Understanding the Evangelical Presbyterian Church's Unique Calling

My denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, is currently bracing itself for an important and likely difficult time of discernment and conversation at our General Assembly this summer. When we gather in Denver in mid-June, at the center of our deliberation will be thorny doctrinal questions about the nature of sexual desire, the dynamics of temptation, the meaning of concupiscence, the possibility of the mortification of sin, and the extent of its indwelling power in those called to ordained leadership in the Church. Collectively we find ourselves taking a deep breath and steeling ourselves for what many fear will be a contentious gathering.

Controversy and strife are relatively new visitors to our common life. In the past, friends from other denominations would speak to me wistfully about the EPC—our lack of rancor, the familial feel of our church courts, the winsomeness of our stated ethos (“In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things, charity”). I would smile and concede the apparent truth of their description, but I’d also offer a caveat. While I was grateful for our relative peace, I also knew our day of difficulty was coming. Controversy comes for us all: in the history of the church, no part of the body has ever been excluded from conflict and even schism. Even while our relatively-young communion, made up mostly of refugees from other Presbyterian denominations, was enjoying the Pax Orlando, it was only a matter of time before the honeymoon would be over.

Well, the honeymoon is over. But that it is so is not necessarily a bad thing. Every good marriage must pass through its days of marital bliss and into the hard but good work of discussion, deliberation, mutual forbearance, agreement, and love. And as any student of church history knows, controversy can clarify and refine. Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, uses conflict providentially to preserve the truth of the Gospel and to help us speak confidently and precisely about the faith delivered to us.

Controversy can clarify, but it can just as easily malform. A good and right focus on a specific doctrinal discussion can cause us to be inattentive and even forgetful of the wider fabric of our particular tradition. That danger accompanies the EPC at this moment, particularly because there is no great clarity about precisely what our tradition is. When faced with a difficult moment, we don’t have the luxury of asking ourselves—as did one of the greater lights in another stream of the Reformed tradition—“What’s so great about the EPC?” We have to ask and answer the prior question: “What kind of Presbyterians are the EPC?”

In what follows, I’d like to try to answer this question. It seems to me to be an important and necessary thing to do, not least because whenever the dust settles on our current controversy, we’ll still have the everyday work of guarding the deposit of faith and proclaiming the Gospel. And I’d like to do so by appealing to two impulses found within Presbyterian history in this country, impulses that appear again and again within the tensions of our tradition. (Credit where credit is due: this description was first suggested to me by fellow EPC TE Zach Hopkins.)

Here is my argument: The EPC is an Old School/New Side denomination. In order to justify this not uncontroversial description, some historical explanation will be required.

The Old School/New School Divide

Old School Presbyterianism represents the confessional impulse within the Presbyterian tradition in the United States. In the early- and mid-1800s, a dispute arose within the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (at that time the only significant Presbyterian denomination in America) regarding the “New England Theology” of Charles Grandison Finney and others. 

The details of this controversy are well-documented and described in various histories of Presbyterianism, but at the center of the disagreement was the place of the Westminster Standards in the life of the church. Old School Presbyterians were instinctually committed to a close and careful adherence to the historic standards and the doctrines that they articulate. New School Presbyterians, on the other hand, could be identified by a concern to adapt historic doctrines to contemporary challenges for the purposes of evangelism and morality. 

So George Marsden writes of early New Schoolers in The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience, “Reflecting the spirit of the age, they were much more interested in morality. Their most pressing concern was to understand how sinners could be changed and how that process might best be effected by the human means through which the Spirit worked.” These were of course noble concerns, but they were pursued by way of revising historic Reformed doctrines of sin and anthropology.

The fault-lines became clearer as the conflict unfolded. On the one side, a concern to remain faithful to the Reformed tradition as expressed through the minds of the Westminster Divines; on the other side, an evangelistic zeal that demanded doctrine respond expediently to the spirit of the age. Marsden again, representing the Old School perspective: “The Old School’s objection was that the New School taught or tolerated an un-Biblical view of man’s nature. The New School’s confidence in the dignity, freedom, and ability of man, a confidence in many ways characteristic of the mainstream of American thought in the eras of Jackson and Emerson, was resisted by the Old School on the ground that it subverted the essential Scriptural teachings of God’s sovereignty and man’s depravity.”

This same basic conflict between two divergent impulses took other shapes and forms in the American Presbyterian Church. New School Presbyterianism was marked by a spirit of moral activism. Sometimes this was right and admirable, especially when expressed in some (but by no means all) New School Presbyterians who advocated for the abolition of slavery. Other times, this activism was more ambiguous, as demonstrated in the significant New School participation in the temperance movement. New School Presbyterians were also eager to adopt the innovative “scientific” revival methods that were the mark of Finney and other leaders of the Second Great Awakening. Old School Presbyterians met these efforts and innovations with skepticism and dismay.

The two schools were composed of various parties, and we cannot devolve the differences simply to theological disagreements. Moreover, the history of these two schools is complicated and thus resists reduction. Nonetheless, it is possible to begin to trace the differences between the two impulses: for Old School Presbyterians, a conservative impulse to maintain the confessional standards of the Westminster Confession; for New School Presbyterians, an impulse to attend to contemporary controversy and to adapt to the perceived needs of the moment.

The EPC as an Old School Denomination

It is by no means obvious to everyone that the EPC is an Old School denomination. Indeed, none other than the author of the official history of the EPC, Don Fortson, argues that the EPC instead is a New School denomination. Let me give an account of why my own telling of our denomination’s story deviates from his.

In Liberty in Non-Essentials: The Story of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Forston writes that, “The New School spirit of a moderate Calvinism is reflected in the ethos of the EPC, which has chosen to put its accent on being broadly evangelical while maintaining its Reformed commitments—as opposed to a dogmatic, exclusive Presbyterianism that was more characteristic of the Old School.” Fortson’s description is correct insofar it describes the origins of the EPC. When the denomination began, there was a great deal more emphasis on the “E” than the “P.” The New School spirit was evident first in the EPC’s emphasis of the “Essentials of the Faith” (a broadly evangelical description of Christian faith) above the Westminster Standards. The New School spirit was also evident in the impulse of moral activism that was present in the early days of the denotation. When the EPC gathered for its first General Assembly in 1981, the two speakers who addressed the denomination were Dr James Kennedy (of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ) and Francis Schaeffer (who was at that point in his ministry waist-deep in cultural activism).

But as the denomination matured, it moved away from those New School beginnings. When the EPC began, the relationship between the “Essentials of the Faith” and the Westminster Standards was ambiguous at best and problematic at worst. Because of the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the “Essentials of the Faith” and the Westminster Standards, the EPC found itself in the embarrassing situation where a Teaching or Ruling Elder could affirm the Essentials but disagree with not-so-minor aspects of the Westminster Confession of Faith like infant baptism or the doctrine of election. As early as 1988 the denomination began a series of conversations with the hope of clarifying the relationship between these two statements. At the center of the conversation was a perennial Presbyterian controversy: the question of subscription to the Westminster Standards.

To make an already long story somewhat shorter, at the 2001 General Assembly the EPC arrived at a decidedly Old School solution to this drawn-out deliberation: the Westminster Standards would not be subordinated to the “Essentials,” but instead would be given a final authority in the denomination. No exceptions would be allowed to the “Essentials,” but also at ordination and installation Ruling and Teaching Elders would be asked explicitly to subscribe to the Westminster Standards, to name explicitly any exceptions, and make known to a church court if there was any change to this vow. The resolution was fundamentally an affirmation of the Old School understanding of the place of the Confession in the Church (and the practice of confessional subscription) and a rejection of the New School impulse.

The EPC is an Old School Presbyterian denomination. Another way to say this is simply to say that the EPC is a confessional denomination. But even as we state this, it is important to say at the same time that our confessionalism is in many ways an unfulfilled mandate still awaiting full implementation and practice. When in 2006 the EPC welcomed a large number of churches from the PC(USA), their arrival significantly changed the ethos of the denomination. (Full disclosure: I, and both EPC churches I have served, were among the number of PC(USA) congregations that joined the EPC.) These churches were both disconnected from the deliberation and discernment behind the 2001 decision and also, having come from the multi-confessional framework of the PC(USA), were unfamiliar with the confessional habitus of Old School subscriptionism.

The result was that the Old School consensus in the EPC has in many ways been forgotten. It is simply self-evident that in the life of our local churches, our presbyteries, and our General Assembly the Westminster Standards have more often than not been sidelined in our theological deliberation and ministry practice. (This was demonstrated most recently when a vote to state explicitly that baptism is a prerequisite for the Lord’s Supper failed at the 2024 General Assembly.) Our confessions and catechisms are often treated like the emergency boxes in public spaces: we can always break the glass in case of emergency, but otherwise they are left alone.

Because of this, our Old School identity is something still to be attained. Our constitutional framework is confessional, but we do not live up to or into the vision articulated by those who went before us. To say that the EPC is a confessional, Old School Presbyterian denomination is in many ways to say that we should aspire to become what our constitution says that we are.

New Side Presbyterianism

The category of Old School does not fully exhaust the EPC’s identity. Both the PCA and the OPC in different ways would also be understood to be Old School Presbyterians, and yet there are significant differences between each of those three denominations. Similarly, the Old School/New School division does not fully exhaust the different impulses within American Presbyterianism. In order to understand what kind of Presbyterians are the EPC, we need to give our attention to another Old/New contrast within the history of American Presbyterianism: Old Side/New Side.

The Old Side/New Side controversy actually predates the Old/New School debate, beginning in the mid-1700s in response to the First Great Awakening. The preaching and ministry of George Whitefield fanned the flames of revival that had first been kindled by the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards and the Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent into a phenomenon that spread through the American colonies and across the Atlantic. Whitefield’s itinerant ministry and the emotionalism that accompanied the revivals placed a strain on American Presbyterianism as church leaders were forced to discern whether or not to welcome Whitfield’s version of extra-ecclesial “parachurch ministry” and how they would respond to the enthusiasms of the revivals.

Old Side Presbyterians felt that the First Great Awakening should be ignored or denounced because its emphasis on revival and religious experience ran counter to the traditional forms of Presbyterian life: strict confessional subscription, catechesis, the order of the church’s courts. New Side Presbyterians, in contrast, wanted to emphasize religious experience and the necessity of conversion. (These tensions are well-described by D.G. Hart and John R. Muether in their excellent Seeking a Better Country: 300 Years of American Presbyterianism.) The revivals of the First Great Awakening no doubt did at times run counter to the forms of Presbyterian polity and confession, but it is important to note that this was not necessarily the case. While there were definite tensions between Old and New Side Presbyterians, the two were always able to remain within the same denomination and it was not long before the two parties resolved their differences in the Plan of Union in 1758.

If we are looking for an example of what a New Side/Old School Presbyterian might look like, we should go no further than the Old Princeton professor and pastor Charles Hodge. Hodge’s life and ministry married a New Side appreciation for the best of Reformed piety and practice with an Old School adherence to the Westminster Standards. Thus in describing Hodge as a “New Side-Old School Presbyterian,” Andrew Hoffecker says in his biography of Hodge that he “manifested the attributes of associated with Calvinistic confessionalism (strong adherence to creedal religion, liturgical forms, and corporate worship) as well as the characteristics of evangelism pietism (the necessity of vital religion marked by conversion, moral activism, and individual pious practices).” The New and the Old can co-exist; Old School confessionalism can flourish alongside a New Side emphasis on conversion and religious experience.

The EPC as a New Side Presbyterian Church

That the EPC has the impulses of New Side Presbyterianism is, I think, an uncontroversial statement. It is evident even in the denomination’s name; preceding the anchoring noun “Presbyterian” is the important qualifying adjective “Evangelical.” The EPC is relatively untroubled by the kind of “religious enthusiasms” that were problematic for Old Side Presbyterians (as is evidenced in both cessationists and non-cessationists calling the denomination home). While the EPC does have its own missions agency, World Outreach, it is also marked by a trans-denominational cooperative spirit which at times troubled Old Siders but was a mark of the New Side.

If the argument that the EPC is an Old School denomination is an invitation to become what we are, then the argument that the EPC is a New Side denomination is an exhortation to deepen what we already know ourselves to be. If the impulses of our denomination are towards the practices of piety and the importance of experiential religion, then we should remind ourselves that the Reformed tradition has rich resources for us. Calvin was the theologian of the Holy Spirit, and from Augustine to John Owen we have been given a tradition of saints who can help us to live into the best of our theology. While we can always learn from other traditions and contemporary voices, there is simply no reason that we should forsake our inheritance in order to give ourselves over to the latest fad in spirituality. Sinclair Ferguson’s The Whole Christ—with its account of how the Marrow controversy revealed not just what the Confession teaches but how we can hold those beliefs with either a gospel or legal spirit—might be an example to us of the kind of marriage between deep, confessional theology and religious experience that our tradition possesses. Embracing the ways the EPC is New Side denomination is an invitation to bring the best of the evangelical tradition to our confessional roots.

Old School, New Side, So What?

I have argued above that the EPC, in its constitutional commitments and in its evangelical ethos, is an Old School/New Side denomination. This exercise has not been merely academic; this history has implications for those who of us call the EPC home. If these two strains of American Presbyterianism represent the best of our particular corner of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic church, and if they are the inheritance which those who have gone before us have passed on to us to steward, then what does this mean for us as we seek to serve today?

Confessional Reasoning

A confessional standard is more than a list of doctrines to be checked off upon admission to a denominational body. A confession of faith is a way of reading Scripture, a system of doctrine, a spirituality, and a philosophy of ministry rolled into a single document. Because of this, we can’t simply slap the Westminster Confession on to our churches like a new bumper sticker on an old truck. We must continue to learn to inhabit the Standards, to follow their reasoning, and to submit to the particular rationality that they provide for us.

Within American evangelicalism there is a strain of lean biblicism latent in many of our churches in the EPC. This biblicism is more nuda Scriptura than sola Scriptura, substituting the Reformers’ restoration of the authority of the Bible over tradition for the abolition of tradition. Reformed theology is rooted in the Great Tradition. As Calvin argued in his “Reply to Sadoleto,” the Reformation was more catholic than the Catholics. Part of what we must do moving forward is reintroduce ourselves to the tradition that is ours and do the deeper work of inhabiting its gifts with conviction.

Practically, this means intentionally teaching and utilizing the Standards within our presbyterian institutions. At least one thing this means is that among Teaching and Ruling Elders and in our presbyteries and church sessions, the Westminster Standards should be taught and utilized in our deliberations and officer examinations in the way I have described above. Sessions can set apart time to deepen their knowledge of the Confession – and not just during officer training and then reason according to their wisdom when shepherding and deliberating. Presbyteries can not only take their confessionalism seriously when candidates are examined or teaching elders are admitted from other presbyteries, they can also—as my own presbytery has done recently—set aside time to resource and equip teaching and ruling elders alike with the riches of the Standards and remind them of their importance.

Warmly Reformed

A particular charism that the EPC possesses within the larger church catholic is the marriage of the New Side and the Old School dynamics of American Presbyterianism. One fruit of this marriage is that we can hold in tension the warm evangelicalism of the New Side (a hunger for revival, experiential piety, mutual forbearance for the sake of mission) with the historic confessionalism of the Old School. In many ways these two impulses helpfully supplement one another. Without our New Side spirit, our Old School Presbyterianism might become dead orthodoxy. But without our Old School instincts, our New Side impulses could easily devolve into sentimental biblicism. The two need each other. 

When the EPC embraces both our Old School and New Side inheritances we have a great gift to offer both our own communion and the world: warm piety that is formed by deep theology, missional hunger that is confessionally rooted, precise doctrine that is humbly inhabited.

Institutional Stewardship

We live in an anti-institutional age, and as those who bear the name “evangelical” we are identifying ourselves with those who may be great at starting new institutions but who are less proven at maintaining them. There is a symbiotic relationship between a tradition (here Westminster Presbyterianism) and institution (the EPC). Much of what I have argued is that we in the EPC must reclaim our tradition. But there is a corresponding truth that is just as important: we must care for and maintain the institution that is the EPC.

Admittedly, this work often feels tedious and boring. It is the work of attending presbytery meetings, of reading dockets in advance, of learning parliamentary procedure, and of comprehending the Book of Order. Few of us took vows of ordination with this kind of thing in mind. But the longevity of the work we have put our hands to depends in some way on this ministry of little things. As Yuval Levin has argued, our institutions should not serve merely as platforms for our public-facing preaching and teaching. They should instead form and even restrain us as we submit to the wisdom they have accumulated over the years of their existence.

Conclusion

We don’t know what kind of gathering the 46^th EPC General Assembly will be, nor do we know what the subsequent months and years will hold for our denomination But no matter what, on the other side we will need to get on with the ordinary and everyday work of proclaiming the Gospel and stewarding the institutions—local churches, presbyteries, and the EPC itself—that God has entrusted to us. The best way to do that will be to inhabit the best gifts of our own particular version of American Presbyterianism: an Old School denomination bearing the best of the Westminster Confession of Faith with the warmth and evangelical spirit of our New Side heritage.