After the Disappointment, a Church Regroups

William Miller, a Baptist lay preacher and former army officer from upstate New York, began teaching in the 1830s that biblical prophecy pointed to the imminent bodily return of Christ, initially calculating that the event would occur sometime before March 21, 1844. When that date passed without incident, Miller and his followers, who had become known as Millerites, revised the calculation to a new date, October 22, 1844, and when Christ again failed to appear, the failure became known among Miller's followers as the Great Disappointment, a crisis that scattered and demoralized a movement that had drawn tens of thousands of adherents across the northeastern United States. A Mutual Conference of Adventist believers met in 1845 to work out what had gone wrong and what should be preserved from Miller's teaching, and the movement split into several distinct bodies over the following fifteen years as different groups reached different conclusions: the Advent Christian Church itself formally organized as the Advent Christian Association at a conference held in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1860, while a separate line, more directly disagreeing over the seventh day Sabbath question, organized as the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863.