Expert: Bruce Gourley - 5/4/2007

Question
I first learned of the Seventh Day Baptist about 10 years ago. I grew up in the Baptist church (Missionary) and heard of and visited several kinds of Baptist churches from freewill to primitive, but had never heard of Seventh Day Baptists until researching different sabbath keeping groups. When I first came across the name, I thought it was one small independent church but to my surprise it was a small denomination with roots in United States as early as the 1600s and even before then in Europe as an independent group of believers that followed the Waldenses. I would constantly mention and inquire about them to other Sunday keeping Baptist pastors who said they had also never heard of them, not even the Baptist Conference in Augusta Ga. They seemed to be surprised at their existence and well established history. But, I surprisingly found a link to a letter written by the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference to Sunday Keeping Baptists in 1843, titled "An Address to the Baptist Denomination of the United States On the Observance of the Sabbath From the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference." You can read it if you go to their home page and select Beliefs/History and then Historical Resources, and finally Letter to the Baptists. With their books, articles, magazines, quarterlies, publishing houses and two or three colleges they began, Alfred University in NY and Salem in W. Va and one other, I'm surprised that more Baptist clergy aren't familiar with them. Although still small, there are still active congregations as old as 350 years old in the US alone. Do you know of them and why are they not that well known among their Sunday keeping brethren? According to their website, with the exception of worshipping on the Sabbath, they share the same beliefs as Sunday Baptists. If you've ever heard of them, do you know about any history or interaction they've had with Sunday Baptist brethren over the years and why not more cooperation being that with the exception of the Biblical Sabbath observance, they have more doctrine in common with traditional Baptists than do the primitive Baptists?


Answer
Seventh Day Baptists do indeed have a long history, but yet remain in relative obscurity to this day (even among the larger Baptist family). As to the reason for their ongoing obscurity, I would suggest it is related to the fact that Christians, historically, have been (and are) largely a people who worship on Sundays. To this day, no Sabbath-observing group of Christians is highly visible in Christian life, and Seventh Day Baptists are no exception to this rule. Historically, Seventh Day Baptists have had little interaction (other than periodical correspondence) with "Sunday" Baptists. In recent times, however, the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference has participated in the Baptist World Alliance (BWA), a worldwide organization of Baptists of which about 210 of roughly 250 Baptist groups worldwide are members.

I hope this helps.

Bruce Gourley
www.brucegourley.com
www.baptistlife.com
www.centerforbaptiststudies.org