Friedensau Mission School and Mission Work in the Middle East

What is today known as Friedensau Adventist University was first established in 1899 as an Industrial and Mission Training School. As an industrial institution with a holistic pedagogical approach, a sanatorium, workshops and a food factory were also built, which offered practical teaching and at the same time opportunities for earning money. As a Mission School, the institution was paramount in training and sending several missionaries.

One area in which the Friedensau Mission School played a key role was the training of three major successful missionaries who were sent to the Middle East. The stories of Wilhelm Heinrich Lesovsky, and Erich Waldemar Bethmann illustrates this point.

Wilhelm Heinrich Lesovsky (1901-1976) and Erich Waldemar Bethmann (1902-1993)

Lesovsky was born on July 2, 1901 in Kranichsfeld near Marburg into a South Bohemian Lutheran family. Bethmann was born in 1902 in Berlin.

In 1919, after he became an Adventist in Vienna, he went to study at the Mission Seminary in Friedensau. It was in Friedensau that Lesovsky met with Bethmann under the influence of the school director Wilhelm Mueller. Lesovsky and Bethmann were concerned with questions related to missions among Muslims. They developed strategies for doing mission in Muslims lands. As a result, both students became missionaries among Muslims.

First, in 1925, Bethmann was sent to Egypt where he learnt Arabic to be able to minister among Muslims then in Jordan (1933-1936) and Iraq (1936-1939). Following Bethmann, Lesovsky was sent to Lebanon in 1929 after he had served as youth director in Czecho-Slovakia.

Both missionaries left a legacy that still attests to their work in the Middle East. Lesovsky made a contribution to the mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the areas of education and mission. As an educator, Lesovsky influenced students in the area of Christian psychology. As a missionary, he was a key player in the establishment of Adventism among Muslims in Lebanon and Syria.[1]

For Bethmann who worked as a missionary for twenty years in Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, he translated Adventist literature from Arabic to English and vice versa. According to Chigemezi Wogu, Lesovsky later became a Muslim researcher and scholar who “helped both Adventists and the wider Christian missionary enterprise by providing a deeper understanding of Arabic culture as well as how to do missions among Muslims. Not only was his Bridge to Islam an anthropological work in its own right, it was a well-received contribution to studies in Islam.”[2]

Finally, it was the foundational training at the Friedensau Mission School that boosted the mission work and ministry of Lesovsky and Bethmann. Perhaps both missionaries remained friends since they patterned together while in the Middle Eastern mission field. What is sure is that they are part of the missionary legacy of Friedensau’s endeavour in educating workers for mission.