Evangelical Presbyterian Church (United States) - History

History

The EPC began as a result of prayer meetings in 1980 and 1981 by pastors and elders increasingly alienated by liberalism in the "northern" branch of Presbyterianism (the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., which merged with the Southern and border-state Presbyterian Church in the U.S. in 1983 to form the present Presbyterian Church USA). An important catalyst of their separation was the decision of a Maryland presbytery to permit a minister of the United Church of Christ who did not forthrightly affirm the divinity of Jesus to become pastor of one of its churches. Another important catalyst was another presbytery refusing to ordain a graduate of seminary, who, in good conscience, declared that he would refuse to participate in the ordination of a woman, although he affirmed that he would willingly serve in a pastorate with ordained women on the staff.

The first general assembly of the church met at Ward Evangelical Presbyterian Church in suburban Detroit, Michigan in late 1981, drafting a list of essential beliefs. This list was intentionally short in order to help preserve the unity of the church around the essentials of the faith in theology, church government, and evangelism.

At its foundation, the EPC adopted a list of essential beliefs, "The Essentials of Our Faith," to state what the EPC views as the sine qua non of Evangelical Christianity (see below), in part to seek to guarantee that it would not succumb to the theological problems that had plagued its parent denominations during the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. "The Essentials" is a fuller version of the "Five Fundamentals" that many PCUSA ministers had rejected in the "Auburn Affirmation" of 1923. Originally titled "The Fundamentals of Our Faith," the name was changed to avoid the negative connotations that the term "fundamentalism" had gained. This document has served to assure that the EPC has always kept what is of primary importance for all evangelical Christians (namely the Gospel, or Good News about Jesus), as well as to maintain the irenic orthodoxy that has always been the hallmark of the denomination. (See "Ethos," below.)

In the more than thirty years of its existence, the EPC has become active as a missional church, through church planting in the United States as well as in a variety of foreign fields, particularly in the 10/40 Window. One significant step was the incorporation of the St. Andrews Presbytery (Argentina) as one of its presbyteries. This presbytery was released to independence as the national St. Andrews Presbyterian Church of Argentina after many years of mutual cooperation and benefit.

As of the 2007 General Assembly, the EPC has created a temporary, non-geographic "New Wineskins Presbytery" (NWEPC) to provide a home for churches associated with the New Wineskins Association of Churches (NWAC) that are seeking to find a new denominational home after finding that their current home in the PC(USA) is no longer suitable to them theologically, organizationally, or missionally. The New Wineskins Presbytery was dissolved in 2011 as its mission was completed.

Jeff Jeremiah, the stated clerk, announced at the 2012 General Assembly at the First Presbyterian Church of Baton Rouge, that the number of congregations had increased from 182 in 2007 to 364 in 2012, exactly doubling in number.