems”, plus the “withdrawing from social activities”. I did not practice “lewdness, lustful” behavior; I became even more modest, hoping that would protect me from CSA like Purity Culture promised.
In short, White’s cruel, victim-blaming CSA assumptions and predictions about pedophile SDA pastor Wessels’s young girl CSA survivors are bullshit.
White writes that if Wessels was truly saved, he would not sexually abuse girls: “I knew this was your sin, but I knew also that if the truth was enthroned in your heart it would make this sin appear to you in its true enormity.”
Wessels minimized, justified his actions to Ellen White: “You say you did not commit adultery.”
Wessels was a CSA survivor himself: “Can you not see, can you not understand by your own experience,…”
White was obsessed that Wessels’s victims might masturbate: (quote continued from above) “…that you are leading youth into this habit of self abuse [masturbation]?”
Relevant aside: White was obsessed with masturbation. She wrote a book, An Appeal to Mothers, on how masturbation causes everything from fevers to “misshapen heads”. She wrote a letter, clutching her pearls because some man masturbated and he wouldn’t eat graham flour to stop masturbation. (Yes, really.) https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/12886.884?hl=Graham+self+abuse&ss=eyJ0b3RhbCI6MSwicGFyYW1zIjp7InF1ZXJ5IjoiR3JhaGFtIHNlbGYgYWJ1c2UiLCJ0eXBlIjoiYmFzaWMiLCJsYW5nIjoiZW4iLCJsaW1pdCI6MjB9LCJpbmRleCI6MH0%3D#902
She said she’d sooner her granddaughters were dead than be CSA survivors: “I have granddaughters, the children of my son, W. C. White. If I were forced to choose whether these children should be exposed to these temptations, educated in these evil practices, or be cut down by death, I would say, Let them die in their innocency.”
She told pedophile Wessels to Jesus harder to cure his pedophilia: “Educate your mind to study the Word of God. Study it with your whole heart and pray much. Everlasting life is worth a lifelong, persevering, untiring effort.”
Wessels offered to make a public confession. Ellen White said hell no to that, for it makes SDAs look bad: “You ask me if you shall make a public confession. I say, No. Do not dishonor the Master by making public the fact that one ministering in the Word could be guilty of such sin as you have committed. It would be a disgrace to the ministry. Do not give publicity to this matter by any means. It would do injustice to the whole cause of God.”
She said don't even tell his wife, Maria:“Defile not the lips even by communicating this to your wife, to make her ashamed and bow her head in sorrow.”
Remember, Wessels had five children who survived to adulthood? Pedophiles CSA their own children. With this one sentence, Ellen White enabled a known pedophile unlimited access to CSA his children. White ensured his wife remained ignorant, couldn’t protect her children.
There's one sort-of-good man in this story. He’s the SDA Conference President, a pastor named Asa Robinson:
https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=7A27&highlight=Asa|Robinson
Ellen White gave this a copy of her letter to Wessels. She did this right, ensuring one in charge know wtf was up.
“I am sorry that you feel injured because I let Brother Robinson have a copy of the letter I sent to you.”
“Whenever I have written a message of reproof, I have always sent one copy to the minister who is officiating in the church,…”
Robinson should have told secular authorities, the church, and Wessels’s wife. He didn't.
Robinson, the sort-of-good pastor, wanted Wessels to confess to the SDA church congregation: “You had yourself written me that you had made matters known to him [Pastor Robinson] concerning yourself [that Wessels committed CSA on multiple young girls], and he thought you should confess the whole matter to the church.”
White ensured pedophile Wessels did not confess to his church: “I thought that letter would prevent any such movement [Wessels confessing to the church], and keep the matter as private as possible.”
This is still standard SDA policy for SDA pedophiles in leadership. Silence. Exactly as their prophetess Ellen White wrote, “Keep the matter as private as possible.”
Pastor Robinson obeyed Ellen White, didn't have Wessels confess. This sort-of-good man found a way around White’s commanded silence. Robinson tattled to Wessels’s mom: “I do not in any way favor his reading the matter [White’s original reproval letter to Wessels] to your mother. She has an abundance of sorrows to carry.”
The SDAs immediately relocated Asa Robinson’s to Australia.
“After almost six years developing the Adventist work in South Africa, A. T. Robinson was called to Australia, where he and his family, now also including daughter Gladys Evora (born 1892), arrived October, 1897. https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=7A27&highlight=Asa|Robinson
That. Right there. Pastor Robinson was the dad of a young daughter. Robinson was a decent human, brainwashed into believing Ellen White and the SDAs were The Truth. His protective parental instincts kicked in.
He was a proven troublemaker finding workarounds to reveal pedophilia in SDA leadership.
SDAs refused to assign Pastor Robinson a role in Australia:
“In Australia Robinson was given various assignments, fitting in wherever there was a need.”
Pedophile Wessels was super, duper offended that SDA Church people removed his pastor credentials and tattled to his mom. So White told him a Bible story about hidden sin in Israel, writing: “I present this before you that you may not feel that the church has done a grievous thing against you, that they have done you a personal injury and desire to hurt you as a man.”
Here White coddles a rich pedophile former pastor so he doesn’t feel bad about losing status after committing CSA on multiple young girls. It is sickening.
This shows this pedophile SDA wasn’t sorry for committing CSA. He's sorry he's caught. He's sorry he's lost his credentials, sorry his mom knows.
White is a brain-damaged woman, a religious extremist. She failed to notice these obvious signs Wessels was wholly unrepentant.
White told him to read the Bible: “Please read the first, second, and third chapters of 1 Samuel carefully and attentively.”
Ellen White doubled down on ensuring silence: “I do not advise that this matter be made public before the whole church.”
SDA Church still does this. This is exactly what the SDA Church I grew up in did when they hired the wife of a rumored pedophile, the SDA teacher who CSA’d me at church.
The church I grew up in did not make the “matter [the fact a rumored pedophile attended church] public before the whole church”. They didn't notify parents, either.
In the 21st century case, the SDA Church—per my source—still lets charged-with-felony molestation Sabbath School leader Gabriel Dubon around SDA kids unattended, in church, every week.
Covering up pedophile, not telling parents nor the finding, not telling police, and permitting the actual-or-alleged pedophile around children unattended. That is SDA practice since 1897.
Ellen White coddles more: No worries, Jesus forgives and pedophile Wessels must live, feel guilty enough, and be a good daddy: “My brother, it behooves you to walk carefully and softly before God. The greatest hindrance to the perfection of your Christian character will be putting a light importance upon the matter under consideration. You have a wife and precious children to live for, to teach and to encourage in every holy practice.”
Finally, White reminded Wessels, Jesus forgives: “Now, my dear brother, come close to Jesus, and He will pardon your transgressions and forgive your sins.”
End written advice from Ellen White to Seventh-day Adventist pastor and child sex abuser Peter Wessels.
How the SDA Church covers up Peter Wessels’s pedophilia:
In Wessels’s official Seventh-day Adventist biography on ESDA, the SDA Church obfuscates and conceals:
Here's the entire passage:
“Pieter’s [Peter Wessels’s] participation in church work reached its highest point in 1895 during the third session of the South Africa Conference, at which he was elected conference vice president.60 Pieter continued to serve the church in various responsibilities, although his ministerial license was withdrawn in 1896.”
I bet money that this was Conference President Robinson’s doing.
“Towards the end of the 1890s, he [Wessels] received several letters from Ellen White, who was in Australia at the time, giving him spiritual encouragement and warning him against his extreme views on faith-healing.61”
I just documented White’s letter to Wessels. They’re pedophile-enabling, not “spiritual encouragement”.
Notice there's zero links to Ellen White’s letters to this pedophile. Nope, if one clicks that “61” link, one gets this:
The reader is permitted to know White wrote 16 letters to Wessels, but no more.
ESDA’s next paragraph obfuscates: “Dr. Anthony of Claremont Sanitarium described some of Pieter’s extreme views as follows: “He has told me repeatedly that all our Sanitariums are a standing denial of faith – that we should banish all human instrumentalities for the alleviation of pain and restoration of health, as these things are in the hands of God, and we must seek Him as our physician. He wholly ignores water treatment and says that no Seventh-day Adventist should use them. He is one of those who takes an extreme position on the subject of faith-healing.”62”
White’s 1897 letter makes it clear the SDAs pulled Wessels’s credentials because of his pedophilia.
This ESDA paragraph implies its anti-SDA, anti-sanitarian, religious extremism.
Of note here, SDAs have a pecking order of preferred professions. Physician is the top of the pecking order. They get the top treatment in the church; and that's why SDAs quote a physician to mislead the reader here. (Male pastors are next in pecking order. Anything medical is next in order, music is below that, and the lowest is lawyers and IT. Female pastors are uncommon and SDAs haven’t figured out how to rank them in the pecking order yet.)
What happened next: Says ESDA: “By mid-1899, Pieter replaced his brother John as business manager of the Claremont Sanitarium when John left to Australia.”
This directly conflicts with “Dr. Anthony’s” report that Wessels was wholly against sanitariums.
Per March 28, 1899, Review and Herald, the SDAs elected pedophile “P. J. D. Wessels” aka Peter Wessels was to a Conference Executive position. https://documents.adventistarchives.org/Periodicals/RH/RH18990328-V76-13.pdf#search=%22P%2E%20J%2E%20D%2E%20Wessels%22
ESDA claims there was a falling out between Peter Wessels and the SDA Church: “A conflict between the Wessels family and the church arose due to the family’s desire to have greater control of the Sanitarium to ensure that it made more profits. When the family made legal threats, the church surrendered the Sanitarium to the family.”
Reading ESDA, one would assume the SDA church and Wessels parted company after the Sanitarium fallout. Nope. Adventists kept him around.
In the SDA publication Review and Herald, 9/9/1926, Peter Wessels published his testimony as “P. J. D. Wessels”. He mentions large sums of money he and his family donated to the church several times. This is narcissist behavior.
https://documents.adventistarchives.org/Periodicals/RH/RH19260909-V103-46.pdf#search=%22P%2E%20J%2E%20D%2E%20Wessels%22
There’s Bible verses against bragging about charity one does. Jesus himself said in Matthew 6, KJV:
“1Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.”
So the pedophile guy is disobeying Jesus in print in the SDA hallmark magazine Review and Herald. The SDAs approve.
Wessels died in 1933. Per ESDA: “Pieter Johannes Daniel Wessels died on February 13, 1933, at Retreat, Cape Town, at age 77 and was buried at Plumstead Cemetery. He was survived by his wife, three sons, two daughters, and 14 grandchildren.”
It reads like his burial service was performed by two Adventist pastors.
ESDA says his wife Maria lived until 1942. I hope she had a good rest of her life without this arrogant monster of a controlling man.
But wait! That's not all! In 1981, the Seventh-day Adventist Church named one of their college libraries after this pedophile: Per ESDA, “In 1981, the Helderberg College of Higher Education inaugurated the Pieter Wessels Library in honor of his commitment and contribution to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.”
So there's what the SDA Church did with a known pedophile pastor in the 1890s: They silenced it. Ellen White told them to. They elected the pedophile to a conference executive role. They published his memoir in their magazine like he was a hero.
They continue to cover up and obfuscate his CSA in their biography of this pedophile.
Fifty years after pedophile Peter “Pieter” Wessels’s death, the Adventists named this library after him:
Source: https://hche.ac.za/pieter_wessels_library/
End series.