Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (ESDA) has been available

Since 1 July 2020, the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (ESDA) has been available on the World Wide Web. It is an online reference work with more than 2,000 articles, with photos of important Adventist personalities as well as with documents, overviews, maps on the history and distribution of the Free Church. International authors and editors are involved in the encyclopedia. They collect, sift, write and edit texts and documents on historically relevant persons, organizations and themes of the Seventh-day Adventist Church around the world. The project, which was commissioned by the World Adventist Church leadership in Silver Spring (USA), has been running for five years. The Friedensau Adventist University (FAU) was involved in this project and has taken over the coordinating tasks for large parts of Europe and the area of the former Soviet Union.

Stefan Höschele, Professor of Systematic Theology and Adventist Studies at the FAU, and church historian Daniel Heinz (Ph.D.), head of the Historical Archive of the Seventh-day Adventists in Europe, headed the regional editorial board. With them, the research assistants Chigemezi Nnadozie Wogu (M.T.S, as project manager), Eudritch Jean (M.T.S), Jón Hjörleifur Stefánsson (M.A.) were involved in the project. Heinz and Höschele were the "Regional Editors" for two large geographical regions in Europe, managed from Bern and Moscow. Several hundred articles had to be rewritten for the territory of these two ecclesiastical administrative units alone. The articles on the countries of the former Soviet Union are particularly difficult, as only a few historical sources are available. The encyclopedia replaces a two-volume printed version from the 1990s.

What information does the encyclopedia provide for the user? For example also names of Friedensauer graduates. For example, Amalia Löbsack, who trained as a nurse in Friedensau before the First World War and worked as a pastor's wife with her husband Alexei Galladzhev in Georgia and Armenia. "When Alexei was imprisoned during the massive religious oppression in the former Soviet Union, Amalia continued to care for the congregation. She too was imprisoned and executed on February 4, 1942. Amalia is representative of many women in the former Soviet Union who served the Seventh-day Adventist Church in difficult times and whose names we do not know," says Adventist World (May 2020 issue, p. 18). These and many other Adventist women and men are commemorated in the online encyclopedia worldwide and their fate is saved from oblivion. It is estimated that 5,000 more articles will be added in the coming years.

https://www.esda-europe.org | https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/