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Presbyterians

American Eras

Presbyterians

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Beginnings. Among the earliest Puritan settlers in New England were many with a presbyterial orientation in which ministers and elders from congregations formed the governing body within a given district. When the Presbyterians gained ascendancy during the English Civil War, New England nearly adopted their view that church membership should be open to all who followed God’s commandments and that congregations should relinquish some of their authority to higher councils of ministers and elders in order to maintain standards and prevent unscriptural practices and theological errors from creeping into the church. When this did not come to pass, individual congregations quietly followed presbyterian practices under either a Congregational or Presbyterian minister.

Makemie. The Irish Presbyterian minister Francis Makemie is credited with joining these scattered congregations into an organized denomination. An inveterate traveler, he first arrived in 1683 to journey throughout the mainland colonies and Barbados, preaching and organizing churches as he went. His appeals to his English, Scottish, and Irish brethren for clergy attracted much-needed ministers to these new churches. In 1706 he organized the first presbytery in Philadelphia, attended by seven local ministers and their elders. Within ten years there were four presbyteries and a synod operating. A few months after the first presbytery meeting, Makemie became the center of attention when Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, governor of New York, had him arrested for preaching without a license. His defense was that he had been granted a license as a dissenting minister in Barbados, which was valid in all British domains. The court acquitted him, but a vengeful Cornbury charged him to pay the entire cost of the trial. New Yorkers were so incensed that the assembly passed a law prohibiting such assessments and got Cornbury recalled in disgrace. By this time Makemie had died, but the publicity brought the infant Presbyterian Church to the favorable attention of many dissenters who moved into the Presbyterian fold.

Adopting Act. From its inception the Calvinist theology and presbyterial organization of the Presbyterian Church attracted Protestants of many flavors, and the church worked closely with other denominations in worship, ministerial education, and mutual support. Within its fold were people from Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales, Sweden, Germany, and France. Bringing such diverse elements into a consensus on the essentials of an American denomination was a great challenge. The most divisive issues of congregational autonomy and subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith found adherents settling into three identifiable positions. The Scots sat at one end of the spectrum, favoring a highly centralized government and strict adherence to the Westminster Confession; the New Englanders were poised at the opposite end, espousing more congregational autonomy and no subscription to any man-made creed; and the Irish occupied the middle ground. Debates raged from 1721 until 1729 when a compromise was reached in the Adopting Act. The synod adopted the Westminster Confession but required its members to subscribe only to the essential doctrines it contained and merely recommended the Westminster Directory as a guide to church government.

Growth. Presbyterians formed the fastest-growing religious group in the eighteenth century, primarily because of the large influx of Irish immigrants. As Dissenters these Presbyterians had endured religious persecution for decades in Ireland, but the eighteenth century also brought economic hardship. Waves of Irish Presbyterians flooded into the middle and southern colonies, which tolerated their religious beliefs, and flowed into the unoccupied western regions. Some were established congregations who brought their ministers with them; most immigrated as individuals or in small family groups and were followed by clergymen.

Congregations. Most of these immigrants dispersed into scattered farms and so had to travel some distance to attend services. They usually formed small congregations which had trouble supporting a minister. Before a congregation could call a minister, each family had to pledge what it could contribute to his salary in the form of money, firewood, food, or services. If this was not sufficient, two or three congregations shared a minister and conducted their own services when he was engaged at another church. Most clergymen had to find supplementary support and moonlighted as farmers, teachers, and physicians. The synod assigned settled ministers to hold services in the vacant congregations, but they often got lost trying to find them. Larger congregations relied on pew rents, with the more desirable pews going for a higher rent. Worship services were similar to those of the early Puritans and later Congregationalists in New England, except that several congregations might join in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, which sometimes lasted for two days. One minister would preach a sermon of preparation, after which the local clergy dispensed communion tokens to worthy members. These were their ticket to sit at the rough tables which were roped off to keep out the undeserving.

Revivals. Within this porous, multinational, and loosely organized denomination the one common denominator was a desire for conversion. About 1726 a young minister in New Jersey, Gilbert Tennent, became acquainted with Theodorus Frelinghuysen, a neighboring Dutch Reform clergyman who was preaching emotional sermons urging personal conversion. Tennent wanted to spark his own revivals and was soon joined by his brothers and a few others who had been tutored by Gilbert’s father in what later was known as the Log College. They began to intrude on other congregations and accuse the regular clergy of being unconverted and thus not able to lead others to regeneration. Several of Tennent’s followers could not meet the stringent education standard required of ministers by the Westminster Directory and fought to rescind it. There was some sympathy for their position, for lowering these standards would make more ministers available for all those vacant congregations. The synod compromised by passing an Examination Act in 1738, which served until it established an official seminary with the requisite course of study. Those ministerial candidates without a university degree were examined by a synod committee which could attest to their learning. When the supporters of revivals persisted and tried to repeal this act as well, the synod prepared to censor them.

Great Awakening. George Whitefield arrived in 1739, sparking his own revivals and lending legitimacy to the process. It grew and became more insistent on the irrelevancy of a settled and educated clergy. Eventually the synod split into the moderate Old Side Synod of Philadelphia and the revivalist New Side Synod of New York. After the emotions of the Great Awakening quieted, however, both of these synods maintained the standards and organization that had been set earlier: an educated ministry, adherence to the essential doctrines of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and a moderately centralized church government. They only remained separated until 1758 because of the hatreds engendered among local congregations who had split during the revivals.

Sources

Jon Butler, Power, Authority, and the Origins of American Denominational Order: The English Churches in the Delaware Valley, 1680–1730 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978);

Elizabeth Nybakken, “New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influences on Colonial Presbyterianism,” Journal of American History, 68 (1982): 813–832;

Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 1987);

Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Reexamination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Library Press, 1949).

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