Seventh Day Baptists are Baptists who observe the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week, Saturday, as a holy day to God. They adopt a theology common to Baptists, profess the Bible as the only infallible rule of faith and practice, perform the baptism of believers by immersion, and believe in the autonomy of the local church. They profess a statement of faith instituted on fundamental precepts of belief. Seventh Day Baptists rest on Saturday as a sign of obedience in a covenant relationship with God and not as a condition of salvation.
Most Christians and churches in history made Sunday their principal day of rest instead of Saturday. Nevertheless, there are countless accounts in the history of Christians who resisted that innovation and preserved the seventh day of the week as a day of rest and worship to God as instituted by God in the creation of the world, affirmed as a fourth commandment and reaffirmed in the teaching and example of Jesus and the Apostles. There are reports of Sabbath-keeping in different parts of the world. In England, the first Baptists to keep the seventh day only appear in the middle of the 17th century, and it was not the mainstream belief.
Seventh Day Baptists consist of churches all over the world, with over 520 churches and at least 45,000 members. Many have constant interaction among themselves through conferences in each country and through the Seventh Day Baptist World Federation. Other groups are independent. In general, federations maintain good relations with other Baptist churches and Protestant denominations as well as establishing links with other Christian institutions and unions worldwide.
History English Baptists date back to the early 17th century Puritan Nonconformism, in which many did not "conform" to the governance and usages of the Church of England and formed other churches. Among these congregations were the Gainsborough church whose leaders were John Smyth and Thomas Helwys. In 1608, they left England in exile and went to the Netherlands. Soon, the congregation concluded that infants should not be baptized because of the lack of biblical and apostolical support. The exiled English church in Amsterdam became what is considered the first Baptist church. Two years later, Helwys expelled Smyth and returned with some of the supporters to England, reestablishing the church in London. From there, Baptist practices and teachings spread throughout the country. However, they observed their weekly Sabbath on Sunday, the first day of the week.
Mill Yard Seventh Day Baptist Church The beginning of the observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week in England caused the occurrence of well-known debates on the subject to arise. These started in London, where one of the "Seventh-Day Men", a tailor and self-taught Bible student called Hamlet Jackson, converted a Minister couple, John and Dorothy Traske, to the observance of the seventh day (Saturday). In 1614, John Traske ordained Hamlet and three other Seventh-Day Men to proclaim their discoveries and anoint the sick. In 1616 John and Dorothy were arrested but Hamlet's Ministry was able to establish the Mill Yard Seventh Day Baptist Church in London in 1617.
John Traske was accused of writing two scandalous letters to the king and sentenced by the authorities to prison on 19 June 1618, for "…aspiring to be the leader of a Jewish faction". After a year in prison, John Traske recanted, was released and tried to divert his followers from this and other doctrines he preached. However, Dorothy Traske did not deny her convictions and remained in prison for 25 years. After these, other groups also kept and declared Sabbath observance, which led to retaliation by the political and ecclesiastical authorities of the time such as when Theophilus Brabourne was imprisoned for 18 months and threatened with the loss of his ears for publishing his "Discourse on the Sabbath" in 1628.
When Christmas, Easter and Pentecost were banned in 1643/4 leading to a number of riots, a variety of "Independent" churches sprang up supporting the Seventh Day Baptists' right to dissent. Then in 1645 Henry Jessey converted into a Seventh Day Baptist arguing in 1647 that the seventh-day was "[Christ's] Sabbath which he blessed and sanctified". Subsequently the new Independent churches began to be tolerated and enjoyed relative religious and political freedom from 1649 under the republican rule of the Commonwealth of England. With this newfound freedom, England's first Seventh Day Baptist Church became secure. In 1650, Brabourne's pupil, James Ockford, published in London the book The Doctrine of the Fourth Commandment, Deformed by Popery, Reformed & Restored to its Primitive Purity, which was the first writing of a Baptist defending Seventh-day Sabbath observance, when the overwhelming majority of Baptists in England observed the Sabbath on Sunday. The book generated such a nuisance that the mayor of Salisbury, the city where Ockford lived, asked the president of Parliament for guidance on how to handle the work; a parliamentary committee determined that all copies should be burned without giving the opportunity for James Ockford to defend them. Only one copy has escaped, kept today in a library in Oxford.
The first official Seventh Day Baptist service in London took place at the Mill Yard Church in 1651, led by Peter Chamberlen, M.D., "the Third". The first records of church activities were destroyed in a fire; the second record book is in possession of the Seventh Day Baptist Historical Library and Archives and begins in 1673. The first pastor to be officially considered responsible for the congregation was William Saller, who among other activities, wrote eleven books and a booklet, in addition to an appeal to magistrates reporting concern over laws imposing rest on Sunday. The local church continues its activities to this day under the name of Mill Yard Seventh Day Baptist Church.
There were matters among the Seventh Day Baptists that were discussed in addition to the uniform agreement of the Sabbath, among them the general propitiation. Most Baptists were "General Baptists" and believed in a general propitiation. Certainly in 1710 when it attracted John Maulden (d. 1714) the Millyard Church was a Seventh-day Arminian Baptist Church.W. T. WHITLEY "Minutes of the General Assembly of the General Baptist churches in England : with kindred records", LONDON MINISTERS AND MEETING-HOUSES: 1709-1719. Cornel University 1924 However, some Seventh Day Baptists were influenced by Calvinist doctrine and believed in predestination, in which salvation is limited to the elect, the rest being predestined to condemnation, which is why they were called "private Baptists". This difference does not appear to have prevented fellowship among Seventh Day Baptists in the beginning. However, it generated greater discomfort from the 17th century onwards. Today, Seventh Day Baptist churches still continue to leave this issue open, with no direct mention in their declaration of faith or other official church document.
Under the Restoration In 1660 with the end of the republican government and the restoration of the monarchy in England, relative religious freedom was again restricted mainly to English Dissidents, forcing Seventh Day Baptists to increasingly unite in specific locations. Edward Stennett wrote in 1668 for Seventh Day Baptists in Newport in the American Colony of Rhode Island that there were in England approximately nine or ten churches that observed the Sabbath on Saturday.
The minister and master at Oxford, Francis Bampfield, and his brother Thomas Bampfield, were also prominent Seventh Day Baptists. Francis founded the Pinner's Hall Seventh Day Baptist Church in London in 1676. He was one of the first to propose an association that encompassed England's seventh day Baptist churches and their colonies in North America, technical best biblical instruction for children and ministers, as well as strategies for method conversion.
Seventh Day Baptist individuals and groups continue to appear in Britain; however, they did not achieve much growth compared to North America. Between the mid-17th century and 1910, Don A. Sanford lists between five and sixteen congregations that existed in the United Kingdom: three in London, one in Colchester and Braintree and others that existed from Norfolk to Dorsetshire and Gloucestershire. The UK currently has very few Seventh Day Baptist churches, their survival is largely the result of missionary work of the Jamaica Seventh Day Baptist Conference.
United States The first immigration to the British colonies in North America occurred for political, religious, economic and social reasons. The organization of the American colonies conferred more religious freedom than in the territory of the British Isles, which provided the development and solidification of different Protestant groups and churches. The first to be recognized as a Seventh Day Baptist in the Americas was Stephen Mumford and his wife Anne, who were from the Baptist Church of Tewkesbury and personally observed the Sabbath on Saturday. The Mumfords emigrated to the American colonies in 1664, but little is known about their lives in England.
After some adamant opposition by some Baptists to the Sabbath rest on Sunday of the First Baptist Church of the Colony of Rhode Island (located in Newport), about five to fifty Baptists who kept the Seventh-day Sabbath left the church, united with the Mumford couple and founded on 3 January 1672, Newport, Rhode Island Seventh Day Baptist Church, which was the first Seventh Day Baptist church in the Americas. The services took place in a building in Green End (address) but it grew small with the growth of the church, land was then purchased on Barney Street and the new temple built in 1730. With this, Newport became a center in which they expanded to other American colonies. A few years later two other important churches were established in the early 18th century, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Piscataway, New Jersey. By 1776, there were a few hundred members and twelve churches established in the Americas, including two governors of the Colony of Rhode Island: Richard Ward and Samuel Ward. Over time, the Seventh Day Baptists expanded, following the development of the colonies.
The course of expanding the Seventh Day Baptist churches and increasing the territorial distance between them culminated in the organization of a General Conference. At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the following century, annual meetings and assemblies were taking place between some churches to share unity and the Lord's Supper. On 11 September 1801, at an annual meeting of some churches in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, Henry Clarke of Brookfield, New York, proposed "the union in an institution with the purpose of propagating our religion in different parts of the United States, sending missionaries from various churches, at their own expense". In September 1802, the majority of the eight Seventh Day Baptist churches voted in favor of the proposal, with the result that the General Conference was founded. The service conference for carrying out missionary work, promoting unity and a great growth in the number of members and locations. It continues its activities until today, obtained the union with the Seventh Day Baptist churches of Canada, passing the nomination to the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference of the USA and Canada. Undertook most of the mission fields of the Seventh Day Baptists and through these they were instituting and spreading the churches and conferences in several other countries of the world. Currently, the conference is member of the Baptist World Alliance.