Drafting the Blueprint:
Harold Lance and the Legacy of ASI and ASI Missions, Inc.

It was 1980 in Lake Kiamesha, New York. The ASI convention had just wrapped, and Harold Lance stood among a modest group of attendees, marveling at what had just happened.

That year, despite a small turnout of just 125 attendees, members gave an unprecedented $105,000 to fund a city evangelism project in New York. It was five times more than the usual offering.

Lance, then a successful trial lawyer in Southern California, had just chaired his first ASI convention. What began that year, though, was far more than a generous outpouring.

Later that night, a member approached him and said: “We shouldn’t be satisfied with $100,000. We’re living in momentous times. What if we aimed for ten million?”

The challenge was laid at Lance’s feet. If ASI were to create an organization to support large-scale mission development and oversight, the ASI member would donate the first million to the cause.

“Suddenly,” Lance says now, “the project lurched from talk to reality.”

That moment gave birth to ASI Missions, Inc., an entity that would become the operational and financial engine behind some of ASI’s most recognizable projects. But more than that, it captured the spirit of what ASI has always been—a partnership between vision and faithfulness, between lay conviction and church mission.

A Movement Rooted in Necessity

Lance, now 93, has been called a “grandfather” of ASI—a term not of hierarchy, but of historical memory. His fingerprints are on nearly every development within the Adventist-Layman’s Services and Industries (ASI) network over the past fifty years. Yet he’s quick to point away from himself and toward the movement’s foundations.

“ASI in North America is entirely unique,” he explains. “It wasn’t just an idea to get laypeople involved. It was a response to a real need.”

That need, as Lance describes it, traces back to Madison College, the self-supporting institution in Tennessee that trained workers for medical missionary and gospel service. Madison’s model sparked a proliferation of independent ministries across the American South in the early 20th century—ministries that both blessed and perplexed the organized church. These were not official church institutions, but they were deeply Adventist in identity and mission. How could the two work together?

“ASI was formed so the church and lay ministries could sit at the same table—not as rivals, but as collaborators,” Lance says.

The earliest members were connected to Madison and institutions like it. Though they were independent, their work filled a vacuum in underserved territories. It was NC Wilson, General Conference vice president, who helped bring the laypeople and the church together. Wilson’s exposure to Madison brought him a deeper understanding of the lay cause, and under his guidance, ASI was officially formed in the 1940s as a General Conference–affiliated body. “ASI’s roots were at the highest level of the church,” says Lance.

Growing Pains and Growing Up

Lance first attended an ASI convention in the early 1970s. At the time, he was a well-established trial lawyer serving on the Southeastern California Conference executive committee. ASI at that time, he says, still carried a more casual atmosphere and was a little bit “cowboy.”

But in the late ’70s and early ’80s, a quiet shift began. ASI moved from being a loosely structured group to a professionally managed, mission-focused ministry organization. Church leaders and lay members had to wrestle with questions of ownership, governance, and voice. Lance recalls a defining moment at an ASI convention when laypeople asserted that they were co-architects of the mission.“That’s when the culture changed,” he says.

Lance served as ASI president in the early 1980s and later led ASI Missions, Inc. for nearly two decades. Under his guidance, ASI launched its signature global projects—from printing millions of Steps to Christ through the Happiness Book Project, to providing metal roofs in the Roofs Across Africa project, to partnering with Maranatha Volunteers International on the One-Day Church initiative. But just as importantly, ASI championed the “small stuff”: quiet ministries, start-ups, and mom-and-pop medical missions that never made headlines but transformed lives.

“The best stories,” he says, “aren’t always the big ones. They’re the hundreds of small ministries that ASI has encouraged and helped. Places like Riverside Farm in Zambia, which recently needed solar power in order to refrigerate their banana crop, for example.”

Foundations and Friendships

In 1989, after decades in law, Lance made an unexpected decision. He walked away from his thriving legal practice to become president of Outpost Centers International (OCI), an organization born from the same spirit of lay action that fueled ASI. OCI was focused specifically on coordinating self-supporting ministries across the globe.

“I had never asked for any position,” he says. “But when Warren Wilson, OCI’s founder, asked me to take it on, I said yes.”

What followed was nine years of growth and deepening credibility for OCI. Under Lance’s leadership, the organization professionalized its structure, expanded globally, and supported ministries in over 30 countries. Though OCI and ASI remain separate entities, Lance describes them as “friends”—with many OCI member ministries still benefiting from ASI project offerings.

An Architecture of Trust

Of all the innovations ASI has undertaken, Lance believes that ASI Missions, Inc. remains the most structurally significant. “It brought stability and strategy,” he says. “It meant projects were selected carefully. Every application is vetted, summarized, and reviewed. Follow-up is required. Reports are filed. It’s rare that anything goes wrong because we built it that way.”

Today, ASI Missions, Inc. continues to steward millions in donor funds each year, distributing support to about 35 projects annually, including both church entities and lay ministries. Roughly 20% of those funds go to official church initiatives—like Spirit of Prophecy translation work in partnership with the White Estate or funding for Southwestern Adventist University’s paleontology project—but the majority of financial support goes to the kinds of lay-led efforts that ASI was designed to foster.

“This is what happens when the church and its members work in trust,” Lance says. “That’s not common in every part of the world, but it has been a defining feature of ASI in North America.”

A Picture of What’s Possible

As he reflects on more than 50 years of involvement in ASI, Lance is not wistful—he’s hopeful. His stories are not nostalgia but blueprints: markers laid for the next generation to follow and build upon.

“ASI gives people a picture of what’s possible in service,” he says. “It shows what laypeople can do when they follow God’s leading.”

He sees organizations like GYC as part of ASI’s extended family—offspring, in a sense, of the same spirit of mission. But his real hope lies in what happens next: that young adults, business professionals, missionaries, and passionate believers will see ASI not as a legacy to preserve, but a platform to expand.

“You don’t have to leave your job or sell everything to serve God,” he says. “But when He opens a door—say yes. Whether it’s teaching Sabbath school, going on a mission trip, or saying yes to something bigger—you’ll find He’s already taken care of the rest.”

Lance has lived that reality. Since leaving his law practice in 1989, he’s never drawn a paycheck. Yet, he says, “Our net worth today is greater than when we left. That’s not a financial story. It’s a faith story.”

And so he shares the blueprints with an invitation: Follow where God leads. Say yes. The plan is already drawn.