Presbyterian

Calvinist churches of the Scottish and English tradition, governed by elders in graded courts.

Calvinism with a constitution: churches governed by elders in graded courts, convinced that God is sovereign and that church business deserves minutes.

Heritage

The Scottish Reformation under John Knox (1560) and English Puritanism, with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms (1640s) as the enduring standards. Francis Makemie organized the first American presbytery at Philadelphia in 1706, and Scots-Irish immigration carried the church down the Appalachian backcountry. The family's history is one of principled splits and patient reunions: Old School and New School, a North-South division at the Civil War healed only in 1983 with the formation of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and conservative bodies formed along the way — the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936), the Presbyterian Church in America (1973), the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and ECO.

Theological family

Confessional Calvinism through the Westminster standards: the sovereignty of God, covenant theology, and the Shorter Catechism's opening — that man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. How strictly officers must subscribe the Confession varies by body and marks the family's internal boundaries.

Who decides what

The family's signature: neither bishop nor independent congregation, but teaching and ruling elders in graded courts — session, presbytery, synod or general assembly. Ministers are members of presbytery, not of their congregation. Everything decently and in order, by conviction.

What a first-time visitor would find

Word-centered and orderly: a substantial sermon, psalms and hymns, prayers of confession, communion periodic to weekly — dignified rather than elaborate, though the same order of worship now carries everything from chorales to worship bands.

What it has always cared about

An educated ministry — Presbyterians planted Princeton and dozens of colleges; catechesis; foreign missions; confessional integrity held worth dividing over, and reunion pursued anyway, repeatedly.

Its gift to the wider church

Representative church government, which trained generations of Americans in deliberative self-rule and fed the young republic's constitutional imagination; the Westminster Shorter Catechism's first answer, quoted warmly by Christians of every stripe; and a standard of learned preaching that raised the bar for the whole Protestant pulpit.

Commonly confused with

With the continental Reformed family — same Calvinism, different confessions and immigrant lineages, merged by some sources but not by this map. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church is orthodox with a small o — no relation to Eastern Orthodoxy. And which body a "First Presbyterian Church" belongs to cannot be read from its sign.

Range of views inside it

The PC(USA) ordains women and LGBTQ persons and leans progressive; the PCA and OPC hold complementarian and confessionally strict positions; the EPC and ECO sit between. Each position belongs to its body; the family as a whole spans nearly the full width of American Protestantism.

A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation — above all its body, doctrine or politics, none of which the word "Presbyterian" reveals. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Presbyterian churches typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.

Sources: The Westminster Confession of Faith (Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office of the General Assembly) · Presbyterians and American Culture: A History (Bradley J. Longfield, Westminster John Knox Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)

Where Presbyterian churches are on the map

11,638 Presbyterian congregations appear on The Church Map, across 52 states.

Bodies and networks in this family

Moments that formed this family

  • 1734–1743 — The Great Awakening

    Revival broke out under Jonathan Edwards in Northampton in 1734, and George Whitefield's preaching tours from 1739 turned it into the first shared spiritual event the colonies ever had — Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists and Anglicans swept up together, tens of thousands in open fields. Church membership, new colleges, and a common evangelical vocabulary followed.

    Before the colonies were a country they had a revival in common. The Awakening gave people of different churches one story to tell each other.

  • 1801 — Cane Ridge: the frontier at communion together

    Perhaps twenty thousand people — in a Kentucky whose largest town held two thousand — gathered for a week-long communion at Cane Ridge, with Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist preachers exhorting from stumps and wagons at once. The camp meeting became the engine of frontier Christianity.

    The greatest revival of the frontier era was a communion service that no single denomination owned.

  • 1801–1852 — The Plan of Union

    Presbyterians and Congregationalists agreed to stop competing on the frontier: congregations of either tradition could call ministers of the other, and new churches west of the Appalachians were planted jointly for half a century.

    Two Calvinist families that could have fought over every new settlement chose for fifty years to plant one church at a time, together.

  • 1806–1812 — The Haystack Prayer Meeting and America's first mission board

    Five Williams College students caught in a thunderstorm prayed under a haystack in 1806 and resolved to carry the gospel overseas; four years later the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions became America's first foreign missions agency, and in 1812 its first missionaries sailed for India. ABCFM missionaries later stood with the Cherokee against removal — Samuel Worcester went to prison for it, and won at the Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia even as the Trail of Tears proceeded.

    American foreign missions began as a student prayer meeting — and its missionaries were among the first to learn that going with the gospel sometimes means standing against your own government.

  • 1816 — The American Bible Society

    Delegates from dozens of local Bible societies — Presbyterian, Episcopal, Reformed, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker — founded the American Bible Society in New York in 1816 with a single object: Scripture for everyone, without doctrinal note or comment. It became one of the longest-running cooperative ventures in American church history.

    The traditions found they could not share a pulpit, but they could share a Book — and they have, for two centuries.

  • 1824 — The American Sunday School Union

    Laymen from a half-dozen denominations founded the American Sunday School Union at Philadelphia in 1824, and its 1830 "Mississippi Valley Enterprise" resolved to plant a Sunday school in every western settlement — thousands of them, many becoming congregations of whatever denomination arrived next. For decades it was the largest publisher of children's literature in America.

    Before most denominations could reach the frontier, an interdenominational society taught its children to read Scripture — and handed the resulting congregations to whoever came.

  • 1831–1865 — The Underground Railroad runs through the churches

    The network that moved fugitives from slavery to freedom ran substantially through congregations: Quaker meetings and homes, AME and AME Zion churches (Harriet Tubman's church home), free Black Baptist congregations, and antislavery Congregational and Presbyterian churches. The Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) had barred slaveholders from communion since 1800.

    Decades before the denominations could agree about slavery in their assemblies, believers across a dozen traditions were already agreeing at midnight, at the river crossings.

  • 1832 — "Christians only": the Stone–Campbell handshake

    Two frontier movements that had independently resolved to drop party names and creeds — Barton Stone's "Christians" and Alexander Campbell's "Disciples" — merged with a handshake at Hill Street Church in Lexington, Kentucky on New Year's Day 1832. Their plea: the church of the New Testament, wearing no name but Christ's.

    A whole American family of churches exists because two movements decided that unity itself was the point. Their heirs — Churches of Christ, Christian Churches, Disciples — still carry that plea.

  • 1857–1858 — The Prayer Meeting Revival: a noon hour in a borrowed room

    On 23 September 1857 a lay missionary named Jeremiah Lanphier opened a noon prayer meeting on Fulton Street in New York. Six men came. Within six months daily prayer meetings filled halls, theatres and counting houses in cities across the North and South, and the press carried the tallies city by city. Estimates of those converted run from five hundred thousand to a million — in a nation of thirty million.

    It was led by laypeople, not clergy, and it belonged to no denomination: merchants and clerks kept the hour in rented rooms, and the churches received the result.

  • 1861 — Presbyterians divide North and South

    With the country at war, the Old School Presbyterian church divided along the same line: southern presbyteries withdrew in 1861 and formed what became the Presbyterian Church in the United States. North and south, Presbyterians preached against each other's section for four years from the same Westminster Confession.

    This wound also closed: after 122 years apart, the northern and southern churches reunited in 1983 as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

  • 1869–1870 — Old School and New School Presbyterians come back together

    Presbyterians had split in 1837 over revivalism, doctrine and the machinery of missions, and the two schools ran parallel denominations for a generation. The Southern halves reunited in 1864, the Northern halves in 1869, effective 1870. It is the first reunion in this story, and it happened while the far larger wound of 1861 was still open.

    The first proof in American Protestantism that a denominational split could be undone, and it came within a decade of the war.

  • 1875–1899 — D. L. Moody and citywide revivalism

    Dwight L. Moody — a shoe salesman turned Congregationalist evangelist — ran citywide campaigns organized jointly by the churches of each city, from Brooklyn to Boston to London. His Northfield conferences seeded the Student Volunteer Movement, and the Chicago institute bearing his name trained workers for every evangelical denomination.

    Moody made the citywide, all-churches-together campaign the standard form of American mass evangelism — the template Billy Graham inherited.

  • 1886–1920 — The Student Volunteer Movement

    At D. L. Moody's 1886 summer conference at Mount Hermon, one hundred students pledged themselves to foreign missions, and the Student Volunteer Movement that grew from that pledge sent over twenty thousand American students overseas under the watchword "the evangelization of the world in this generation." Nearly every denomination's mission board was fed by it.

    For a generation, the shared missionary cause did what nothing else could: it put Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists and Episcopalians on the same boats, toward the same work.

  • 1906 — The Cumberland Presbyterians return

    The Cumberland Presbyterian Church had begun on the Kentucky frontier in 1810, out of a revival its parent body would not license preachers for. Ninety-six years later most of it reunited with the Presbyterian Church in the USA. A substantial minority declined and continues to this day, as does the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America, organised by its Black congregations in 1874.

    A body born of a revival the parent church distrusted was received back by that same church — and the part that stayed out was not treated as having left.

  • 1908 — The Federal Council of Churches

    Thirty-three denominations — Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Reformed, and the Black Methodist and Baptist churches among them — formed the Federal Council of Churches in Philadelphia in 1908, adopting a Social Creed on labor conditions in its first act. It was the first standing body through which American denominations spoke together.

    For the first time since the colonies, the divided churches built themselves a common table — imperfect, argumentative, and permanent.

  • 1922–1936 — The fundamentalist–modernist controversy

    Harry Emerson Fosdick's 1922 sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" lit a decade of struggle over Scripture, miracles and the creed inside the northern Presbyterian and Baptist churches. Conservatives lost the institutional fights and walked: J. Gresham Machen founded Westminster Seminary in 1929 and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936, Regular and Conservative Baptists formed their own associations, and a vast independent Bible-church movement grew outside every denomination.

    The argument was real and remains real — but the heirs of both sides now frequently pray, serve and plant together in the same cities, which nobody in 1925 predicted.

  • 1942 — Wycliffe Bible Translators

    William Cameron Townsend, a onetime Bible salesman in Guatemala, founded Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1942 on a simple conviction: everyone deserves Scripture in the language of their heart. Workers came from nearly every Protestant stream, and the movement has touched over a thousand languages.

    Bible translation became the missionary work no single tradition could claim — or accomplish — alone.

  • 1946 — Church World Service and the relief table

    Seventeen denominations pooled their postwar relief work into Church World Service in 1946 — "help where help is needed, without regard to creed" — and the CROP hunger walks that followed put Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Mennonites on the same country roads carrying the same signs.

  • 1950 — The National Council of Churches

    Twenty-nine denominations — mainline Protestant, Orthodox, and the historic Black churches — merged the Federal Council and seven other cooperative agencies into the National Council of Churches at Cleveland in 1950. Its education division produced the Revised Standard Version and later the NRSV, the Bibles of half of American Protestantism.

  • 1958 — The United Presbyterian Church in the USA

    The Presbyterian Church in the USA merged with the United Presbyterian Church of North America — a body of Scottish Covenanter and Seceder descent — at Pittsburgh in May 1958. It brought a strand of Presbyterianism that had held itself apart since the eighteenth century into the mainstream American church.

    A tradition that had defined itself for two centuries by staying out chose to come in.

  • 1965–1978 — A Bible in common: the NIV

    Begun by initiative of the Christian Reformed Church and the National Association of Evangelicals, the Committee on Bible Translation drew scholars from dozens of denominations across the English-speaking world; the New International Version they produced in 1978 became the best-selling modern English Bible, read each Sunday in Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian and non-denominational pulpits alike.

    Traditions that share no bishop and no assembly now share sentences — the same words, memorized across every border in this taxonomy.

  • 1971 — The common songbook

    From Maranatha! Music in the Jesus Movement, through the hymns of Keith and Kristyn Getty, to the catalogs of Hillsong, Bethel and Elevation: American congregations of nearly every tradition now draw Sunday music from one shared, living repertoire. A Baptist church, a Catholic youth group, a Pentecostal storefront and a Methodist chapel can all sing the same three songs in the same week without anyone planning it.

    The traditions never merged their pulpits — but they have very nearly merged their singing, and singing is how most people carry their faith through the week.

  • 1973 — The Presbyterian Church in America forms

    Conservative congregations left the southern Presbyterian church in 1973 over theological direction, founding the Presbyterian Church in America at Briarwood Presbyterian in Birmingham — now the largest conservative Reformed body in the country and, through its church-planting arm, one of the most prolific planters of city churches.

  • 1973 — Key 73: a continent called to Christ together

    More than 140 denominations and church bodies — evangelical, mainline, and dozens of Catholic dioceses — undertook simultaneous evangelism across North America in 1973 under the theme "Calling Our Continent to Christ." It was the broadest formal evangelistic cooperation in American history, and Catholic participation in a joint evangelistic year was without precedent.

    For one year, nearly the whole width of this taxonomy knocked on doors at the same time, on purpose.

  • 1976 — Prison Fellowship

    Charles Colson, converted before serving prison time for Watergate, founded Prison Fellowship in 1976; its in-prison ministry and Angel Tree Christmas program run on volunteers from Catholic parishes, Baptist churches, Pentecostal storefronts and Presbyterian sessions alike.

  • 1983 — Presbyterians reunite after 122 years

    The northern and southern Presbyterian churches, divided since 1861, reunited at Atlanta in June 1983 as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — the two moderators sealing at a joint assembly a wound opened by the Civil War.

    One hundred twenty-two years. Reunions can outwait everyone who caused the split, and still come.

  • 1997–2009 — The healing documents

    On Reformation Day 1999 at Augsburg, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, declaring that the sixteenth century's church-dividing condemnations on justification no longer apply — the World Methodist Council joined in 2006, and Reformed and Anglican bodies have since associated themselves with it. In the same years American churches signed full-communion agreements in a lattice: ELCA with the Presbyterians, Reformed and UCC (1997), with the Moravians (1999), with the Episcopal Church (2001), and with the United Methodists (2009).

    The argument that broke Western Christianity in 1517 was declared, by its own heirs, no longer church-dividing. Unity here arrived not as merger but as mutual recognition — churches remaining themselves and calling each other true.

  • 2009–2016 — Repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery

    One after another — the Episcopal Church (2009), the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterians, the ELCA (2016), and others — American denominations formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, the centuries-old legal theology used to justify the seizure of Native lands, and began reckoning publicly with their own missions' entanglement in it, including the boarding schools.

    Repentance became something traditions did in each other's sight — each repudiation citing the others, a chain of confession running across the mainline.

  • 2012 — ECO and the Presbyterian realignment

    Out of the Fellowship of Presbyterians, congregations departing the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) over theology and sexuality formed ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians in 2012 at Orlando, while others transferred to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Several hundred congregations were dismissed through the 2010s, most under negotiated "gracious dismissal" policies rather than through the courts.

    Many presbyteries and departing congregations chose negotiated dismissal over litigation — parting as an agreement rather than a lawsuit, which earlier centuries rarely managed.

Read The American Church Story · Find these churches on the map