Sleep, Not Torment, Until Christ Returns

The Advent Christian Church shares with the larger Seventh-day Adventist Church a common Millerite ancestry and a shared emphasis on the literal, imminent, and personal return of Christ, but the two bodies parted ways on several specific doctrinal points that have kept them organizationally separate ever since. Where Seventh-day Adventists adopted Saturday, the seventh day, as their day of worship, the Advent Christian Church retained the conventional Sunday worship practiced by most other American Protestant denominations, treating the Sabbath question as one on which Miller's original movement had not settled and did not need to settle uniformly. More distinctively, Advent Christians historically teach conditional immortality, the belief that the soul does not automatically survive death in a conscious state but instead sleeps in an unconscious rest until the resurrection, and that only the redeemed are then granted eternal life, while the unredeemed simply cease to exist rather than facing conscious eternal punishment, a position known as annihilationism that sets the denomination apart from the majority of historic Christian teaching on the afterlife. This distinctive combination, an undated but urgently expected second coming, Sunday worship, and conditional immortality, has defined the small denomination's identity since its nineteenth century organization.