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Coming to the Faith

A Visit to Millyard

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Who are the Seventh Day Baptists?

Coming to the Faith (Part 3)

Within a few months I began to feel that I wasn't learning or growing so I began, for the first time in my life to regularly, on my own, study the word of God. One of my first studies was on the Ten Commandments. I began with the first commandment and over several weeks worked my way down down to the fourth, the Sabbath, Commandment. As I studied the commandment and related references to the Sabbath in the old and new testament I became convinced that there was no scriptural reason for the change to Sunday worship. My notes from this study became the outline for the article The Keystone Commandment, which you can read in this web magazine. Lorraine remained unconvinced at the time and there wasn't a Sabbath keeping group to be found so I continued on with my studies with the intention of finding out more when we returned to the United States. Several years later as I looked back at these studies I realized that God had blessed me through those studies in a number of ways. No, I didn't become a prophet or find some great new truth, but I did grow in the word of God and when I acted on what I learned I was lead to other men, and women, of God, who helped me grow even more. Over the next three years those studies changed my life.

In the summer of 1992, after six years in Japan, we received orders to a station in Chesapeake, Virginia. On the way to my new duty station in Virginia we spent a week in Hawaii because, we felt, we would never be by this way again. We then went on to Chesapeake, Virginia. I had about a week to rent a home and find a car for my family before I had to go to Pensacola, Florida for a navy school. While in Pensacola I contacted the only Sabbath keeping group I knew of, the Seventh Day Adventist church. During my two months in Pensacola I worshiped and studied with them. While in a small group study one day the leader mentioned that there were other Sabbath groups and that one of them was the Seventh Day Baptist church. I asked what he knew about them but he did not know much. At the end of my time in Pensacola I was not convinced that Ellen White, founder of the Seventh Day Adventist church, was not a prophet and I had been unable to find other Sabbath keepers.

After returning to my family in Chesapeake I attempted to find a Sabbath keeping church in the area but I was only able to locate cult or fringe groups and Messianic Jewish groups. I knew my Bible well enough to quickly reject the former and the latter I considered worshipping with, if not joining, for some time but I took no action. At this point I was discouraged, the more I studied the more I became convinced of the validity of the Sabbath and the Ten Commandments as a whole but if I mentioned this to other Christians my idea was rejected without a moments thought and I was called a legalist. Eventually we ended up going to a Baptist church and I kept my mouth shut.

One day, while leaving a Christian bookstore, I picked up a copy of The Christian Yellow Pages and in it was a notice about a Seventh Day Baptist meeting. After getting in contact with the man who was organizing the meeting, Tom Tayler, I found out that the group was in the very early stages of forming and had not even made a determination to affiliate with the Seventh Day Baptist church. Lorraine, our sons James and Robert and I went to the Friday night meeting that was being held in the home of Georgia Fuller, in the Cradock community of Portsmouth. At this meeting we met David and Gloreen Alexander, his four children, Tom Tayler, Georgia Fuller and her grown daughter Mary, Brenda Light and Barbara Smith. We both enjoyed the meeting and began regularly attending on Friday nights.

David Alexander was already holding a more formal Sabbath worship service at the Cradock Baptist church. After a couple of months we began to attend his Sabbath service and we quite going to church on Sunday. The picture on this page is of David outside the Cradock Baptist church before a Sabbath service.

Click here to go to Coming to the Faith (Part 4). Part four is the last part.