Georgia-Cumberland Conference of Seventh-day Adventists - History

History

Seventh-day Adventist publications penetrated the territory of the present Georgia-Cumberland Conference in 1872, four years before the first Seventh-day Adventist workers arrived, resulting in the conversion of J. A. Killingworth and his family of Griffin, Georgia. Rufus Eugene Seagraves learned about the Seventh-day Adventist health principles from a Dr. Irwin in 1875 and was baptized three years later by C.O. Taylor, the first denominational worker in Georgia. Taylor came to the South Georgia town of Quitman in the autumn of 1876. Knowing of no other Seventh-day Adventists in the state, he engaged in personal evangelism. The next spring he learned of the Killingworths through the Review and Herald.

In 1876, the same year that Taylor arrived in Georgia, a church was organized in the present Georgia-Cumberland Conference territory in Tennessee as a result of the work of Orlando Soule, who came to visit a Seventh-day Adventist friend named Wetherby, who had moved from Michigan to Sparta, Tennessee, on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau. Asked to lecture there, Soule remained to preach in several places, was ordained by D. M. Canright in May, and built up the first church in the conference area, the Mount Gilead church, not many miles from Sparta. He organized the church in the autumn, with Patrick D. Moyers, his first convert, as elder. Moyers, one of the earliest Southern-born Seventh-day Adventist preachers, was a strong pillar at Mount Gilead and later at Graysville, Tennessee.

The Cumberland Conference was combined with the Georgia Conference in March 1932, forming the Georgia-Cumberland Conference, with H.E. Lysinger as president, and with headquarters at 547 Cherokee Ave., SE., Atlanta, Georgia. The 24 churches in the Cumberland Conference and the 23 in Georgia made 47 churches, with a total membership of 2, 490. In 1938, there were 49 white churches with 2,781 members and 9 African-American churches with 772 members. When on January 1, 1946, the African-American churches of Tennessee were taken into the South Central Conference, and the African-American churches of Georgia and the Carolinas and all of Florida, except that portion lying west of the Apalochicola River, were taken into the South Atlantic Conference, there were 61 churches left to the Georgia-Cumberland Conference, with 3,000 members and 18 ordained ministers.