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And What Happened To All Millerites? 2

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Dec. 21 - And What Happened To All Millerites? 2

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Unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation. Heb. 9:28.

While precise membership statistics are not available, it seems safe to suggest that the Evangelical Adventists and the Advent Christians were by far the most numerous during the early 1860s, with the Advent Christians constantly gaining over the Evangelicals.

One reason for the Advent Christians' relative greater success seems to be that they had unique doctrines that gave them something to stand for. Their doctrines of the unconscious state of people in death and the final destruction of the wicked provided a focal point for their identity, eventually surpassing their emphasis on the Advent.

The Evangelicals, on the other hand, had only the premillennial Advent to separate them from the general Christian populace. When a significant portion of conservative Protestantism also adopted forms of premillennialism in the decades after the American Civil War, Evangelical Adventism had little reason to continue a separate existence. By the early twentieth century what had probably been the largest post-Millerite body in the early 1860s had vanished as a separate religious body.

In 1860 the first Adventist census estimated some 54,000 believers, with about 3,000 of them observing the seventh day. But by 1890 the United States government census indicated a radical shift in the relative size of the Adventist denominations. The  once minute Seventh-day Adventists had by then achieved predominance, with 28,991 members in the United States. The Advent Christians were next, with 25,816. The other four denominations ranged between 647 and 2,872 adherents each.

A century later only four of the six Adventist denominations still existed. In the opening years of the twenty-first century the Seventh-day Adventists reported more than 1 million members in the United States and more than 15 million worldwide, while the Advent Christian claimed 25,277 in the United States and practically none outside of North America. The other two surviving Adventist denominations reported 3,860 and 9,700 members.

Thus by 2006 the Seventh-day Adventists dominated the post-Millerite world. As Clyde Hewitt, an Advent Christian historian, put it, "the tiniest of the Millerite offshoot groups was the one which would become the largest."

And once again we are left with the question of What was it that propelled the Seventhday Adventists in their mission that the others lacked?


 

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There is no danger that the Lord will neglect the prayers of His people. The danger is that in temptation and trial they will become discouraged, and fail to persevere in prayer(COL 175).

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