Our History

Our Local Congregation's History

Faith Presbyterian Church is a mission work of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church has been in existence since 1936, and the denomination was born of a fight against modern and liberal church practices. Our purpose is to stand on the Word of God alone that was "once delivered to the saints."

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church holds firmly to the Reformed faith. This can be described as an unshakable confidence in the Scriptures Alone; which present the Gospel by Grace Alone through Christ Alone, who must be received by Faith Alone. Reformed faith also holds that the purpose of life is to enjoy the presence of God to the Glory of God Alone.

Orthodox Presbyterian Church History

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) is a small conservative Presbyterian denomination located primarily in the United States. It was founded by conservative members of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) who strongly objected to the pervasive Modernist theology during the 1930s (see Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy). Led by J. Gresham Machen, who had helped found Westminster Theological Seminary, the church attempted to preserve historic Calvinism within a Presbyterian structure. The name signifies its professed adherence to orthodox Calvinist Protestant Christian teachings; it is not related to any branch of Eastern Christianity.

Standing in the tradition of men like Charles Hodge, Geerhardus Vos, and B. B. Warfield, Machen was one of the chief conservative professors at Princeton Theological Seminary, which until the early twentieth century was a bastion of orthodox Presbyterian theology. In 1929, the seminary board reorganized along more theologically liberal lines, and appointed professors who were significantly more friendly to modernism and some forms of liberalism.

Machen and a group of other conservatives objected to these changes, forming Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929. Then, objecting to theological positions that he believed compromised the distinctives of the Reformed tradition, if not the basic tenets of Christianity itself, Machen pled his case before the General Assembly of the PCUSA. The Assembly refused to take action, and so Machen and several other professors, along with a group of fellow conservatives, formed the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions.

In 1934, the General Assembly condemned this action and Machen and his allies were deposed from the ministry of the old Church. On June 11, 1936, Machen and a group of conservative ministers, elders, and laymen met in Philadelphia to form the Presbyterian Church of America (not to be confused with the Presbyterian Church in America which was organized some forty years later). The PCUSA filed suit against the fledgling denomination for their choice of name, and in 1939, the denomination adopted a new name as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

At the time leading up to the founding of the OPC, Machen and his allies in the PCUSA were considered to be prominent leaders of Christian fundamentalism. Machen and the majority of the OPC, however, were committed to the historic Reformed tradition with plenary statements of faith, rather than to the fundamentalist movement, which, in the estimation of many in the Reformed tradition, was inadequate in its doctrinal formulations. By 1937, a faction of the OPC more committed to a bare Fundamentalism, distinguished by such things as total abstinence from alcohol, premillennialist eschatology, opposition to the ecumenical movement, and political activism against the Communist Party, broke away under the leadership of Carl McIntire to form the Bible Presbyterian Church.

Early leaders in the denomination include Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, Oswald T. Allis, Robert Dick Wilson, R. B. Kuiper, and later John Murray.

The denomination maintains a cordial relationship with the Presbyterian Church in America, the largest conservative Reformed denomination in the United States. The two differ from each other more in origin and history than doctrine, though the OPC is traditionally more conservative than the PCA in its approach to worship, government, and discipline; further, the OPC, as a historically Northern U.S. body, was not informed culturally by the Lost Cause of the South as were the churches that would form the nucleus of the PCA. The OPC is a member of the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council (NAPARC), and the International Conference of Reformed Churches (ICRC).

Source: Wikipedia