Immanuel Orthodox Presbyterian Church
Collingswood, New Jersey
September 23, 2007
So far in this project I have attended one church service in the Bible Presbyterian Church (BPC) denomination, and one in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination, both more conservative offshoots of my own mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA) denomination. Today I wanted to visit an Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), about which I knew little except that this is the group that is less culturally conservative than Bible Presbyterian (ie, they do not preach total abstinence from alcohol). Also, I have known some very, very nice members of the OPC church, and so I had a generally favorable impression of them.
First I checked Wikipedia. The OPC split off from the mainline Presbyterians in 1936, when J. Gresham Machen and other conservative Presbyterians met in Philadelphia to form a church they at first called the Presbyterian Church of America. The mainline group (PCUSA) filed suit against them for their choice of name, contending that it was too close to theirs, and in 1939 the conservatives renamed themselves the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (I guess they lost the lawsuit). At any rate, OPC churches are awfully close to PCA churches (they came close to reuniting in the seventies), and, according to Wikipedia, the OPC is pursuing ecumenical relations with the BPC. I’m sure the distinctions among the three are painfully clear to their members, but to mainline Presbyterians it seems as though it’s just us (reasonable and right) against all three of them (unreasonable and wrong). It probably looks the same way, in reverse, to them.
