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The Seventh-Day Adventist Church was first organised in the USA in 1863 and in 1884 the church decided to send missionaries to Australia. The first Adventist missionaries to Australia arrived in Melbourne in June of 1885. The shipping port at the time where people were received and ships were processed by customs was Williamstown. So these first missionaries to the southern hemisphere arrived a short 5km from the current site of Spotswood church. It was only a small company of seven adults and four children, but their hearts must have been wholly committed, their hands very busy, and their minds focussed because the Lord truly blessed their efforts.
A major milestone achieved just a short eight and a half years after landing in Melbourne was the first camp meeting held in Brighton January of 1894. In this time, the group had been exceptionally industrious by establishing a sustainable printing house which was so successful that they funded the purchase of the Fitzroy Church and later the Warburton land and factory. They had also established churches in Geelong, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Kyneton, Daylesford, and into the Northern and Eastern suburbs of Melbourne - Brighton, Coburg, Moreland, Prahran, Hawthorn. Even making Melbourne official as the centre for the Asia-Pacific region and the work in New Zealand and the islands.
At this camp meeting, the Western suburbs of Melbourne were identified as an area that required a renewed focus and it was agreed that a church should be organised in Williamstown which was established in the same year of 1894. The Western Suburbs grew outwards from this centre with church openings following in Yarraville 1903, then Williamstown and Yarraville churches merging to form Newport church in 1920, a while later Footscray in 1933, and then finally Spotswood as another amalgamation of Newport and Footscray in 1948 with our church being built in 1953. Spotswood was the result of continual growth and from that time Spotswood has continued to serve the Western Suburbs by assisting planting of another 5 churches; Seddon, Werribee, Point Cook, Melton, West Point (St Albans).
It is therefore clear that Spotswood church holds a flame, sacred fire ignited by God by the hands of the earliest Adventist Pioneers; To share the light of God to the Western Suburbs of Melbourne. This is a work not yet complete and this reason for being is embraced herein and is the foundation upon which our strategy exists.
