Seventh-Day Adventists
Seventh-Day Adventists stand with Mennonites and other denominations in the long tradition of believers baptism, a practice reinstituted by the Anabaptists on the basis of their study of the Scriptures and the example of the apostolic church (restitutionism).
The Seventh-Day Adventist Church traces its start as an evangelical denomination to 1844 when a congregation in New Hampshire began observing the seventh day, Saturday, as the Sabbath. God's intention for the Sabbath, Adventists maintain, was to meet the needs of created man and woman, as expressed in Genesis 2:2, 3; Exodus 20:8-11; the prophets; and in New Testament passages. Adventists base their restoration of Saturday as the day of rest and worship on the word and example of the apostolic church.
Some Anabaptists did keep the Sabbath. The best known Sabbatarian Anabaptists were Oswald Glait and Andreas Fischer. While the two are seen as spiritual forbears, the Adventist's primary reason for Sabbath-keeping is that it is scriptural.
Adventists maintain numerous colleges, secondary schools, publishing houses, and some 270 medical institutions in the United States and worldwide. North American membership in 1987 was 687,000 (worldwide, ca. 3,000,000 in 1985). The church's headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
See also Manitoba Colony, Mexico.
Bibliography
Bacchiocchi, Samuele. From Sabbath to Sunday. Rome, 1977.
Müller, Richard. "Identifying the True Church." Ministry (September 1986): 17-19. An article by a Seventh-Day Adventist in a SDA journal about 16th-century Anabaptists.
| Author(s) | John M Bender |
|---|---|
| Date Published | 1989 |
Cite This Article
MLA style
Bender, John M. "Seventh-Day Adventists." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1989. Web. 21 Nov 2024. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Seventh-Day_Adventists&oldid=110972.
APA style
Bender, John M. (1989). Seventh-Day Adventists. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 21 November 2024, from https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Seventh-Day_Adventists&oldid=110972.
Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, p. 814. All rights reserved.
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