Global RP Unity: Camps, Conferences and more

Over the past year or so, the RP Global Alliance have contributed a series on Global Unity to the various RP Church magazines around the world - the Covenanter Witness, RP Witness and Good News. Stephen was asked to contribute two articles from a historical perspective. You can read the second one below:

Having considered in the previous article how Reformed Presbyterians have sought to express unity with believers outside the RP church family, we are now going to consider how a sense of unity has been fostered between the various denominations which make up the global RP Church.

International Support and Encouragement between Covenanters

There were, of course, personal links between Covenanters in Scotland, Ireland and North America even before the formation of the various Reformed Presbyterian denominations. Congregations in what are now the United States and Canada were formed as Covenanters emigrated from the Old World to the New, with pastors sent from Scotland and Ireland to minister to them. The first American RP Presbytery was formed in 1774 by four immigrant Irish and Scottish RP ministers. In 1858, the first RP congregation in Australia was started after an Irish RP licentiate was sent as a Colonial Missionary.

While the majority of Covenanter ministers who crossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth century did so permanently, there were also who visited for the sake of mutual encouragement, before returning home. In 1789 Rev. James Reid was given leave from his duties in South West Scotland to visit America, returning the following year with a call from South Carolina, either to himself or to any other member of the Presbytery – which they all declined. This practice of ‘mutual eligibility’ – a minister in one RP denomination being free to receive a call from a congregation in another RP denomination – has continued without controversy to the present day.

As time went on, traversing the Atlantic became less of an ordeal. In fact, in 1844, Rev. John Sprott (a Scottish RP licentiate who had become a Seceder minister in Nova Scotia), commented that ‘crossing the Atlantic is now an easy matter’ as it only took ten days. In 1860 RPCS minister John Graham, having recently become minister in Liverpool, went to America and came back with $3000 which enabled his new congregation to finish their church building. Irish RP minister Thomas Houston spent four months in the States in 1856, and an American obituary stated ‘his friends and admirers on this side of the Atlantic were as numerous as those in the country of his birth’. William Milroy was the first RPCS minister to train for the ministry in North America, studying at the university of Toronto, before being licensed by the RP Presbytery of Pittsburgh in 1861 and immediately returning home to accept a call in Scotland.

 International Conferences

Opportunities for unity between the various RP denominations, particularly in the form of conferences, began in 1896, and really took off in the second half of the twentieth century. Obvious reasons for this were the rise of air travel – journeys which had once been measured in weeks and then days, now only took hours – as well as better economic conditions in the English-speaking world.

Another reason is that by the time of the first international conference in 1896, it was clear that institutional unity with other denominations would be impossible for RPs unless they gave up their distinctive principles. The second half of the 1800s was a time when there was a great push for the different denominations to unite with each other. As we saw last time, these efforts at visible unity were something that Reformed Presbyterians had a great deal of sympathy for, and some of the leading RPs of the 19th century were noted for their catholicity and warm personal friendships with those in other denominations. However, they were not in favour of unity at any cost.

In Scotland, the majority of the denomination, which had split off in 1863, united with the Free Church in 1876, which in turn merged with the United Presbyterian Church in 1900 and then the Church of Scotland in 1929. In 1872, RPCS minister Torrens Boyd, speaking at the Irish RP Synod, had prophetically warned that such unions were like chaining two ships together – when the waves begin to roll ‘they will rasp each other’s sides off, tear open each other’s hearts and go down together’. At the same Synod, the RPCI received a proposal from the mainstream (and still exclusively psalm-singing) Presbyterian Church in Ireland to discuss a potential union. They replied, acknowledging the Christian kindness and love of union in initiating the proposal, declaring their ‘earnest concern and desire to have the divisions of the Church speedily healed, on the grounds of Scriptural truth and duty’, but concluding that given their ministerial and membership vows, any discussions were unlikely to produce the desired union.

Against this background, the ‘First International Convention of Reformed Presbyterian Churches’ was held in Scotland in 1896. The purpose of was ‘to examine the distinctive doctrines that were held by the three Churches and to renew their commitment to these common principles’. The book published to commemorate the conference lauded its success in this regard: ‘The first international Convention in her history has infused new life into the Church, and cheered her ranks’. Another benefit of the conference was that ‘Covenanters from the Old and New Worlds met each other for the first time face to face, and clasped hands warmly together in a friendship which will endure while life lasts’.

One of the resolutions at the conference was to ask the Synods to hold a similar convention in 1899. As it turned out, however, it was almost four decades before a similar conference was held – marking the tercentenary of the signing of the National Covenant of Scotland in 1938. The conference – once again held in Scotland – was organised by Revs A. C. Gregg, W. J. Moffett (RPCS) and Rev. J. Boyd Tweed (an American pastor who had recently been inducted as pastor in the Glasgow RP Church). The number of delegates totalled 630, with more joining them for the various public meetings.

Once again, it was hoped that a series of conferences would follow, but the war and its aftermath delayed plans. International Youth Conventions were held in Scotland in 1962 (with 35 Americans chartering a plane) and Ireland in 1964.

The first all-age International Conference of the modern era was held in 1966 in Carlton College, Michigan. Between 60 and 70 Irish RPs chartered a flight to attend, with a total attendance of 1352. A conference planned for Scotland in 1968 did not take place. Further International Conferences in the US were held in 1966 and 1970, with the planned 1974 conference moved to 1976 due to fuel shortages. Since then, International Conferences have been held in America every four years, with the venue changing to Calvin College, Michigan in 1996 and then Indiana Wesleyan University in 2012. The conference planned for 2020 was initially postponed for a year due to the outbreak of COVID-19, before being cancelled altogether. God willing, we will return to IWU in 2024.

 International Conferences organised by the Irish RP Church have been held every four years from 1982, initially at Kerrykeel, then Portrush, Termonfeckin (five times), Gartmore (Scotland – twice) and from 2018 at the Gold Coast in Waterford.

 The current arrangement means that an International Conference is held every two years, alternatively in the USA and the UK/Ireland. As the years have gone by, the number of countries represented has increased dramatically given new RP works in Asia and South America.

The RPCS contingent at the last International Conference in Waterford in 2018

 Opportunities for Global Service and Ministry

The Geelong Bible Conference is held in Australia every two years and has featured speakers from the RPCNA, RPCI and RPCS, as well as from those outside the global RP church. Due to their relative proximity, the Australian RP Church has taken a particular interest in the Japanese Presbytery, sending and receiving mission teams, as well as sending ministers to teach at Kobe Theological Hall (as other RP denominations have also done). 

A ‘Consultative Committee of the Three Covenanting Churches’ met 3 times during the 1966 conference and discussed efforts by the Synods towards drawing the three churches together. They discussed the following issues: Praise (namely the possibility of an international psalter), Christian Education, Magazines, Exchange of Personnel (in the form of pulpit exchanges and stated supplies, as well as Irish RPs teaching and studying at RPTS as well as Belfast), Foreign Mission Work, International Conferences, Pensions, and Reciprocity in Doctrine.

A joint meeting of ministers and elders representing the Churches in Scotland, Ireland and America was due to be held in July 1972 in Portrush but was cancelled due to the outbreak of the ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. In our own day, the RP Global Alliance seeks to continue these efforts to facilitate cooperation between the various denominations.

Since 1997, congregations in the various RP denominations have benefited from hosting RP Mission Teams, organised by the RPCNA, but with opportunities for others to serve as well. Irish and Scottish young (and older) people have served together on go teams.  Young people from the US and elsewhere have had the opportunity to experience the wider RP church through formal initiatives like the Covenanter Summer Institute and Semester in Scotland, as well as through attending church camps in Ireland. Irish young people have taken part in Theological Foundations Backpacking trips in Colorado. Seminary students have taken advantage of the opportunity to do internships in RP congregations on other continents.

Many of us have been personally enriched by these connections, and while we feel the smallness of our own denominations at times, those things we perhaps miss out on are more than compensated for by being part of a global body with an international vision and an abundance of opportunities for service and fellowship together.

RPs and Global Unity

Over the past year or so, the RP Global Alliance have contributed a series on Global Unity to the various RP Church magazines around the world - the Covenanter Witness, RP Witness and Good News. Stephen was asked to contribute two articles from a historical perspective. You can read the first one below:

Although Covenanters today make up a very small part of the church of Jesus Christ in each nation of which they are a part, the original Covenanter vision was for national unity with global cooperation. In these next two articles, after touching briefly on that original vision, we will look at how Reformed Presbyterians have sought to visibly express their unity with other Christians – both inside and outside the global RP family. 

The Scottish Reformation

Each branch of the worldwide RP family traces its roots back to sixteenth-century Scotland – but what is often forgotten is that the Scottish Reformation itself had an international flavour. The first Scottish martyr, Patrick Hamilton, encountered Luther’s teachings when studying at the University of Paris. He also studied in Louvain and at the University of Marburg, where he developed a friendship with the French Reformer Francis Lambert of Avignon – possibly meeting Erasmus and Luther along the way.

In the build-up to the Scottish Reformation, John Knox spent four years with Protestant communities in France, Germany and Switzerland where he ‘experienced the diversity of international Protestantism’. Indeed, ‘for the remainder of his life he remained in contact with his European friends and acquaintances and valued his membership of this broad religious brotherhood’. For Knox, John Calvin’s Geneva was ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles’, and Knox himself ministered to a congregation there before returning to Scotland.

Solemn League and Covenant

The Scottish Reformation, brought about under God by Knox and others in 1560, began to unravel before the end of the century. However, a Second Reformation recovered and advanced what had been lost, reaching its high point in the two covenants at the heart of Reformed Presbyterian identity. The Solemn League and Covenant has been called ‘the climax of Scotland’s Calvinist reformation’, though it was signed by the English Parliament as well as the Scots’, along with many people of all classes in Scotland, England and Ireland. This covenant called for ‘the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion’ in the three kingdoms, in the hope ‘that we, and our posterity after us, may, as brethren, live in faith and love, and the Lord may delight to dwell in the midst of us’.

Covenanters’ Global Vision

One of the immediate consequences of the Covenant was the sending of Scottish delegates to join their English counterparts at the Westminster Assembly, to draw up what became the central documents of worldwide Presbyterianism. The Ordinance calling for the assembly, passed by both the House of Commons and Lords, explicitly made it their agenda to bring about ‘nearer agreement with the Church of Scotland, and other Reformed Churches abroad’. Indeed, Covenanters envisaged future international cooperation, with the martyr James Guthrie (1612-1661) arguing not just for provincial Synods and national General Assemblies, but for representatives from each country being sent ‘to a more universal Assembly’.

RP Evangelical Cooperation

By the time of Guthrie’s execution in 1661, the three kingdoms had rejected their vows, and those who still held to the vision of a Covenanted Reformation were a persecuted remnant. Following the end of persecution and the establishment of Reformed Presbyterian Churches in Scotland, Ireland and North America, the question for future generations of Covenanters became how they would exist alongside other Christians who did not hold to their ideals. In fact, with the advent of evangelicalism, by the nineteenth-century the question was not simply one of existing alongside Christians of differing beliefs, but working with them.

In the 1800s, leading Reformed Presbyterians such as William Symington (1795-1862) in Scotland and Thomas Houston (1803-1882) in Ireland, proved that it was possible to do just that without abandoning their own convictions. Both men were involved in numerous missionary and philanthropic societies with Christians from other denominations, and often preached in congregations outside their own branch of the church. Shortly after the formation of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, Symington was asked to preach the opening sermon at an interdenominational conference to mark the bicentenary of the Westminster Assembly. His sermon, entitled ‘Love one another’, included a call for unity, which helped lead to the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance. His older brother Andrew, the denomination’s Professor of Theology, was one of a number of Scottish RPs who took part in that first meeting in Liverpool in 1845. A minister of another denomination remarked: ‘his language in the midst of Evangelical Episcopalians, Methodists, Independents, Baptists, Seceders, Relief, Free Church, and others, indicated no coldness on the subject of Christian union, but the reverse’.

Reformed Presbyterians felt they had something to contribute to the doctrinal basis of such organisations. In fact, William Symington managed to get the original doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Alliance amended to include a reference to the mediatorial kingship of Christ. The Alliance also took a strong position on the Lord’s Day, and according to Symington ‘the movement has no connexion with Voluntaryism and…there are hundreds who are sound to the backbone on the subject of National religion’.

Around the same time Andrew Symington contributed a chapter to a book entitled Essays on Christian Union. He urged Christians from different denominations to speak to one another ‘face to face, and in co-operation in good works’ rather than just reading what others said, or writing to or about one another. He did not advocate institutional unity but saw denominations as like the different tribes of Israel – with their own banners but ultimately rallying around one standard against a common foe.

A Basis of Unity

What role did the Solemn League and Covenant play in all this? For William Symington, it would only be when the Spirit gave ‘the ministers and members of the divided Churches of the Reformation one heart and one way’ that ‘the glorious conceptions of the Solemn League and of the Westminster Assembly’ would be fulfilled. In Ireland, Thomas Houston went further, seeing the Covenants not simply as a spur to unity, but as the basis for it. He wrote a book advocating covenant renewal ‘so that those who are desirous of union throughout the churches’ would have ‘an approved basis of scriptural fellowship, and co-operation for the advancement of the Redeemer’s kingdom’.

Yet while Houston, ‘in marked contrast with many contemporary schemes for union’ desired a union around the Covenants, he also exhibited a warm catholicity when it came to those of different convictions. He could speak of ‘the great and the good of various names, Episcopalians, Independents and Presbyterians’. When Houston sought to raise funds for a church plant, several endorsements of his character by respected ministers of different denominations were included to ‘show that the attempt is not regarded as sectarian’. The testimony of the Seceder R. J. Bryce is a glowing tribute to Houston’s broadmindedness:

‘I do not know, in any denomination, a man of more catholic spirit than Mr. Houston, nor one who unites more perfectly a firm adherence to his own conscientious convictions, with the kindest and most brotherly feelings towards all who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, even in the denominations of Evangelical Christians who differ most widely from his own’.

Practical International Cooperation

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Reformed Presbyterians participated in bodies such as the Alliance of the Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System and the International Congress of Calvinists. The Alliance (also known as the Pan-Presbyterian Council) began in 1875 and met in the UK or North America every few years. It soon comprised around 300 delegates from an impressive representation of denominations which also included churches in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. At its meeting in Belfast in 1884, Irish RP Minister J. A. Chancellor (1824-95) gave a paper on ‘The qualifications and duties of elders’. Elders, he said, should have ‘Catholic qualifications’ – realising that the church in any one place or country ‘is but a branch’ of Christ’s church. No single church could bear the burden of the Great Commission itself, and in fact ‘the more conscientious an elder is in the discharge of his duties, the more humble and distressed will he feel at the shortcomings of his own denomination, and instead of restricting his sympathies within its narrow circle, he will expand himself in agonizing earnestness over the whole field’. The servants of Christ should ‘take note of the efforts made by Churches with whom they may have scant sympathy, that they may learn to emulate their sacrifices, while honouring their devotion’.

In our own day, RP involvement in the wider church can be seen by participation in the European Conference of Reformed Churches, the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council and the International Conference of Reformed Churches, as well as other efforts on more local levels.

Such involvement is not without its challenges – as when Chancellor spoke unsuccessfully against the admission of the anti-Calvinist Cumberland Presbyterian Church to the Reformed Alliance in 1884, or when a couple of years later the RPCNA threatened to withdraw if hymns were introduced to its meetings. On the whole however RPs have concluded that it is worth the effort since, as Houston once put it, ‘while the points on which evangelical Christians differ are not immaterial, those on which they are agreed are numerous and fundamental’.

An Ordinary Pastor

In his introduction to Sunday evening’s sermon, Stephen mentioned Rev. John Tweed, an RPCNA pastor who passed away last week. John served as interim pastor in Stephen’s home congregation during the summers of 2007 and 2008 when they were without a minister. There is also a connection to Scotland, as John’s father was the minister of the Glasgow congregation for a few years, until the outbreak of WWII meant he had to return home.

John and Alta Tweed pictured outside Faughan RPC in 2007

Rev. Kyle Borg, who preached in Stranraer in January, wrote a tribute to John the day that he died entitled ‘John H. Tweed | An Ordinary Pastor’. You can read it on the Gentle Reformation blog.

Kyle writes ‘Today, Jesus has tended another one of his sheep through the pasture of this life and into eternity’ - and on Sunday evening we saw how we can be confident that that will be true of us as well.

Kyle Borg in Stranraer

We’re looking forward to have Rev. Kyle Borg preaching on the 12th of January. Kyle is the pastor of Winchester Reformed Presbyterian Church in Kansas, co-hosts the podcasts Three Guys Theologizing and The Jerusalem Chamber blogs regularly on Gentle Reformation and A Standard for Living. He also contributed two chapters to the recent book A Puritan Theology.

Kyle has done a lot of thinking, speaking and writing about rural and small-town churches, and on the Sunday evening he will be speaking on the topic ‘The Big Picture for Small Churches’. Our friends from the Baptist Church will be joining us, and the event is open to all. It begins at 6:30pm, and refreshments will be provided afterwards.

You can read Kyle’s testimony in the latest issue of the RP Witness magazine:

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American visitors

We recently had the opportunity to hear about the work of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. Jason and Michelle, who were over visiting from Indianapolis with their two children, gave us a bit of a flavour of church life Stateside at our Wednesday morning Bible study.

Stephen and Jason had previously met on a mission team in Newry, and Carla and Michelle had previously met on a mission team in Airdrie. Because of their vision for the Global RP Church, they said that they had decided to spend their European holiday in Airdrie and Stranraer rather than Barcelona and London.

After sharing some traditional Scottish food, Stephen and Carla took them to Wigtown to show them some Covenanter sites.  We are grateful for another opportunity to spend time with brothers and sisters in Christ from around the world!