History
Seventh Day Baptists trace the beginning of their movement to coalescing factors during the decade of the 1650s in England. These factors included the continuing Baptist movement in England, English language publications about the Sabbath in the early 1600s, and a relative freedom of religion from state interference in Oliver Cromwell's commonwealth. Once the factors had coalesced, individuals associated with the movement chose to accept punishment meted out by the State rather than renounce their Sabbath conviction.
The first recorded Seventh Day Baptist meeting was held at The Mill Yard Church in London in 1651 under the leadership of Dr. Peter Chamberlen. However many Seventh Day Baptists believe that it had originated in 1617 with John Trask and his wife. They believe that the records for this were lost in a fire.
The first Seventh Day Baptist church in America was at Newport, Rhode Island in December 1671. Samuel and Tacy Hubbard, two members of the First Baptist Church of Newport, pastored by John Clarke (1609–76), withdrew from that church and joined with Stephen Mumford, a Seventh Day Baptist from England, and 4 others, covenanting to meet together for worship, calling themselves Sabbatarian Baptists. Mumford, for his part, arrived in Rhode Island in 1665, and was mentioned as an advocate for seventh-day Sabbath in many records of that time. Other churches rose in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and soon spread north into Connecticut and New York, and south into Virginia and the Carolinas. Seventh-day Sabbatarianism also emerged among the Germans at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, founded in 1735. Ephrata was incorporated as the German Religious Society of Seventh Day Baptists in 1814, and the site where their community was founded came to be known at the Ephrata Cloister. The Seventh Day Baptist General Conference was organized in 1801.
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