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Church Founder
attend to responsibilities there. Mrs. White preached at the camp ground to the assembled Seventh-day Adventists and their guests. She noted with surprised joy how much
the attendance had grown from the small, mostly poor and uneducated group she had
addressed at the same place six years earlier.
Evidently the Sunday afternoon temperance meeting had been well advertised, for
people poured out of three excursion trains onto the campground. Ellen White wrote
about the large group that assembled and the message she presented to them:
The people here were very enthusiastic on the temperance question.
At 2:30 p.m. I spoke to about eight thousand people on the subject of
temperance viewed from a moral and Christian standpoint. I was
blessed with remarkable clearness and liberty, and was heard with the
best of attention from the large audience present.
We left the beaten track of the popular lecturer, and traced the origin
of the prevailing intemperance to the home, the family board, and the
indulgence of appetite in the child… .The great work of temperance
reform, to be thoroughly successful, must begin in the home.
—Ibid., 222-24.
The next night Ellen White appealed to her listeners to give their hearts to Christ.
Around 50 came forward to request special prayer, and 15 were baptized as a result of
the preaching by Ellen White and Elder Waggoner.
Mrs. White returned to Battle Creek and entered the Sanitarium for treatments.
About the same time, Elder White was sick from exhaustion. However, they prayed and
decided to venture on God’s promises by faith to attend the camp meeting at Groveland,
Massachusetts. Thousands of people came on Sunday by boats and trains. Again Ellen
White accepted the privilege and responsibility of addressing a huge tent full of people
with thousands more packed around the outside. At the beginning she experienced pain
in her lungs and throat, but while speaking she forgot her discomfort and weariness. For
more than an hour she spoke on Christian temperance.
One evening Mrs. White especially directed her remarks to sinners and backsliders;
200 listeners, from children to gray-haired seniors, came forward for special prayer. In
the afternoon a baptism was conducted for 39 converts, and many others declared their
intention to be baptized when they returned home.
On and on she went—to Oregon, Colorado, New England, the Midwest—considering this her only opportunity to call some of those listeners to prepare for the judgment at the end of the world.
As for her method of preparing sermons, it appears that often Ellen White thought
and prayed about the subject matter needed for a particular time and place as she traveled. Upon occasion the Lord gave her specific instruction to relay to a particular group.
(Ibid., 111.) She usually spoke in an extemporaneous mode, looking directly at her
listeners. As she grew older, when addressing business sessions she sometimes read

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