Seventh-day Sabbatarianism

Seventh-day Sabbath observance among Christians did not begin with Adventism. Small Seventh Day Baptist congregations had kept Saturday as the Sabbath in England since the 1650s and in colonial Rhode Island since the 1670s, reading the fourth commandment as a permanent creation ordinance never abrogated in the New Testament, centuries before the movement that would carry the practice to a much larger audience existed.

That transfer happened through one woman. Rachel Oakes Preston, a Seventh Day Baptist living in Washington, New Hampshire, shared her congregation's Sabbath conviction with local Millerite believers, followers of William Miller's prediction that Christ would return in 1844, in the months after Miller's expected date passed without the return, an episode Adventists call the Great Disappointment. Among those persuaded was Thomas M. Preston, and through the New Hampshire Millerites the practice reached the movement's emerging leadership, including Ellen G. White, whose subsequent visions and writings confirmed and helped establish it as settled doctrine.

The believers who organized formally in 1863 took the name Seventh-day Adventist specifically to name both convictions together, the seventh-day Sabbath and the imminent advent of Christ, making the Sabbath the first word of the denomination's own name rather than an incidental practice.

Seventh-day Adventists observe the Sabbath from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, following the biblical day's evening-to-evening reckoning, setting aside the period for worship, rest and family time and generally avoiding ordinary work, business and non-essential activity across those twenty-four hours. Sabbath school, a structured period of Bible study preceding the main worship service, is a distinctive feature of Adventist Saturday observance found across the denomination worldwide.

The practice sets Adventists apart from the great majority of Christian bodies, which moved their principal day of worship to Sunday in commemoration of Christ's resurrection sometime in the first two centuries of the church, a shift Adventists regard as an unauthorized human tradition rather than a scriptural command, and one they trace historically to Roman imperial influence following Constantine's Sunday-rest legislation of 321.

Because the underlying evangelical theology of salvation by grace through faith is otherwise close to that of other conservative Protestant bodies, Sabbath observance functions as Adventism's clearest and most publicly visible marker, the practice most likely to be named first by both Adventists and outside observers describing what distinguishes the denomination from its Protestant neighbors.