Presbyterian Church in the United States of America
| Presbyterian Church in the United States of America | |
| Classification | Protestant |
|---|---|
| Orientation | Calvinist |
| Associations | Merged with the United Presbyterian Church of North America in 1958 to form the newer United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPC-USA) |
| Founder | John Witherspoon |
| Origin | 1789 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Branched from | Church of Scotland |
| Separations | Cumberland Presbyterian Church (separated 1810; reunited in part 1906); divided into New School and Old School bodies 1836-1869; Presbyterian Church in the United States ("Southern Presbyterians" - separated 1861; re-united 1983); the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, separated 1936 |
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The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ("PC-USA") was an earlier Presbyterian denomination in the United States. It was organized in 1789 under the leadership of John Witherspoon in the wake of the American Revolution and existed until 1958 when it merged with the United Presbyterian Church of North America to form the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPC-USA). Although national and ecumenical in membership in its later years, it acquired the nickname of the "Northern Presbyterians" as a result of differences over slavery, politics and theology in its earlier years.
History[edit]
The first General Assembly of the PC-USA met in Philadelphia in 1789. It adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith, together with the Larger Catechism and the Shorter Catechism, as the church's subordinate standard (i.e. subordinate to the Bible). The General Assembly modified the confession to bring its teaching on civil government in line with American practices and by removing references to the pope as an anti-christ. The new church was organized into four synods: New York and New Jersey, Philadelphia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. These synods included 17 presbyteries and 419 congregations.
During the "Second Great Awakening", the PC-USA was much less involved in the newly emergent revivalism than the other newly-emergent Methodist and Baptist or even immigrant Lutheran and Reformed or Congregationalist denominations in America. The Cumberland Presbyterian Church (CPC), which originated from revivals in Kentucky and Tennessee, separated from the national PC-USA at the time of this revival. Nonetheless, growth progressed apace from east to west, covering most of the U.S.A.
In the "Old School-New School Controversy", the church divided into a "New School" (favoring revivals and a less stringent Calvinism) and "Old School" (favoring traditional Calvinism and formal worship) in 1836; these factions would not reunite until 1869.
In the meantime, in 1861, almost all the Presbyterian congregations and Presbyteries in the southern States separated from the PC-USA over the issue of slavery, forming what would come to be known as the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PC-US), often known as the "Southern Presbyterians" or "Southern church". The PC-USA thus became known (sometimes pejoratively) as the "Northern church," although it maintained a presence in the southern U.S.A. through its work among African-Americans and through some congregations in Appalachia region of the Appalachian Mountains that, in accordance with the region's political support for the Union, refused to leave for the PC-US.
Most of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church eventually re-united with the national PC-USA in 1906, at which time the Westminster Confession was revised again, in part to accommodate the more "Wesleyan"-"Arminian" views of the C.P.C.. The C.P.C. acquisitions brought this group of Southern and border-state (e.g., Kentucky, Missouri) churches back into the historic fold.
Between 1922 and 1936, the PC-USA experienced a major controversy, the "Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy", concerning matters such as inerrant inspiration of the scriptures, the role of the confessional standards, and the "temperance" movement. This occasioned the formation of the first explicitly conservative schism in American Presbyterian history with the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It was exemplified by the church trial and controversy around a prominent minister Harry Emerson Fosdick in New York City who had been ordained as a Baptist, but served in the local First Presbyterian Church, who preached a challenging sermon regarding what he saw as the rising tide of fundamentalism. He later went on to become the minister of the famed ecumenical Riverside Church (now member of the American Baptist Churches and United Church of Christ) in New York. The issue was also to hit the national consciousness and headlines with the famed "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee with the 1923 trial of a young school teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in his classroom contrary to a recently passed state law.
In 1946, with cooperation of three other denominations, it formed the United Andean Indian Mission, an agency that sent missionaries to Ecuador.
In 1958, the PC-USA ("Northern church") merged with the United Presbyterian Church of North America to form the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. It was this body (occasionally now called the "U.P.'ers") that existed and ministered during the 1960's and 70's and then merged with the PC-US ("Southern Presbyterians") to form the present-day larger and ecumenically broader Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1983 (distinquished from earlier previous denominations by the use of the parentheses around the initials).
External links[edit]
- Orthodox Presbyterian Church
- Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) predecessor churches
- Presbyterian denominations in North America
- Presbyterian organizations established in the 18th century
- Presbyterianism in the United States
- Protestant denominations, unions, and movements established in the 18th century
- Religious organizations established in 1789
