On April 16, 1889, Frederick Carnes Gilbert was baptized as one of the first Jewish-Adventists in the US. At his baptism, Gilbert was 23 years old, and he devoted the rest of his life to Jewish work in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. From book-canvassing to preaching, from public service to book publishing, from local organizing to church administration, F.C. Gilbert helped to lay the foundations for Jewish-Adventist ministry as we know it.
Starting in the Boston area, Gilbert’s outreach grew, in part because of his ability to connect people with the hope and help they needed. Meeting these needs inspired gratitude, discipleship, and teambuilding. Conference and lay people wanted to get involved, and Gilbert’s ambitious outreach needed workers and donors. In a 1906 article, E.W. Farnsworth estimates that “during the past year nearly four million pages of literature have been circulated . . . bringing light to the thousands of Jews in Boston, as well as the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Union Conference” (“The Jewish Mission,” 134).
