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History of the Presbyterian Church in America
(PCA)
The following article was written by Kenneth
S. Keys, a ruling elder in the PCA and a key figure in the
Concerned Presbyterians' organization, one of the four groups
that was responsible for organizing the Presbyterian Church in
America.
Copies of this booklet may be obtained from:
Committee for Christian Education & Publications
1852 Century Place, Suite 101, Atlanta. GA 30345
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENTS IN THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN
THE UNITED STATES (SOUTHERN) WHICH LED TO THE FORMATION OF THE
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN AMERICA
To really understand the 30-year struggle between the liberals
and the conservatives in the Presbyterian Church U.S. which
finally resulted in the formation of the Presbyterian Church in
America, one must go back to the time when Dr. L. Nelson Bell
(Billy Graham's father-in-law), a medical missionary in China,
returned to the United States in the late thirties or early
forties and started practicing medicine in Asheville, North
Carolina.
It didn't take Dr. Bell long to realize that a relatively small
group of liberal ministers and seminary professors in the
Presbyterian Church in the United States--the so-called southern
Church--were engaged in an organized effort to gain control of
the church. These men, led by Dr. Ernest Trice Thompson, a
professor at Richmond Theological Seminary, formed a secret
organization which they called "The Fellowship of St.
James." They sought to have the church abandon its belief in
the integrity and authority of the Bible, to water down the
Westminster Confession of Faith, and to participate more actively
in the National Council of Churches and the World Council of
Churches. Their primary goal, however, was to unite our church
with the far more liberal and three times larger Presbyterian
Church in the United States of America--the Northern Church.
These men would get together before meetings of presbytery, synod
and general assembly, decide whom they would nominate for key
positions, what motions would be made and who would present and
speak to the motions. In effect they developed a political
machine to control the actions of the church.
SOUTHERN PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL
To let the members of the Presbyterian Church U.S. know about
this attempt to undermine our historic faith and to encourage
conservatives to resist the efforts of the liberals to gain
complete control, Dr. Bell and Dr. Henry B. Dendy, minister at
the Weaverville, North Carolina Presbyterian Church, founded
the Southern Presbyterian Journal. Dr. Bell served as editor and
Dr. Dendy as business manager.
By the early 1950's the liberals believed they had sufficient
control to achieve their primary goal of uniting the Southern
Church with the Northern Church. The 1954 General Assembly,
dominated by the liberals, approved the union and sent it down to
the presbyteries for the vote. They were so sure they would win
that they did not oppose a conservative motion that the pros
and cons of the union be widely debated over the church.
UNION DEFEATED
The Book of Church Order required that 3/4ths of the presbyteries
had to approve a merger with another church body. There were 84
presbyteries. To defeat union 22 presbyteries would have to vote
"no" on the union. We thought we could get that many
and a few more to oppose the union but we realized that if the
vote was fairly close the liberals would keep bringing up the
merger every year and eventually they would succeed in their
efforts to unite us with the Northern Church.
With Dr. Bell and several other speakers, I debated the issue
with top liberal leaders. When all the presbyteries had voted,
the count was 43 presbyteries opposed and 41 favoring the merger.
God had blessed our efforts by giving us a clear majority.
Following this loss the liberals, still in control at the
Assembly level, temporarily abandoned their efforts to unite the
church as a whole. Where they controlled enough votes in a synod
or presbytery, they formed Union Synods and Union Presbyteries,
violating the Book of Church Order by requiring only a majority
vote.
By 1964 the secret "Fellowship of St. James" was no
longer secret so they replaced it with a new and larger group
which they called "The Fellowship of Concern." They
redoubled their efforts to merge our Southern Church with the far
more liberal Northern Church. This group was in complete control
of Assembly's Nominating Committee, many of the synods and
presbyteries, the board and agencies, colleges and seminaries and
most of the important committees of the church.
Dr. Bell and a number of other conservative leaders met in
Atlanta and concluded that informing church members regarding the
direction the liberals were taking the church through the
Presbyterian Journal would never return control to
Bible-believing Presbyterians. They decided that an organization
was needed to actively combat what the liberals were doing and
that it would be a lay organization because if conservative
ministers in liberal presbyteries became involved they could be
defrocked.
CONCERNED PRESBYTERIANS
At the Journal board meeting in August of that year, I was asked
to form and head such an organization. With $15,000 seed money
which the board provided, Concerned Presbyterians was formed in
the fall of 1964 with Col. Roy LeCraw of Atlanta serving as vice
president, W.J. (Jack) Williamson of Greenville, Alabama, as
secretary and J. M. Vroon of Miami as treasurer.
By the time 50,000 copies of our bulletin-THE CONCERNED
PRESBYTERIAN-were issued in March, 1965, we had enlisted
Concerned Presbyterian chairmen in most of the presbyteries and
trustees in most of the synods.
Our first bulletin listed these reasons for our concern:
WE ARE CONCERNED-
* because the primary mission of the church - winning people to
Jesus Christ and nurturing them in the faith - is being compromised
today by overemphasis on social, economic and political matters,
forgetting the basic necessity for regeneration.
* because the integrity and authority of the Word of God are
being questioned by dubious theories of revelation in some of the
literature of the church.
* because some presbyteries no longer require complete loyalty to
the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.
* because
continued membership in the National Council of Churches involves
us in activities, pronouncements and programs of which we
strongly disapprove and repeated protests to that body have been
ignored.
* because the plan to establish a central treasurer now approved
by the General Assembly indicates a determination to regiment the
benevolence giving of the church's members by
"equalizing" their gifts - in effect actually thwarting
the wishes of many donors.
* because another determined effort has been started to effect a
union of the Presbyterian Church U.S. with the United
Presbyterian Church U.S.A., which is now engaged in negotiations to
unite with denominations that do not adhere to the Reformed
faith.
By this time many conservative members were leaving churches
which were pastored by liberal ministers. In bold type on the
first page of our bulletin was this statement: This is NOT the
Answer... Concerned Presbyterians Inc. does NOT recommend that
anyone withdraw from our beloved church. Our goal is to reverse
the trends that are causing so many members to consider
withdrawal. We should "stand fast and hold the traditions
which ye have been taught."
PRESBYTERIAN EVANGELISTIC FELLOWSHIP
When it became evident that those in control were
no
longer interested in evangelism, Rev. William P. Hill organized
the Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship. Starting with two
full-time evangelists they eventually had fifteen evangelists
serving the church. Later on this group became a sending agency
for missionaries so that our conservative churches which had
stopped giving to the church's Board of World Missions had
missionaries whom they could support.
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCHMEN UNITED
In 1969 more than 500 conservative ministers formed Presbyterian
Churchmen United and ran 3/4 page statements of their beliefs in
29 or 30 leading newspapers.
Dr. John P. Richards, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in
Macon, Georgia, headed this organization and Rev. Paul P. Settle
was its field director. They both played a very active role in
speaking at conservative rallies, informing members in the pews
regarding what the liberals were doing to the church. By this
time presbyteries where the liberals were in control were
receiving ministers who did not believe in the Virgin Birth, the
validity of Christ's sacrificial death on the cross, His bodily
resurrection and other cardinal doctrines of the faith.
The Board of World Missions was replacing conservative leading
missionaries with men and women who no longer believed that
leading the unsaved to Christ was their primary mission. The
liberally controlled courts of the church made no effort to
discipline a West Virginia minister who "married" two
homosexuals at a church in Washington D. C., and a Louisville,
Kentucky, minister who offered himself for a position as elector
in the Communist Party. Some of the liberal presbyteries were
blocking the efforts of conservative churches to call a
conservative minister.
CONCERN FOR OUR YOUTH
One of our most disturbing concerns was the determined effort
being made by many liberal leaders to undermine not only the
faith of our children and grandchildren but also their morals. In
1961 the National Council of Churches published and distributed a
booklet entitled "The Meaning of Sex in Christian
Life." Its text was a heart-to-heart talk between a church
leader and a teenager.
On one page the church leader told the youth:
"Our culture declares that all sexual activity within
marriage is legal, proper and good, while any such activity
outside marriage is illicit, sinful and wrong. We know that there
is sexual contact between unmarried couples that is motivated by
love and which is pure and on occasions beautiful."
In 1969 or 1970 the church's Board of Christian Education joined
with the Northern Church and the United Church of Christ in
publishing a monthly magazine called "Colloquy." Here
are a few quotes from this blasphemous publication:
"The American Christ is a Christ of separation and
selfishness; we want no part of him." Of pre-marital sex it
said: "If kids were made aware of alternatives, they
wouldn't have to worry about getting into trouble. If there were
some way you could stop pregnancy, I don't think there would be
anything wrong with sex."
In one issue a review of a movie "The Graduate"
contained six large and lurid photographs of sex scenes
describing in detail how a boy had his first sexual experience
with a married woman.
In 1968 more than 400 students attended a youth convention in
Atlanta during the Christmas holidays. Our liberal leaders who
sponsored this conference had the young people sing this
blasphemous song from a song book published by the National
Council of Churches. Here are the words:
It was on a Friday morning that they took me from the cell,
And I say they had a carpenter to crucify as well.
You can blame it on to Pilate, You can blame it on the Jews,
You can blame it on the devil, It's God I accuse.
You can blame it on to Adam, You can blame it on to Eve,
You can blame it on the apple, but that I can't believe.
It was God that make the devil, and the woman and the man,
And there wouldn't be an apple if it wasn't in the plan.
Now Barrabas was a killer, and they let Barrabas go.
But you are being crucified for nothing here below.
But God is up in heaven and he doesn't do a thing,
With a million angels watching, and they never move a wing.
To hell with Jehovah, to the Carpenter I said;
I wish that a carpenter had made this world instead.
Goodbye and good luck to you, our way will soon divide.
Remember me in heaven, the man you hung beside.
CHORUS:
It's God they ought to crucify. instead of you and me.
I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree.
Commenting on this convention three young men from Beaumont,
Texas, wrote that they thought the planned purpose of the
convention was to blaspheme the name of our Lord and to
completely destroy any sense of morality in the youth of our
church.
At the 1971 General Assembly our four conservative organizations
decided to make an all-out effort to elect three conservatives to
the Permanent Nominating Committee - probably the most vital single
committee in the church. Our nominees were Dr. C. Darby Fulton
who had ably directed our Board of World Missions for many years,
Walter Shepard, a former missionary, and Ruth Bell Graham (Billy
Graham's wife.)
The liberals nominated the layman from Charleston, West Virginia,
who had given the church $50,000 to start paying for abortions, a
minister from San Antonio, Texas, who held a liquor party in his
room every night, invited our youth delegates and got two of them
so drunk that they had to be hospitalized and a liberal woman
from Texas. It was the most radical group ever nominated for this
very important committee. All three were elected.
This assembly rejected an overture to withdraw from the National
Council of Churches by a vote of 213 to 189. It condemned the
Commission on Overseas Evangelism which the Presbyterian
Evangelistic Fellowship had set up to provide a vehicle by which
churches and individuals who had lost faith in the Board of World
Missions could support conservative missionaries. The vote was
270 to 126.
The assembly rejected a motion to order the Board of Christian
Education to stop cooperating in publishing Colloquy -- the
blasphemous magazine which was undermining the morality of our
young people.
A few weeks after the General Assembly representatives of
Concerned Presbyterians, Presbyterian Churchmen United,
Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship and the Presbyterian Journal
met in Atlanta to assess the situation. They decided that the
time had come to abandon our efforts to change the liberal
leadership and to start planning for a new church. The vote was
25 to 1.
A steering committee of three members from each organization was
appointed. Rev Donald B. Patterson was elected chairman, Rev.
James Baird, vice chairman and Rev. Kennedy Smartt, secretary.
Dr. Jolan E. Richards resigned his pastorate at First
Presbyterian Church in Macon, Georgia to become administrator for
the steering committee.
In August 1971 this decision was announced with this statement:
INTOLERABLE SITUATION
We have reached the point where the situation in our beloved
church has become intolerable to thousands of loyal Presbyterians
who love the Lord, and want to serve Him in a Presbyterian church
which will be true to His Word. We feel that we can no longer be
a part of a denomination in which the Board of Christian
Education publishes literature which violates our Confession of
Faith and encourages our young people to experiment with sex and
drugs; in a denomination in which the Board of World Missions no
longer places its primary emphasis on carrying out the Great
Commission; in a denomination with seminaries which train
ministers who substitute social and political action for the
preaching of the Word; in a denomination where presbyteries
violate our constitution by receiving ministers who refuse to
affirm the Virgin Birth. the bodily resurrection and other
cardinal doctrines, while denying membership to faithful
ministers who stand firmly for these doctrines which they vowed
to uphold.
Especially do we feel that we can no longer subject our children
and grandchildren to the kind of youth leaders that those in
control have seen fit to place in these sensitive positions - young
radicals who seem determined to lead our young people away from
their faith in God.
Two years were spent in laying the foundation for our new
denomination.
OUR FIRST ASSEMBLY
During 1973, 260 churches with approximately 40,000 members
withdrew from the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Their
representatives attended our first General Assembly held at the
Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama and
formed what we now know as the Presbyterian Church in America.
On January 1, 1987 we had 924 churches with 160,827 members. We
had 99 groups in the process of forming churches. Our church is
the most rapidly growing Presbyterian body in our nation. There were over 306,000 communicant and
non-communicant members in 1400 congregations as of December 2000.
The church we left was a regional church extending from Maryland and
Virginia on the east, to Texas and Oklahoma on the west.
Today we are a national church, with churches in almost every
state, including Hawaii, and in three provinces in Canada.
At the present time we have approximately 600 missionaries
serving 60 countries. The church we left - with more than 800,000
members - was having difficulty in maintaining 300 missionaries in
foreign lands.
God has richly blessed this effort to be true to His Word,
faithful to historic Presbyterian doctrine and polity and
obedient to the Great Commission.
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