About the OPC

As soon as the church was established by Christ and baptized by the Spirit, the devil began to attack it with compromise and lies.

During the first three centuries of its existence, the Church fought valiantly against the heretics who sought to undermine the most foundational doctrines of the faith: The Trinity and the Person of Christ.

After these heretics were exposed and silenced with the ecumenical creeds, the devil adopted a new strategy of attack. Rather than opposing the main tenets of the faith, and knowing that the human mind is a proverbial idol factory, the devil began to obscure the truth slowly and subtly through idolatry and ceremony.

These satanic subtleties (and the priests which performed and promoted them) soon evolved into a formidable religious system called Roman Catholicism. Under this system, the truth and flame of the Gospel was nearly extinguished for a millennium.

During these dark times, there were theologians, priests, monks, or friars within the Roman Church who called for a reformation of the doctrine and practice, but they were quickly silenced by the Beast.

However, and as the sixteenth century began to dawn, there were several who decided that they would rather die than watch the Light of Christ remain hidden under the bushel of sacerdotalism and sacramentalism.

The Protestant Reformation began, flourished, and was culminated about one hundred and fifty years later when several ministers met at the Westminster Assembly in London to summarize the ancient-but-newfound faith. This group produced and adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.

As English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants came to America, they brought the Westminster Standards with them and established the Presbyterian Church of the USA.

While the PCUSA was growing in faith, strength, and numbers, the devil was busy infecting the universities and seminaries of Europe with rank liberalism (with sinister hopes that its foul contagion would eventually spread to America).  It did.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, new reformers began to arise; one of whom being a Presbyterian minister and professor at Princeton University named J. Gresham Machen, who took a strong stand against liberalism and was deposed from office as a result.

Several ministers, elders, and laymen regarded this not only as a gross miscarriage of ecclesiastical justice, but also as a sign of sure apostasy from the faith.  In 1936 they constituted our denomination and have continued, by God’s grace, to fight the good fight of faith to this day.

For more information, visit our denominational website at www.opc.org.