Pathfinders in Trinidad and Tobago

Before any pastor, the books arrived. Probably around 1879, Adventist publications sent from England began to circulate on the islands, and years later a copy of Patriarchs and Prophets, by Ellen White, passed from hand to hand until it reached one of Trinidad's earliest Sabbath keepers. Seventh-day Adventist history in Trinidad and Tobago, and the story of its Pathfinders, grew out of that ground prepared by reading. In 1954, just four years after the General Conference made the Pathfinder Club official around the world, Trinidad's first Pathfinder workshop took place at Camp Cumana. In 2024, a single Pathfinder fair in Trinidad drew more than 800 participants.

📚Seventh-day Adventist history in Trinidad and Tobago: how did the message arrive?

Trinidad and Tobago is a two-island nation in the southern Caribbean, facing the northeast coast of Venezuela, and English is its official language. The Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (ESDA), maintained by the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, traces its political path through three dates: Tobago joined the colony of Trinidad in 1889, independence came on August 31, 1962, and the republic followed in 1976.

According to the ESDA, the first contact with the Adventist message probably came on paper: publications posted from Southampton, in England, around 1879, thanks to the efforts of the pioneer John Loughborough. The word “probably” matters here: the encyclopedia does not commit to the date, and neither do we. On Tobago, a small circle gathered around James P. Braithwaite was already keeping the Sabbath in 1880 or 1881, but it never grew into a lasting church. In the early 1880s, the International Tract and Missionary Society, based in the United States, also listed both islands among the places it shipped its printed material.

In Trinidad, the ESDA links the first concrete response to a single book: a copy of Patriarchs and Prophets, by Ellen White. The buyer was a minister visiting from another island; the volume then went to a catechist and finally landed with someone who would become one of Trinidad's Sabbath pioneers. Published in 1890, the book walks through Bible history from creation to the reign of David. Read more about the author in Who was Ellen White?

The year 1879 has a special ring for club members: that was when two teenagers in Michigan, in the United States, organized the first Adventist young people's society, a starting point covered in the roots of the Pathfinders in the Missionary Volunteers.

Cast your bread upon the waters, For you will find it after many days.Ecclesiastes 11:1, New King James Version (NKJV)

🎒Who were the first Adventist colporteurs and missionaries in Trinidad?

A colporteur is someone who carries Christian books from door to door, and much of Adventist history in the Caribbean runs through people like that. In Trinidad, the first colporteur named by the ESDA is an American, William Arnold, who in 1891 and 1892 knocked on door after door and left The Great Controversy, among other titles, in a great many homes. When Arnold moved on to England, it was the Foreign Mission Board that called on a Caribbean man to keep the work going: Charles D. Adamson, who sold books and taught the Bible while earning his own keep. Adamson gathered the interested people he met into groups that kept the Sabbath, in Couva and in Port of Spain.

In February 1894, a missionary couple reached Trinidad: Pastor Andrew Flowers and Rachel, his wife. Their stay was brief and painful. In July, Flowers died of yellow fever in Port of Spain, and two months later Rachel went back to the United States. For 14 months the island had no resident Adventist pastor. The person who held the groups together and strengthened them during that gap was Adamson, alongside St. Clair M. Phipps, one of the interested people in Couva, and other believers.

The harvest came on November 23, 1895: in Couva, 28 members became the country's first organized Seventh-day Adventist church. That same year, far to the south, the first Adventist church in Brazil was born in Gaspar Alto, in the state of Santa Catarina, as told in how Adventism arrived in Brazil. In January 1897, Couva dedicated the island's first Adventist church building, and in June it was Port of Spain's turn to organize a church, with 18 members. By 1900, membership stood at roughly 160, spread across three churches.

🏛️How did the Adventist Church grow and organize in the English-speaking Caribbean?

Growth called for a new structure. The ESDA places the creation of the South Caribbean Conference in 1906, bringing Trinidad and Tobago together with other islands under one office in Port of Spain; the conference's own website dates its organization as a conference to 1916, and we record that difference here. That same year, 1906, Port of Spain already had a modest Adventist print shop, opened because the Caribbean Watchman magazine was doing so well. When 1913 closed, the country had 632 members in 12 congregations. The Caribbean Union Conference came into being in 1926 and started work in January 1927, also headquartered in Port of Spain; that August it opened the school now called the University of the Southern Caribbean. The Union belongs to the Inter-American Division, created in 1922, the same division featured in the history of the Pathfinders in Mexico.

Not everyone cheered. The ESDA recalls that on April 26, 1927, an editorial in the Port of Spain Gazette urged the government to firmly deny any backing to Adventist work. The tone changed with time: the Trinidad Guardian, in an editorial of September 3, 1966, praised the Adventist hospital and the church's stand for temperance.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (ESDA), article Trinidad and Tobago (2021), for 1895 to 1996; General Conference, 2025 Annual Statistical Report, Table 2, for 2024.

⛺When did Pathfinders start in Trinidad and Tobago?

Pathfinders in Trinidad and Tobago enter the story through the door of the Sabbath School and the Young People's Missionary Volunteers. In 1954, William Wilson Thomson took over as secretary of those two departments, and, according to the ESDA, it was with him in charge that Trinidad organized its first Pathfinder workshop that same year, at Camp Cumana.

The date stands out. The General Conference had approved the club for the whole world in 1950, as told in the 1950 official recognition of the Pathfinder Club, and four years later Trinidad was already running a workshop devoted to it. For comparison, the first club in South America was organized in Peru in 1955, and in Brazil the first clubs appeared in 1959.

By 1955, according to the ESDA, the country already had three Adventist secondary schools, and youth work was branching out with camps and the Pathfinder Club. Neither the ESDA nor the official church pages we consulted give the name of the first club in Trinidad and Tobago or the exact date it was organized. That is why we state neither here.

🧭Who was William Wilson Thomson, the leader of the first workshop?

Tobago gave the Caribbean church W. W. Thomson, as William Wilson Thomson came to be known: he was born in Castara on November 24, 1917. Before he served the church, he made his living behind a camera, running a photography studio in Port of Spain until 1950. That year he joined the church's workforce as secretary of the Book and Bible House, the Adventist bookstore of the South Caribbean Conference. His ordination as a pastor came on December 17, 1955.

His career crossed paths with young people again and again. After the East Caribbean Conference chose him as president in 1970, he gave fresh energy, according to the ESDA, to youth ministry and to the clubs for Pathfinders and Master Guides. The report covering 1971 to 1975 adds up to 6,100 baptisms and 11 new congregations. In 1975, the newly created North Caribbean Conference chose him as its first president.

His patience and tolerance earned him the nickname Mr. Understanding. He retired in 1982 and died in Florida, in the United States, on March 12, 2004, aged 86.

🔥How did Pathfinders join the Caribbean's evangelistic campaigns?

The church in Trinidad and Tobago became known for its large evangelistic campaigns. In 1966, the African American pastor E. E. Cleveland preached a series in Port of Spain that led 824 people to join the church, a world evangelism record at the time, according to the ESDA. That mark fell in 1993, when Fitz Henry, a lay evangelist from Jamaica, passed 1,200 baptisms in a campaign at Queen's Park Savannah.

Young people joined that movement. In 1984, the Caribbean Union's Youth Ministries department brought the 2nd Youth Congress to Port of Spain. Two years later, according to the ESDA, Pathfinder evangelistic crusades multiplied across the Union's territory, and the same record points to more than 200 baptisms in 1986. In 1998, it was at Queen's Park Savannah that Clive P. Dottin, then the Union's Adventist Youth director, introduced the Mega Mission Ministry, with support groups reaching out to people struggling with drug addiction, to schools and to the unemployed, among others.

From March 27 to April 1, 2018, the Caribbean Union gathered Pathfinders at Loo Creek, Guyana, for a regional camporee built around the story of Joseph; on Sabbath, March 31, 32 of them were baptized. On a larger scale, clubs from across the region met at the 5th Inter-American Camporee in Jamaica in 2023.

📊What is the main religion in Trinidad and Tobago, and how many Adventists live there?

The religion with the most followers in Trinidad and Tobago is Roman Catholicism. In the 2011 census by the Central Statistical Office (CSO), 285,671 people said they were Roman Catholic, followed by 240,100 Hindus and 159,033 members of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches. Seventh-day Adventists numbered 54,156 people, about 4.1% of the population counted in households, up 22.7% from 44,147 in 2000. The country had 1,328,019 inhabitants in that census.

The census measures who says they are Adventist; the church counts baptized members. According to the General Conference's 2025 Annual Statistical Report, Trinidad and Tobago ended 2024 with 68,260 members in 170 churches and 20 companies, the equivalent of one baptized Adventist for every 20 inhabitants. Of that total, 61,084 belong to the South Caribbean Conference, which today covers just the island of Trinidad, and 7,176 to the Tobago Conference. Tobago became a separate field, the Tobago Mission, in 2004 and, according to the Tobago Conference itself, was raised to conference status in 2023.

Source: Central Statistical Office of Trinidad and Tobago (CSO), 2011 Census, Demographic Report, Table 1.7 (largest named religious groups; the Other and Not Stated categories are left out).

🏝️What are Pathfinders in Trinidad and Tobago doing today?

Pathfinders in Trinidad and Tobago are still going strong. From August 2 to 4, 2024, El Dorado East Secondary School hosted more than 800 Pathfinders for the South Caribbean Conference's Master Guide and Pathfinder Fair, according to the conference. The fair came right after YUTCAH, a Caribbean Union youth program, and on Sabbath it welcomed visitors from other Caribbean countries. The weekend wrapped up with a big parade on Sunday.

Seventy years separate the Camp Cumana workshop from that fair. Along the way came a borrowed book, a foreign colporteur, a missionary who died a few months after arriving and a photographer from Tobago who became a youth leader. When your club studies the worldwide history of the movement, make room for these two Caribbean islands, where reading got there before the pastors did.