Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church - History

History

After the Westminster Confession was signed by its drafters in 1643, the "Covenanters," a Presbyterian group, left the Church of Scotland for the New World in order to avoid signing an oath to the monarch. These early believers seceded from the Church of Scotland over doctrinal differences. Some ministers stayed in the Church of Scotland to work out their differences. By 1739, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor Ebenezer Erskine led a group of ministers to leave the Church of Scotland who formed a separate group the Seceders which again opposed the main group and had doctrinal differences. Ebenezer Erskine and his brother Ralph Erskine preached sermons that later became the inspiration for the Associate Reformed Church in the American colonies. The monarch moved the some of Ebenezer Erskine's followers to Ireland to quell religious disputes among Catholics and Protestants. These Scots-Irish Seceders and Catholics continued to battle in what is known as The Killing Time and some of the Scots-Irish later emigrated to the American colonies with Seceder ministers from Scotland in the mid 1700s. They settled with the Covenanters in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

Some churches of the Covenanter tradition and the Seceder tradition came together officially in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1782. The Synod of the South was formed consisting of churches in North and South Carolina and Georgia in 1803 and still another in Texas. Each tradition put aside doctrinal differences to come together as long as oath-signing to a central government could be avoided. The Northern Synod merged with the Associate Presbyterians in 1858 to form the United Presbyterian Church of North America.