From American Church to immigrant church: the changing face of Seventh-day adventism in Metropolitan New York.

Extract

---

From American Church to immigrant church: the changing face of Seventh-day adventism in Metropolitan New York.

It has often been pointed out that the United States of America is a nation of immigrants, and that the immigrants brought their religions with them, which in turn reflect the ethnic origins of their members (Niebuhr 1954 [1929]; Herberg 1960 [1955]). American-born religious groups represent an exception to this, for their existence and growth depended initially on their ability to win converts in the US. Only a few of these have grown substantially. One such is Seventh-day Adventism, which emerged from the Millerite Movement after the "great disappointment" of 22 October 1844, when Christ failed to return as William Miller had predicted in his preaching throughout New England and upstate New York.

Adventists were initially almost all rural whites, who were initially so urgently apocalyptic that they thought they had no time to take their message abroad or to create a formal organization. However, they finally created a centralized church structure in 1863, and in the 1870s began to send out a stream of foreign missionaries which gave them a presence on all continents and in most major countries by the turn of the century. Adventists engaged in a building spree, first at home and then also abroad, between 1860 and 1901, establishing 16 colleges and high schools, a medical school, 75 "sanitariums" or hospitals, 13 publishing houses, and 31 other institutions. These later provided members with a means of upward mobility. Adventism put down roots in society, especially in American society, and began to move steadily from sect towards denomination (Lawson 1996a). Although Adventists had spread across the US, they did not put special effort into evangelizing Afro-Americans until the 1890s, when they launched a special mission project in the southern states. When it was found that the initial practice of admitting the new converts to existing white congregations stirred up hostility and attacks within southern communities, the Adventist prophet, Ellen White, endorsed racial segregation within Adventism as a "temporary" measure (Graybill 1971; White n.d.). The "colored work" grew steadily, but Afro-American pastors found no opportunities for promotion to administrative positions within what remained an all-white church bureaucracy. By the time of World War II their demands for such opportunities had become so strident that church leaders chose in 1944 to defuse the discontent not by opening positions in the existing structure to them but by creating separate conferences for black churches which overlapped geographically with the original conferences, which now became white. This change, which placed Afro-American administrators over Afro-American churches and evangelism, resulted in a growth spurt in that community (Reynolds 1984).

Meanwhile, many of Adventism's foreign missions had also experienced steady growth, to the extent that the foreign membership total equaled that in North America by the 1920s. The world membership, which stood at 66,547 in 1900, has shown a growth-rate averaging 67.9 percent per decade throughout this century: it passed 500,000 in 1940, one million in 1955, two million in 1970, three million in 1978. A sharp increase ...

See the full content of this document

---