Orthodox Presbyterian Church
confessional Presbyterian denomination located primarily in the northern United States
The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) is a confessional Presbyterian denomination located primarily in the United States, with additional congregations in Canada, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. It was founded by conservative members of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), who objected to the rise of Liberal and Modernist theology in the 1930s. The OPC is considered to have had an influence on evangelicalism far beyond its size.
History
The Orthodox Presbyterian Church was founded in 1936, largely through the work of John Gresham Machen. Machen, who, prior to this time was a PCUSA minister, had a longstanding distrust of liberalism in Christianity, as typified by the Auburn Affirmation. He and others founded Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929 in response to rising liberal sentiments at Princeton Theological Seminary, and in 1933, Machen formed the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, due to his concerns around tolerance of liberal theology on the PCUSA mission field.
Machen's views were met with opposition. In 1935, the PCUSA General Assembly declared Machen's Independent Board unconstitutional, and gave the associated clergy an ultimatum to break their ties with it. When Machen and seven other clergy did not disavow the Independent Board, they were suspended from PCUSA ministry.
In light of these events, Machen and a group of likeminded ministers, elders, and laymen met in Philadelphia on June 11, 1936, to form what they then called the Presbyterian Church of America (not to be confused with the Presbyterian Church in America, or PCA, which formed in 1973), with Machen as the first moderator.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Orthodox Presbyterian Church” as confessional Presbyterian denomination located primarily in the northern United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as confessional Presbyterian denomination located primarily in the northern United States. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q782613. VIAF identifies the subject as 312817083. The Library of Congress control number is n85033323. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1929, 1933 and 1935.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Orthodox Presbyterian Church” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.