Our History

The origins of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Greeley can be traced back to July 15, 1881, when a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist by the name of E. R. Jones pitched a tent in Greeley and began a series of lectures on various teachings of the Bible.  After a number of meetings, feeling there was not much interest in what he was sharing, Mr. Jones moved on to other communities.

In Greeley, however, three women began to observe the seventh day Sabbath as a result of his work.  Eventually, Mr. Boerge O. States, a colporteur, moved to Greeley and met with them to hold Sabbath School meetings every week in their homes.  After placing books and other reading materials in hundreds of homes, he too moved on.

The next significant step in the development of the Greeley Seventh-day Adventist Church was taken on September 12, 1886, when Mr. J. D. Pegg set up a tent and held evangelistic meetings in Greeley.  At the end of the meetings he baptized 14 people.  A year later, Seventh-day adventists from all over Colorado met for a camp meeting in Greeley, setting a record for the largest Adventist camp meeting to date in Colorado, and affirming the members of the Greeley church.

In 1902 their number had grown to about 50.  That year they hauled lumber from Lyons to build the first Seventh-day Adventist Church in Greeley, a frame building on the corner of 8th Street and 14th Avenue.  In 1916 the church organized its first church school and hired Mrs. Daisy White as teacher.

In 1922, when the church membership reached 70, Roy E. Hay was appointed as the Greeley Adventist Church's first resident minister.  In August of 1925, work began on a new church building that was located on the corner of 9th Street and 13th Avenue with the capacity to seat 300 people and a basement that could house the school.

During the development of the Greeley Seventh-day Adventist church, the German Beebee Draw Seventh-day Adventist church had been meeting in the LaSalle area south-east of Greeley.  Many of them had discovered the Seventh-day Sabbath in Russia before moving to North-Eastern Colorado in the late 1880s.  They had countinued to keep the Sabbath until, around the turn of the century, they joined the Seventh-day Adventist denomination and built a church in Beebee Draw.  In 1943 that congregation disbanded and its members joined the Greeley Seventh-day Adventist church.

Around that same time, communities in the Briggsdale area were depleted as the U. S. Government took over land for the Crow Valley Grazing Project and young people moved away to find work elsewhere.  The Seventh-day Adventist Church that had been meeting in that area eventually disbanded as well, and several of its members joined the Greeley Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Once again, in 1952, the Greeley Seventh-day Adventist Church broke ground on a new building project at at the corner of 10th Street and 21st Avenue for a church that could seat just under 500 people.  That building is still being used by the Greeley Adventist Church today.  In 1960 church membership exceeced the 350 mark.

In 1963 the church decided to build the school it presently operates at 612 23rd Avenue.  A year later funds came in to add a gymnasium to the building.  In 1967 the school opened with an enrollment of 58 students.  The last part of the present-day structure to be added was the annex, originally built to serve as a Community Services Center and house the Dorcas clothing and quilting programs which closed its doors in 2007.

In 1993 the Greeley Seventh-day Adventist Church membership exceeded the 500 mark.  However, over the following decade church attendance slowly began to decline.  In the year 2000, a group of members started another, more contemporary congregation, The Adventure (Adventist) Church.  Eventually a number of families left to join The Adventure Church, many of them frustrated by the mother church's resistance to change.

In 2004 another substantial number of members broke away from the Greeley Adventist Church and formed the Elm Haven Adventist Fellowship that now meets in Windsor.  Since then, attendance has been lower with a weekly average around 80.

Today the aging membership of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is starting to reach out to younger families with the hope of passing the baton to a younger generation that will be able to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ to a world that has changed so much it is radically different from the way it was when the church first started, in the late 1800s.