Chapter Five—Saved From the Danger of Disintegration

We earlier remarked that the Sabbathkeeping Adventist group that began to take shape in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s had little cohesion or coordination. There was no church government, there were no conferences. There was not even a church name! This situation was almost inevitable. That has been the history of the beginnings of almost all religious bodies. Let us never forget that the Millerite movement, out of the soil of which Seventh-day Adventism sprang, was a loose-knit aggregation of people who, without withdrawing from membership in their particular churches, accepted the stirring preaching of Christ’s coming. They were more or less united in spirit as they attended the great meetings held by Miller and his associates. This was the extent of the unity of that movement.WBEGW 35.1

Now the Millerites had unhappy memories of their relationship to this or that particular church body. They remembered that when the movement had gained great momentum by early 1844, many of them had been disfellowshiped from their churches for accepting the doctrine of Christ’s personal soon coming. Ellen Harmon, for example, was disfellowshiped, along with her father and mother. It was in the summer of 1844 that Millerite ministers, in turn, raised their voices not only to proclaim the advent of Christ as near but to call on those who believed this to come out of the churches, because, said they, those churches had become Babylon. They based this charge on Revelation 14:8; 18:1-4. It is thus easy to see how these disfellowshiped and spiritually homeless people in the years following 1844 might easily be suspicious of the very idea of church organizations, with their well-defined names and rigid creeds. In fact, it was the very rigidity of the different church bodies that had caused them to disfellowship those who had accepted the Bible teaching of the visible appearing of our Lord.WBEGW 35.2

Now, it was such spiritually homeless people that largely constituted the initial group of the newly forming Sabbathkeeping Advent Movement. That explains why this new movement began, not simply with a lack of organization but with a fear of it. To transform this loosely knit movement into a church was to many of them equivalent to returning to Babylon. So strong was this fear, this antipathy to formal church order and organization and doctrine, that some were averse to the idea of even attempting to vote a formal name for the new movement. As we look back through the yellowed pages of the Review and Herald of the 1850’s, we find this fear expressed by most of the Adventist clergy and laity.WBEGW 36.1