Summary
A highly influential writer, scholar, and administrator among Seventh-day Adventism’s second generation of leaders, William Warren Prescott served the church for a total of fifty-two years, holding numerous senior leadership roles in education and publishing and at the General Conference. He was a member of the General Conference Executive Committee for forty-two years. As president of Battle Creek College, the first General Conference education secretary, founding president of Union College and Walla Walla College, editor of the Review and Herald, the church’s first vice president, and a powerful preacher of Christ-centered truth, Prescott left an indelible mark on nearly every facet of the denomination’s work.
Early Life (1855-1873)
Born in the village of Alton, New Hampshire on September 2, 1855, to shoemaker James L. Prescott (1828-1915) and Harriet (nee Tripp) (1831-1920), William Prescott grew up in an enterprising family supported by their cottage industry and deeply conscious of their New England heritage. William’s paternal forebears migrated to America in 1665, from Derby, England eight generations earlier. His mother’s Irish-Scottish family descended from Scottish Covenanters who migrated from Ireland in 1720 and identified with the local Congregational Church. Both families had been actively involved in the Revolutionary War.
William’s father, James L. Prescott, had been baptized as a Free-will Baptist but in 1842, after hearing Joshua V. Himes preach on the nearness of the second Advent of Christ, he had become a Millerite believer and an itinerant lay preacher for the Millerites. He experienced the bitterness of the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844 and for the next decade associated with a group that kept setting new dates only giving up on the idea of date-setting in 1857. The following year he learned of the Seventh-day Sabbath teaching and joined the fledgling Sabbatarian Adventists.
When William was nine years of age, during the last year of the Civil War, his father moved his wife and family of five children to North Berwick in Maine where there were more commercial opportunities and he continued to grow his small factory. Tragedy blighted the home during a two-week period just before Christmas of 1869 when fourteen-year-old William’s three younger brothers, aged one, three, and six, succumbed during an epidemic of diphtheria. The experience sobered William and deepened his spiritual sensitivity.
William Prescott attended primary school in a number of small hamlets such as Barnstead and Penacook, New Hampshire, and at Wells on the Maine Coast. For high school he attended South Berwick Academy, the oldest and most prestigious secondary school in Maine. For his senior year he transferred to Penacook Academy in New Hampshire. While at Penacook he fell in love with attractive sixteen-year-old Sarah Sanders, a fellow Sabbath keeper who was registered as a student in his language classes.
College Education and Early Career (1872-1885)
In the fall of 1873, Prescott enrolled with eighty other freshmen at the Ivy League Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. It was a school that still valued its religious heritage and required attendance at chapels and Sunday services. Prescott was the only Seventh-day Adventist in attendance but secured permission from the president not to have to attend Sabbath recitations. Known as “Billy” by his friends, Prescott spent his four years at Dartmouth pursuing the classical studies course graduating in 1877 among the top 10% of his class of fifty-six who completed the BA degree course. The college conferred on him five years later its MA degree. During his time as an undergraduate student he enjoyed a reputation as a keen athlete, developed valuable skills as an editor of the student newspaper The Dartmouth, and enhanced his teaching proficiency through extensive practice teaching assignments in local schools.
Prescott quickly achieved prominence in his early career. Following graduation at age twenty-two, he accepted a position as principal and teacher of a 300-student high school in Northfield, Vermont. Two years later he was appointed as the principal of the prestigious Washington County Grammar School with an enrolment of 350 just a city block away from the State Legislature in Montpelier, Vermont.
The ambition to exercise wider influence led Prescott to form a business partnership with his brother Charles. In 1880 they purchased a weekly newspaper, the Biddeford Union and Journal, and launched a career in publishing. Before moving to Biddeford on the Maine coast, Prescott married Sarah Sanders (1856-1910) at a wedding in her parents’ Penacook home on July 8, 1880. After two years in Biddeford, Prescott expanded his newspaper interests with the purchase of the Vermont Watchman and State Journal, the state’s oldest and most influential Republican newspaper. The business also included book publishing and two other weekly church newspapers. The editorial skills Prescott developed at this time and the publishing business experience he acquired contributed to his success and his marked influence in later leadership roles in the Adventist church.
College President (1885-1897)
Motivated by a desire to become more fully involved in the mission of the Adventist Church, Prescott responded to an invitation in July 1885 to become the president of the church’s fledgling senior college in Michigan. He sold up his newspaper interests and moved to Battle Creek. A decade after its opening, Battle Creek College, in 1882, had become unmanageable and had gone into recess for a year, confused over its identity. In 1883 it had opened again under an interim president, W. H. Littlejohn, but it was drifting and needed strong leadership.
“Professor Prescott” quickly stabilized the shaky institution and during nine years as president nurtured it through a period of steady growth in admissions and influence. He oversaw a doubling of enrolment to over 700, with summer school programs sometimes taking the total over 1,000, as well as a tripling of its physical capacity. The latter included the addition of much needed residential facilities made possible by drawing on his own financial resources. He greatly strengthened academic resources and the curriculum enabling the institution to award its first degrees in 1889. His most enduring achievements at Battle Creek were the introduction of a “school home” environment for students with “preceptors” and “preceptresses” and the study of required Bible courses as part of the degree curriculum.
In 1887, two years after Prescott had assumed the presidency of Battle Creek College, General Conference leaders persuaded him to also accept the newly created role of educational secretary for the General Conference so that he could nurture the growth of Christian education across the rapidly growing denomination. The professor occupied this central role for a decade — until 1897 — and it enabled him to give permanent shape to the church’s educational system.
During this period he served as midwife to the birth of Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska (1891) and supervised plans for the establishment of Walla Walla College in Washington state (1892). He served as the founding president of both institutions in addition to his Battle Creek College duties, relying on deputized on-site principals for day-to-day campus administration.
The Minneapolis Experience and Its Impact
The 1888 Minneapolis General Conference Session with its sharp debates over righteousness by faith prompted a personal spiritual renewal and a profound theological paradigm shift for Prescott. He was ordained to the gospel ministry a year later on November 9, 1889. His new perspectives undergirded his drive for introducing Christo-centric Bible courses into the college curriculum. The negative attitudes and prejudices manifested at Minneapolis also persuaded him of the critical need for a more intentional program of theological education for the Adventist ministry and he persuaded the General Conference to adopt a program to address this problem. During the early 1890s he conducted several extended Bible institutes for practicing clergy on the campus of Battle Creek College and thus had a critically important role in the birthing of Adventist theological education.
The same post-1888 theological reorientation led Prescott to articulate a new Christo-centric setting for the understanding and preaching of Seventh-day Adventist doctrines. His new gospel-centered approach, presented at a landmark evangelistic camp meeting in late 1895 in Melbourne, Australia, was enthusiastically endorsed by Ellen White and other church leaders. His new Christo-centric themes emphasized the eternal deity of Christ and that, together with a new emphasis during the same period on the personality of the Holy Spirit, led to a clearer understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity that began to take root in the church after his visit to Australia. During his Australian sojourn he had been invited to assist Ellen White in the revision of her manuscript for The Desire of Ages published in 1898. The resultant book clearly articulated a trinitarian understanding of the Godhead and became a significant change agent in this area of doctrinal development.
Leaders like Ministry editor LeRoy Froom regarded his Christocentric emphasis both in doctrine and prophetic exposition, as “a great breath of fresh air.” In Froom’s view the professor was “ahead of his time.”
Church Administrator (1897-1919)
Following his return to the United States from Australia in 1897, Ellen White expected that Prescott would be elected as General Conference president to replace O. A. Olsen. Instead he was assigned by a fractious General Conference session to leadership of the church in Great Britain in the United Kingdom. His four years there met with mixed success.
When A. G. Daniells was appointed to lead the denomination through a period of difficult re-organization in 1901 he ensured that Prescott was appointed as his lieutenant. The Professor was first appointed to the powerful role of secretary of the Foreign Mission Board (1901) and then added the role of General Conference vice president to his responsibilities in 1902. When, early in 1902, it appeared that Review editor Uriah Smith was allying with Kellogg against the reorganization effort, Prescott was appointed to replace Smith as editor of the Review and as president of the publishing association, positions he held until 1909.
After the General Conference session of 1903 resolved to transfer church headquarters and the publishing house from Battle Creek, Prescott, in his combined administrative roles, became the primary agent responsible for implementing the relocation to Washington, D.C. He oversaw the establishment of the new publishing enterprise first in rented quarters near the center of the nation’s capital and then in Takoma Park, Maryland where a completely new plant had been built.
In Daniells’ view, Prescott demonstrated “some of the rarest gifts possessed by any man in our ranks.” Daniells valued the professor because he demonstrated “large executive ability” and he was confident that “the interests of the cause” were “safe” in his hands.
The overload of multiple responsibilities on the professor during the Kellogg schism threatened a nervous breakdown in 1906. He spent eight-and-a-half months overseas in Asia and in Europe conducting ministerial institutes and fostering the mission of the church.
When A. G. Daniells experienced health problems related to overwork, the Annual Council of 1915 created a new role of field secretary of the General Conference and assigned the sixty-year-old Prescott to the position. His task was to assist Daniells with the supervision of a rapidly expanding world field and during the next five years up until 1921 he spent much of his time advising and consulting with overseas administrations and conducting ministerial training institutes, particularly in South America and in the Asiatic Division.
The death of his son Lewis who was “lost in action” over the battle-fields of France in April 1918 caused his father deep sorrow. Lewis had joined the Royal Flying Corps of Canada to avoid being drafted for the US military and being sent to the trenches of Flanders. There were long months of agonizing uncertainty. His son’s body was never found and there was no funeral.
In 1919 Prescott was a prominent participant in a number of leadership conferences that had to be delayed until after the war, including the Bible and History Teachers Conference of July 1919. This conference, at which Prescott was the primary presenter, caused major difficulties for both himself and Daniells because of the frank discussions about the methodologies Ellen White had adopted in preparing her books and manuscripts and the necessary limitations on her authority.
Bible Teacher and Interim College President (1919-1944)
Prescott continued to serve as field secretary of the General Conference until his formal retirement in 1937, although during this period he also accepted several interim teaching or educational administration appointments to help the church address various short-term crises.
At the age of sixty-six, he responded to an appeal in August 1921 from church leadership in Australia to take the role of president of Avondale College. Conflict over curriculum issues and mission complicated by the expectations of state accreditation authorities was crippling the institution and had led to a 43% drop in enrolment. Prescott spent a year implementing staff retrenchments and other cost-cutting adjustments to stabilize the institution.
Upon his return to America in 1924 Prescott was persuaded by his General Conference colleagues to take a similar crisis-management appointment to Union College in Nebraska. For several years, declining enrolments and swelling deficits had plagued the small mid-western college Prescott had helped found in 1891. Serving as both president and business manager, and advised by General Conference Treasury, Prescott implemented the most rigid of economies, cut back on staffing, sold off the farm, secured loans to continue operating, and again worked to re-establish the original college culture of the 1890s. After spending a year as president, averting the demise of the college, the professor was persuaded to stay on at Union teaching religion and heading up the Theology Department for a further two years continuing also to serve as a member of the college board.
During the late 1920s and 1930s, Prescott produced several significant books and publications. He wrote apologetic literature in the “Versions Controversy,” defending Adventists who used the Revised Version of the Bible. He also produced the first book published by Adventists exploring the relationship between the Bible and the expanding science of archaeology, entitled The Spade and the Bible, published by Fleming and Revel in 1933.
In 1910, Prescott’s wife Sarah died after an extended battle with cancer. At the end of 1911 Prescott married Daisy Orndorff, a nurse, twenty-four years his junior who had helped care for Sarah during her last illness. Remarriage re-energized his outlook.
His last years were spent in his study, occasional writing, and visiting with old colleagues in the Takoma Park area. Periods of illness slowly limited his mobility and on January 21, 1944, he died quietly at home in his eighty-ninth year. Three days later funeral services were conducted in the Takoma Park Church and he was interred in the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C.
Legacy
William Prescott was an extraordinarily gifted individual with a large capacity for work and thus his fifty-two years of service to the church extended across a wide range of important roles. As a college president and as the first educational secretary for the General Conference he gave an enduring mold to Adventist education. His radical reshaping of the college curriculum, introduction of the “school home” concept and emphasis on Chapel broke new ground for the integration of faith and learning and helped establish “Christian education” as the model for Adventist schools and colleges, and Battle Creek graduates took the model world-wide.
His Christocentric emphasis in theology, his teaching on the Trinity, and his birthing of theological education for the church’s ministry helped firmly establish the church as a confidently evangelical movement. As one who worked closely with Ellen White and her son, W. C. White, Prescott provided insights and cautions about misunderstanding the nature of Ellen White’s work. His highlighting of the problem of attributing to her an authority that was not appropriate did not sit well with many of his contemporaries in the church. Only since the 1980s has his perspective been understood and valued. In this regard he was ahead of his time.
As editor of the Review during a critical period of the church’s development he helped educate the church on the important issues of the day and helped ensure A. G. Daniells’ success as the church leader. His scholarly insistence on accuracy in books and publications helped ensure that the church would be heard in the public arena with respect and encouraged the church to be careful in its claims and in its dialogue with the public.
Prescott’s breadth of learning and large intellect often gave him a perspective on issues in the church that not many of his contemporaries shared and thus he was perceived as provocative. In some things he could see beyond the present, perceiving answers to problems before others were aware that there might be a problem — and he was misunderstood. In the years that immediately followed his death it was more comfortable for many church leaders to put his troubling ideas him out of mind. In the view of those who were more prescient in regard to church affairs, however, Prescott’s insights gave fresh credence to Adventist teaching and his influence was profound. Newly available documentary sources have provided the basis for a new appreciation for his legacy and the extensive influence he exercised in the church.
