Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement

Heritage

During the First World War, Seventh-day Adventist leaders in Germany permitted members to serve in combat and on the Sabbath; members who refused were disfellowshipped, and after reconciliation efforts failed they organized as the Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement at Gotha, Germany in 1925. The movement spread worldwide, with its International Missionary Society and General Conference branches; its US presence is small and quiet.

Theological family

Seventh-day Adventist doctrine held in a stricter register: Sabbath, sanctuary, the prophetic ministry of Ellen G. White, conditional immortality — together with unconditional conscientious objection to military service and commitment to vegetarianism as part of the health message.

Who decides what

Representative: delegates elect officers in a general conference structure on the Adventist pattern, scaled to a much smaller body.

What a first-time visitor would find

Saturday Sabbath worship recognizably Adventist in shape — Sabbath school, hymns, preaching — in small congregations, with the health message visible at the fellowship table.

What it has always cared about

Nonresistance as a test the movement believes the parent body failed; faithfulness at the cost of size.

Its gift to the wider church

A small standing witness, kept for a century, that a church's peace teaching is measured in wartime — a question every tradition with a peace testimony recognizes.

Commonly confused with

With the Seventh-day Adventist Church itself, of which it is a separated reform body, not a part; the two are distinct organizations.

Range of views inside it

The movement itself divided in 1951 into two parallel organizations (General Conference and International Missionary Society), which maintain similar doctrine separately.

Where Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement churches are on the map

1 Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

• Colorado — 1