About Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times is a Seventh-day Adventist missionary magazine founded in Oakland, California, on 4 June 1874 by James White. It was created to do on the Pacific Coast what the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, published at Battle Creek, Michigan, did in the East: carry the Adventist message in print — but from the beginning it was aimed outward, at the general public, rather than inward at church members. That distinction has defined it ever since. The magazine is still published today, monthly, by the Pacific Press Publishing Association, now based in Nampa, Idaho, with companion editions in Australia and, historically, South Africa. This profile concerns the American paper of 1874. It is not the Millerite Signs of the Times published in Boston in the early 1840s, a generation earlier; the shared name reflects a shared concern with the signs of Christ's return, not a shared publication.

Why the West Needed Its Own Paper

By the early 1870s the Seventh-day Adventist Church, formally organised at Battle Creek in 1863, had a small but growing work on the Pacific Coast. Elders J. N. Loughborough and D. T. Bourdeau had come to California in the late 1860s, and by May 1871 there were about 130 Adventists in the San Francisco and Santa Rosa area. What the western believers lacked was print. Material from Battle Creek was frequently delayed in delivery across the continent and soon became prohibitively expensive to ship, as Pacific Press's own history puts it. When James and Ellen White came west in the early 1870s — James White had first issued a paper for a new field a quarter-century earlier, in the movement's eastern beginnings — the conclusion was the same one they had reached in 1849: a paper of their own, printed where its readers lived. Ellen White was convinced that Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, was the place to set up a press. The Whites committed themselves personally to the venture, deciding to sell their property in Battle Creek and use the proceeds in the western work, helping to build the churches in Oakland and San Francisco as well as the publishing house.

The First Issue: Oakland, 4 June 1874

The first issue of Signs of the Times was printed in Oakland on 4 June 1874, produced on a manual printing press at James White's home and issued under his name as editor and proprietor. Its terms announced its missionary character at once: two dollars a year to all those able to pay the subscription price, and free to all others, as far as the paper was sustained by donations from liberal friends of the cause. In a note in the first issue, signed as president of the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, White proposed that for 2,000 dollars he could buy the materials necessary to print the Signs, and that once publication had started he would turn the equipment over to a publishing association if one could be formed on the Pacific Coast — exactly what he had done at Battle Creek in 1861 for the Review. Within a week his ambitions had grown. In the second issue he called for 10,000 subscribers, money or no money, and for one hundred donors of one hundred dollars each to buy a steam press and accessories; eight such donors were already listed, including James White, Ellen White and J. N. Loughborough, and the growing list was published in succeeding issues. By the fifth issue the goal had risen to 20,000 dollars to build and equip a printing plant. White described the paper's purpose to readers days after its launch, in the issue of 11 June 1874: it was designed to be not only an expositor of the prophecies and a reporter of the signs of the times, but also a family, religious and general newspaper for the household.

Pacific Press Is Born: The Oakland Plant of 1875

The paper quickly became an institution. At the California camp meeting at Yountville in October 1874, the General Conference voted a donation of 6,000 dollars to buy a steam press and equipment for the Signs, and the California Conference accepted charge of the publication until a legally organised association could be formed. That association — the Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, always known as Pacific Press — was formed in Oakland on 1 April 1875, with its capital stock fixed at 28,000 dollars, on land on Castro Street deeded to it for the purpose. A building was erected at once by O. B. Jones of Battle Creek, of the same form and size as the Battle Creek office except that Oakland's was built of wood rather than brick, and Signs of the Times moved into its new quarters on Friday, 27 August 1875. The investment paid off quickly. Within a year the Signs had reached about 4,000 subscribers. Within two years another building had been added on an adjacent lot, making Pacific Press the largest and best-equipped printing faculty in the West. Eight years after its founding it operated nine cylinder presses and three job presses, representing an investment of some 200,000 dollars, with gross annual work of about 150,000 dollars and about 125 employees. Charles Harriman Jones, who arrived from Battle Creek in 1879 to superintend the factory, became general manager in 1882 and president of the board in 1888, presiding over that growth and fighting, in the process, for the publishing house's independence — a fight Adventist publishing historians credit with shaping the organising principles of the denomination's worldwide system of publishing houses.

A Missionary Paper, Not a Church Paper

Understanding Signs of the Times requires holding it apart from its older eastern sibling. The Review and Herald remained the general paper of the church, written for members; the Signs, over time, was written more and more for the general public. Its historic emphasis, as its publishers describe it, is the second coming of Christ and the lives readers should live in readiness to meet him, presented through articles on Bible prophecy alongside lifestyle issues, health articles and Christian devotional and other religious material for the household. Ellen G. White's role illustrates the paper's reach: for some forty years an article from her pen appeared in nearly every issue, some 2,000 of her articles appearing in the Signs over that period, covering family life, the raising of children, education, spiritual life, missionary work and church administration among many other subjects — several hundred of them also appearing in the Review and Herald or in her books. The paper was distributed as an evangelistic instrument, sold and given away by agents and church members, placed in reading racks and used in missionary correspondence, and its publishers measured it accordingly: by homes reached, not merely by subscriptions paid.

Publishers, Editions and the Paper's Changing Form

The Adventist Digital Library's catalogue record traces the paper's publishing lineage in detail. It was published in Oakland from June 1874 to August 1904, and from Mountain View from September 1904. Its publishers changed as the denomination's organisation matured: James White personally in 1874 and again in early 1875; the California Conference in the intervening months; the Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association from April 1875 to March 1880; the Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society from 1880 to 1884; the International Tract and Missionary Society from 1884 to 1890; the Pacific Press Publishing Company from 1890 to 1908; and the Pacific Press Publishing Association from 1909 onward. In 1908 the publishers added a companion monthly edition in magazine form — fifty-two pages, illustrated, with a cover in two or more colours, sold at ten cents a copy from house to house and on the streets — while being careful to state that the monthly magazine was in no way intended to take the place of the regular weekly Signs, which continued for home study and free distribution. The General Conference session of 1908 endorsed the plan. In time the magazine form became the paper's own form: the modern Signs of the Times is a monthly magazine, as its predecessor had been weekly for its first century.

Earthquake, Fire and the Move to Mountain View

Pacific Press relocated from Oakland to Mountain View, California, in 1904, and remained there for eighty years. Two years later the press was tested severely: the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 damaged the plant, and a fire two months later destroyed more. The staff rebuilt quickly — and, as Pacific Press's 150th anniversary programme in 2024 recalled with pride, never missed a weekly issue of Signs of the Times, its flagship publication, even producing three special editions linking the earthquake to the imminent return of Christ. The episode captures the paper's theology in action: a disaster that closed other businesses became, in the Signs' pages, itself a sign of the times to be interpreted for the public. Ellen White's counsel at the moment, quoted ever since in accounts of the paper, urged that when people were thinking seriously, literature on the meaning of the signs of the times, wisely circulated, would have a telling effect — and that the opportunity to make the truth known should be taken at once.

The Move to Nampa and the Paper Today

In 1984 the rising cost of living in what had become Silicon Valley forced Pacific Press to move again, to Nampa, Idaho, where it arrived on 7 December 1984 and where it celebrated its 150th anniversary on 17 August 2024. Signs of the Times is still published from Nampa as a monthly magazine by Pacific Press, owned and operated by the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The American edition's editor in recent reference listings is Marvin Moore, and the magazine's website is signstimes.com. Pacific Press describes the Signs as devoted to spreading word of God's second coming, in continuous circulation since 1874, with a Spanish edition, El Centinela, alongside it. The North American Division presents the Signs today in the same terms White used in 1874: its original mission was to proclaim the soon coming of Jesus and teach people how to prepare for it, as a publication for everyone covering topics that relate to the Christian life; today it continues to produce a missionary journal communicating the Adventist understanding of truth in a way intended to reach a twenty-first-century audience, offered to members precisely so that they can share it with family, friends, neighbours and colleagues.

Editions Beyond the United States

The American Signs is the parent of a small international family. An Australian version, also called Signs of the Times, is published by the Signs Publishing Company at Warburton, Victoria; its editor in recent listings is Lee Dunstan, and Australian reference figures have put its circulation at about 45,000. In South Africa, the Southern Publishing Association published a South African edition until 1990; from 1990 to 2012 Dr Eric Webster served as its manager and editor on behalf of the Southern African Union Conference, and Dr Gerald du Preez subsequently served as editor under the union's Communication Department, with the magazine appearing bimonthly there. The three editions collaborate on articles, layout and editorial policy, so that a single title functions as a shared missionary instrument across three continents — a pattern set in the denomination's earliest decades, when Pacific Press and its sister houses routinely exchanged material, and one that distinguishes the Signs from purely national church papers.

Not the Millerite Signs of the Times

Because Adventism grew out of the Millerite movement, the 1874 paper is persistently confused with an earlier publication of the same name, and the distinction is worth stating plainly in any directory. In the early 1840s, Millerite publishers in Boston issued a Signs of the Times to proclaim William Miller's expectation of Christ's return in 1843 to 1844; with its companion papers it was one of the chief organs of that movement. That paper belonged to the Millerite campaign and ended with the movement's collapse after the Great Disappointment of October 1844. The Oakland Signs of the Times was a new foundation thirty years later, by a different body — the organised Seventh-day Adventist Church — for a settled, continuing mission rather than a date-specific campaign, and it has continued, through changes of city, publisher, frequency and format, from 1874 to the present. James White, who had lived through the Millerite years, chose a name heavy with that history; he did not revive the Boston paper itself.

Legacy: The Pioneer Missionary Paper

Adventists have long called the Signs their pioneer missionary paper, and General Conference language from 1908 already recognised it in those terms after more than a quarter-century of service. Its legacy within the denomination is that it created Pacific Press: the paper came first, in a founder's home, on a hand press, and the publishing house — stock association, steam presses, the largest printing plant west of the Rockies, eventual publisher of books, children's magazines, health magazines and Sabbath School materials in many languages — was built to sustain it. Its legacy outside the denomination is as one of the most durable religious magazines in American publishing: founded the year the church sent its first missionaries abroad deliberately, carried through earthquake and fire without missing an issue, moved from Oakland to Mountain View to Nampa with its publisher, and still issued monthly a century and a half after James White offered it free to any reader who could not pay. Few papers founded in 1874 can say as much.