Well, good morning, everyone. I'm glad to be with you this happy Sunday morning, the ordination and installation Sunday for Steve Wise, also Palm Sunday. Why don't we begin with a word of prayer, and then we'll get started this morning. Father in heaven, we thank you for this time together. We thank you for another Lord's Day. Thank you for the joy of coming together as brothers and sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ and worshiping you together. confessing our faith together, hearing your word, and being assured of your promises. We thank you for the Wise Family. And we pray now that you would bless us as we study our own history and help us to see ourselves in the story that you continue to write. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. OK. So Joel Pendenning will be here. with the handout momentarily. It's printing off right now. But last week, we began a eight-part lecture or course series, which is designed to prepare everybody for church membership, Communicate Church membership, or perhaps as a refresher, if you're already a member here at Grace, on your history and also the vows that you've taken as members. So what we looked at last week was that the idea of Presbyterianism goes back to the Bible. The word Presbyterian itself is a Greek word that stands for elder. It's translated as elder in our English translation. So everything that we do as a church, we are seeking to find our principles for it in scripture itself. And this week, we are going from, Well, last week, we went from Adam, really, to the end of the New Testament, looking at all the different principles, showing why we have elders and deacons and church government and presbyteries and sessions. This week, we'll go to the historical figure of John Knox, who found in scripture all of these same things and used it to really break free of Rome and various superstitions that were involved there, what they would call sacred tradition. And I don't think we're going to get to cover quite as much as I had hoped today, so we'll have to make up ground somehow next week. But we will get into American church history, or American Presbyterian history, and then hopefully through the Revolutionary War. So the handout has a lot on the back as well. Before we dive into that, there's this comic I came across maybe five years ago, and it's not quite as clear as I would like it to be on the handout that you have, but you can make out what's there. Some stick figures and a very, very long family tree sort of diagram on the wall with the instructor pointing to just one of the tiny branches on that massive family tree of sorts. And you can't quite see it, but on the wall in the back is something that says, membership class. And it begins at 1 AD and then just branches off in a thousand different directions. And the caption, even though you probably can't read it there, says, the instructor is saying, so this is where our movement came from and finally got the Bible right. So just this. massive fracture of church history and then pointing out just a one tiny denomination or church and saying, here's the group that finally got it right. That's where we come from. And then somebody in the classroom is saying, Jesus is so lucky to have us. And I think that communicates so much and we want to avoid that perspective. In many ways, that fracture is sad but I think there's another way to look at that as well. And even in our name, you can kind of read that into our name, Orthodox Presbyterian, right, true teaching. We're the true teaching church, right? None of the other ones are. We are. We don't want to think like that, although we do cherish our true teaching, our Presbyterianism, our Reformed heritage that goes back to John Knox and, of course, before that to the Bible itself. But we don't want to have this perspective, divisive, separatistic sort of approach and attitude. And I would challenge you also to, Sure, look at all the different divisions within church Protestantism. It is sad, you know, we're very good at protesting and kind of standing on what we believe and being willing to break away for our principles which is all commendable. But there is overreaction, and there is fracture where there shouldn't be. On the other hand, I think we should look at that also and say, you know, it's interesting. When the Orthodox Presbyterian Church does foreign missions, we don't try to set up Orthodox Presbyterian churches in different countries. We go and see what churches are there, try to strengthen them. We say we try to set up indigenous churches. So that is some insight into saying, We can be one church, one holy universal church without all being the same denomination. And, you know, I was just thinking, probably because of March Madness, but, you know, you don't look at all the different teams in college basketball and kind of like just wring your hands over the state of basketball. Oh, it's so terrible, you know. Basketball is so divided because there's so many different teams. No, it's actually, it supports the idea of basketball. It shows what a phenomenon it is or, you know, baseball or pick your sport and see all the different teams. And I think that in some ways that's a healthy way to look at all of the different groups within Christianity. You know, the Lord is at work in all different ways, in all different countries, in all different areas, sometimes working through churches that we don't really agree with in various ways. You think about how, prevalent the Pentecostal churches in South America. And while we don't agree with them, in many ways we can be thankful for what the Lord is doing in all of these different groups of the church. And furthermore, this really, I think this is so over, missed with especially reformed church history. The biggest difference often is when a group starts. So the OPC begins in the 1930s, breaking away from the PCUS, PCUSA at that point, and the PCA, our sister denomination, begins in 1973. So 40 years later, a little different circumstances, maybe very different circumstances, and that's significant because you're responding to all kinds of issues of your time. 1930 Presbyterian issues aren't the same as 1970 Presbyterian issues. And because you start at a different point, it doesn't mean you're enemies, it doesn't mean you're at odds. I like the idea that we're sister denominations. And there's just not really a need for us to all combine into one uber denomination of any sort. I think in some ways the United States is a good example. Like it's good to have 50 diverse United States that are still of one country, it's good to have All of these different churches that are working together, united, you know, it's always encouraging to read, or not always, often encouraging to read statements of faith and say, you know, I'm very different than that group, but I'm glad they believe in the Trinity. I'm glad they believe in salvation by grace alone through faith. I'm glad, I'm thankful for what they do. So it's not entirely negative to see that comic, but it is, I think, a helpful direction. for us as we go forward. Presbyterian, as I've mentioned, it derives from a word that's translated as elder in the scripture, English New Testament. And it simply means church by means of elders or church governed by elders. It's a branch of Protestantism that embraces biblical reformation, not just for our theology of salvation, but also for our theology of worship and our theology of church government. So it is very thought through, very from the book, very transparent in that sense declaring everything that we are about and making it known to all of everyone through confession of faith and book of church order saying here's essentially how we do church. Whether it's ordination and installation service like you'll see today or church membership vows or a baptism, or even a wedding and a funeral, which aren't quite as laid out. There's some latitude in how you do that, but there's forms set forward, ideas set forward for how to conduct in those situations. So from Adam to the end of the New Testament was last week. John Knox in Scotland during the Reformation realizes all of the errors with Rome after being a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. goes and studies with John Calvin in Geneva. And in 1560, he manages to, in a very substantial concrete way, bring the Reformation to Scotland by persuading Scotland's parliament to abolish the authority of the pope, to prohibit the celebration of the mass, and to approve the Scots confession. And this is substantial for a number of reasons, But one is that this Reformation is very different than the Reformation that led to the Anglican Church, or we call it the Episcopalian Church here. But if you remember, that was King Henry VIII who declared himself the head of the church. So he didn't want to abide by the rules and dictates of the pope. So he became the head of the church. And that's a massive difference between Presbyterianism and Anglicanism, Episcopalianism. is that John Knox, what he brought really was a book, The Scots Confession, saying, I'm not going to be a pope or someone who stands in the place of the pope or a pseudo-pope or another pope. It's going to be by the book coming from scripture. In 1564, the Scottish Church produces a Book of Common Order to facilitate word-based worship and church government by elders. And you can already start to see the parallels to where we are today, not quite 500 years later. We still have a Book of Church Order. It's not called the Book of Common Order, but interestingly, the abbreviation is still BCO, Book of Church Order. 100 years later, you have the Westminster Divines meeting in Westminster Abbey in London. And they come up over a period of years with the Westminster Confession and catechisms, the Confession of Faith, the larger catechism, the shorter catechism. And maybe not quite as well known, they also came up with a directory for public worship and the form of Presbyterial Church government And those documents replaced the original documents from the 1560s in the Church of Scotland. In 1689 to 1690, the British government officially established a Presbyterian Church of Scotland. And that's, again, very significant because just in that you see a huge step towards what we would call like the separation between church and state. The world to that point was used to the prince or the king or the pope being the main person who would speak into things and could make orders and rulings and whatnot. So to have a Presbyterian Church of Scotland that's saying, there's nobody at the top. The only thing we have at the top is a moderator who is to moderate according to a book. And you can read that book, whether it's a directory for public worship or a book of common order. and see how we're doing things, and therefore hold us accountable to our Presbyterian convictions, which derive from scripture itself. So that brings us to the 1690s. This is after the Westminster Divines, the Westminster Assembly, the Westminster Standards, at least in their original form. And of course, there's the developing of the New World, colonies over here in these United States before they were these United States. And there's missionary activity even back then. So there's Presbyterians in Ireland and Scotland saying, hey, we need those new colonies to be Presbyterian. They need the gospel just like all other areas of the world. And you have these pioneering, colonizing, missionary sorts, church planting sorts, going out into across the Atlantic from Ireland and Scotland into the New World and bringing Presbyterianism along with them. And there's two groups that are identified very interestingly, Covenanters and Seceders, and Bob Keyes has some good background on these, at least the Covenanters, so you can speak with him. for more information and all kinds of great detail. But the Covenanters and Seceders are interesting because they were separate from, they didn't sign up for the Church of Scotland. They didn't like everything that the state Church of Scotland was standing for. They had some objections. So they were separate from the Church of Scotland from the beginning and brought their separate form of Presbyterianism to the United States and that exists to this day. Reformed Presbyterian Church of America, RPCNA, and then the Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church, the ARPC, which has lots and lots of churches on the east coast, southern east coast area. So you can be aware of those groups. But then there were other Presbyterians that weren't trying to set up a Church of Scotland in the United States, but they were Presbyterian by conviction. And unlike the covenanters and seceders, there were Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterian immigrants that came to the American colonies without any support from a mother church and without any patronage from colonial governments. which governments were often controlled by Episcopalians or Congregationalists. So it might not sound like it, but that was really risky stuff to do that, to come without saying, hey, I'm sent on behalf of Scotland. I'm setting up other churches of Scotland over here in the colonies, or not to be sent with a patron or with any sort of backing. But that's really what led to the first Presbyteries, being set up in the United States. This is a hyperlink right here, the next bullet point. I'll just have an interesting story on this in a second. So yeah, if you get the PDF version of this handout, you'll be able to click on that. The first Presbyterian church in America was organized in 1662 in Jamaica, which is Queens, New York City. where the church I planted was in Queens and we were doing ministry one day there in a certain area and I looked up and I saw this church which was just so interesting and kind of bizarre because I had studied this in seminary so I knew that there was like the first Presbyterian church somewhere in Queens. I didn't know that it was still existing and then I just looked up at this instance and see Presbyterian Church established in 1662, oldest Presbyterian Church in the United States. So that hyperlink actually takes you to that church's website. It's a PCUSA church now. So don't get your theology from it. But the link goes to the history section. So yeah, so that was the first Presbyterian Church in the United States. 1683, a real pioneer. A missionary sort comes along named Francis McKinney who is an Ulster Northern Irish Presbyterian. He comes to Maryland. At one point, he's thrown in prison for five months in New York because he's setting up Presbyterian churches and that conflicts with the Anglican flavor of the city at that point. So, you know, he's doing some, real work that is not as simple as it might sound in our day and age. But he is a church planner. And it's good to make the equation in our day and age, like a Brad Peppo sort, if you know him from our presbytery, but somebody who's going around, organizing people, having home Bible studies, getting groups together, teaching them biblical church government from the Bible, pointing out that there is a book of church order by which they do things, laying out the need for plurality of elders, which is a presbytery, working to organize these different men together. And he's doing this up and down the East Coast long before the Revolutionary War, 100 years before the Revolutionary War. And by 1706, there is the first presbytery in the United States. So again, significant. You go from 1662, having a presbytery and church, to 1706, having a presbytery, so not just a church, but representatives from a group of churches forming the presbytery of Philadelphia. And you start to see from this something very exciting that is really American history is church history. It's in Philadelphia, in New York, the centers of the beginning of building what is now the United States of America. Presbytery of Philadelphia, 1706, seven ministers. So we can look at our denomination and bemoan its size and always wish to grow and expand, but it is remarkable when you look back and say, hey, it started with these seven guys, you know, traveling in horse and buggy to get together in a presbytery of Philadelphia. So just 23 years later, These seven ministers have expanded to be 43 ministers and three presbyteries, Philadelphia, Newcastle, and Long Island. And they come together at something called a synod. So in our structure in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, at least currently, I guess it could change, we don't have the synod level. What we have is a session, so this church has a session, and then when a bunch of different sessions, so to speak, come together, we call that presbytery. And then the next level is called the general assembly, which is when people from all the different presbyteries come together. Well, between that presbytery level and the general assembly level, you could have a synod level, sort of like a division in Major League Baseball, you know, you could have, central east and west synod sort of thing, but we don't have that right now in this denomination. Other Presbyterians often do and you'll hear that term synod, so it's not quite a general assembly, but it's bigger than the Presbytery. Is it just based on size? I don't think it's based on size. I think it's more geographic. Yeah. Yeah. But maybe it's based on whatever they determine it to be. In RPC&A churches, their GA is synod. Their GA is synod. For all. Okay, so it's not even... Instead of saying General Assembly, they just call it a synod. So it's not based on size. Okay. It sounds like it could be. Yeah. Well, you know, that's how it was back here, too. So when it first happened in the United States, it was a synod, not a General Assembly. So... Yes? Right, that's a good observation. So this was not linked to the Church of Scotland. Maybe they had communications and that sort of thing, but it was never under the Church of Scotland or through the Church of Scotland. Yeah, good. All right, so three presbyteries, 43 ministers, 1729, operating as a synod. And at this point, before we move on, There's these three emphases. And I think you can make a very good point for saying, a very good case for saying that these three emphases come up over and over throughout all of church history. But they certainly come up within the Reformed Protestant understanding of Christianity. And they start to play a significant role in Presbyterian church history, really, at this point. And, you know, if you know your American history, you're thinking Great Awakening and then the Revolutionary War, which is exactly where we're going on the next page. But before we go there, it's good to consider these different emphases. Three emphases in Reformed and Presbyterian churches, experiential, theological, transformational. Experiential emphasizes the importance intense personal Christian experience. And it tends to be less formal, a little bit more subjective. Theological emphasizes the importance of correct doctrine and organized churches. It tends to be less individualistic, more formal. And then transformational emphasizes the Puritan hope of a city on a hill being the salt of the earth, letting your light shine before others that they see your good works, glorify your father in heaven, the idea of bringing Christian renewal to all of society. So which of these emphases should we go with? All of them. And that's the difficulty. So what happens is, you know, people get behind one of these emphases. And they're all right. I mean, we could have lots and lots of Bible verses for each of these designations, emphases, titles, categories. And they're really all true. And what we want to do is go forward in a way that holds them all together instead of emphasizing one to the extent of the other or to the depletion of the other. But again, throughout church history, you see this. And this is still with us today. I mean, there's all kinds of Presbyterians and online and wherever else and, you know, they're all about transformation and, you know, changing culture and there's so much of that we can appreciate. We want to see culture changed by the gospel. I mean, every time we pray against abortion and pray for a new path and pray for crisis pregnancy centers and all different kinds of things, we want to see changed in culture, really and truly. And yet we have a history in which social change, social gospel, has become the only gospel. So we don't want to go so far with it that we forget the experiential and the theological. With experiential, we want that as well. I mean, that's a huge part of who we are as a church. What we want to see in our young people is not just that they can regurgitate catechism questions and let them roll off of their lips, showing that they have a powerful memory. We want them to embrace those doctrines and to live out of them and to say with feeling, my only comfort in life and in death is the Lord Jesus Christ. And to have a fleshed out worldview, but one that they live in and breathe and partake of. On the other hand, we don't want to be pressing everybody all the time for a radical, dramatic conversion story in which they come to these understandings. I mean, if it happens that way, we're very thankful. But we don't want people to feel forced into that. We recognize that the Lord works through the covenant. The Lord works through families. The Lord works over time. And real saving faith can simply be saying, yeah, I believe these things. I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. So we want the experiential, but we're not so rallying behind that that all we're looking for is dramatic conversion stories. And then with theological, I think maybe we're all particularly sensitive to this. We cherish good theology. Orthodox means straight teaching or correct teaching. So it's right in our name. We'll talk gladly about what is in our standards, why we believe what we believe, what's been written on what we believe, and we are willing to lay down our lives for these truths. They're not up for grabs, right? When it comes to something like the Trinity, salvation through Jesus Christ alone, these are critical to who we are, what we believe in, And we're willing to sacrifice for these truths. At the same time, we don't want to become dead in our orthodoxy, frozen chosen. We're good with God because we believe the right things. We recognize the need for all of these emphases. And as we look back in church history, we can see that as some of these emphases took a foothold in certain areas, it led to division. and set some sad chapters in our own Presbyterian church history. So go ahead and turn the page over. And we're into the early 1700s here, and I think dates on the first Great Awakening, or what's often just called the Great Awakening. probably differ, but the period of Presbyterian history that we're interested in here is from 1720 to 1758. And there are these experiential Presbyterians during the 20s and 30s, and even that just sounds bad. Hopefully we have many and a church full of experiential Presbyterians today. But they were rejoicing at the outbreak of numerous local and regional revivals, taking note of this, that the gospel is going into the different colonies and towns, and it's taking taking root. And you have things like Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which I believe was in 1739. And you have George Whitefield, who is really the beginning of Methodism, but coming from an Anglican background either way. I guess Methodism was later. But in any case, an itinerant pastor, preaching for revival, calling men to repentance, calling men to faith in Jesus Christ, powerful preacher, an amazing period of time, just, you know, think of thousands and thousands and even men like Ben Franklin attending George Whitefield sermons, no microphone, open field, not a building with acoustics but somehow oratory skills powerful enough to communicate to thousands in an open, probably hot field or cold field. And so he's itinerating throughout the North America, 1739 to 1741. And in a sense, nationalizing the revivals into a widespread Great Awakening. So it seems these revivals were already present, already a thing in North America. But then what George Whitefield did was sort of capitalize that in a sense and become a spokesman for it. And he's certainly the one that is identified with the Great Awakening, the first Great Awakening. We'll get to the second one in the 1800s next week. So Presbyterians are rejoicing in genuine conversion during this time. And you could see how this would happen for Presbyterians. They're frustrated by itinerating pastors. Just think about how this church would respond to somebody coming in, somebody that we haven't met before, or somebody that maybe only a few of you know about. saying, I have a gospel message everybody needs to hear. We wouldn't welcome him into the pulpit at that point. We would have all sorts of questions for him and greetings for him. But it wouldn't just be a pathway to the pulpit to come and say, I'm an itinerating pastor who believes in revival and the gospel, and I have a message for your church. But that's what's going on. And men like George Whitfield have just tons and tons to be commended for. So a lot of agreement with the theology, a lot of joy over conversion, joy over revival, and yet a little concern as well over the itinerating. And itinerating is a fascinating study in itself in the United States. Now I don't think it's itinerating so much, although that still happens as well. probably actually more than it did then. So itinerating is still a thing but think about like the television evangelist, you know, somebody that is not necessarily backed by a specific church or if they are, that's not why you know about them but instead very, a remarkable personality, a remarkable communicator, somebody who draws attention and keeps attention. somebody very enthusiastic, all of those things, not bad in themselves. So there is, in the 1740s, an experiential pastor named Gilbert Tennant, who is a Presbyterian, and he preaches a sermon in March of 1740 called The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry. Now, when you read that title, you can kind of say, yeah, that is a dangerous thing, having an unconverted minister. has to be just about the most dangerous thing anybody can imagine. But there is behind that title and that sermon this idea that, you know, if you're not experiential the way some of us are, if you're not feeling these things, experiencing these things the way some of us are, you're not even converted. And it really is casting suspicion on so many Presbyterian pastors who are sort of just doing their job, not itinerating, working at a small local congregation, busy with their work, perhaps at many points too worn out and tired to have all the experiences of an itinerant revivalist. So this kind of sermon is breeding an atmosphere of suspicion and it really does result in making the church ripe for fracture, for schism or at least splitting temporarily. And that's what happened in 1745. There's bitter infighting and it splits the Presbyterians into a new side and an old side. A new side synod of New York and a old side synod of Philadelphia, the new side very much going with experience and revival, looking for that conversion experiences, very suspicious of people not claiming to be converted through something dramatic or through a revival of some sort. And then the old side, a little more stable and saying we cherish our theology, right? You see these two emphases at work. And neither one of them is wrong, but when one starts to outdo the other, or when there's one at the expense of the other, this is the sort of thing that happens. And again, you can understand it. It's not so blatant as somebody just coming in and teaching terrible heresy, somebody denying the Trinity, or saying Jesus Christ isn't the way, the truth, and the life. It's a lot more subtle than that, and yet it results and substantial real division, 1745. Very interestingly, Gilbert Tennant, by 1749, he himself begins to see these conversion claims, these revivals that are happening, there is excess in them. And he's convicted about it himself, realizing that I've fanned this into flame, I've called for experience, I've condemned Some who haven't had experience that seems to line up with a conversion. And he comes to this point where he realizes there is some fanaticism. There's some over-enthusiasm. There's too much going on in these revivals to look at it all and say, it's all from God. It's all from the Holy Spirit. He's saying it is excessive at points. preaches another sermon in which he recants for his extremism. He calls for a reunion within the Presbyterian body. And in 1758, those two synods, so the split church, New York and Philadelphia, old side and new side, they reunite, 1758, almost a decade later. And Gilbert Tennant is elected as its moderator. So Great Awakening, which Hopefully, we still learn about in our education. You can see here how it's really laced with Presbyterian church history. And really, as wonderful as a great awakening is, and revival, and national reformation, you can see it resulted in heartache for the church, even a split, which then the Lord works through, brings back together. And those are all things to keep in mind in church history. The Lord's at work in ways that We can't imagine, you just look at something like the Great Awakening and you think that's just so wonderful and it really is. It's just astonishing that the Lord is working and awakens a nation and all these colonies and yet it's sort of a sad page in Presbyterian Church history then has a sweet conclusion in 1758. After the Great Awakening, we come to really the Revolutionary War period. And of course, this period is longer than the Revolutionary War. But what's going on in American Presbyterian church history at this point is all so related to the war itself. From 1766 onward, Presbyterians began corresponding and meeting with Congregationalists from New England to work together on spreading the gospel and preserving religious liberty. So again, that's just a real critical term. You think about England being the mother country and the king being the head of the church in Anglicanism. So churches become certainly a place for the gospel, but also an entity with authority, an entity with order, apart from England and the king. In 1775, as war looms, the Presbyterian Synod issues a pastoral letter. It's very interesting what's involved with that. First, calling loyalty to King George III and allegiance to the British nation, but then calling for prayer and loyalty to the Continental Congress. of thing Presbyterians do in their letters, you know, looking at all sides, not jumping into one or the other but making some sort of a statement like that, recognizing merit and value in both positions. But the letter does state and even concludes with, there is no example in history where civil liberty was destroyed and the rights of conscience were preserved. That's a real interesting, statement to include in a letter. It's basically saying, if the country, the king, England, is going to remove all of our liberties, then we can't live out of conscience anymore, which is why we came here in the first place in many instances. So we need the right of conscience to do church the way we believe we should be doing it, and for any who are looking legitimizing the Revolutionary War, seeing why it wasn't like the French Revolution or some other insurrection or rebellion, you can sort of see the rationale for that even in that statement. Yeah, I mean, I would guess more in some areas. And the idea that, I mean, I know it was a long time before, but Francis McKinley being thrown in jail for trying to set up Presbyterian churches. And the fear during this time was that the Church of England would set up a bishop over them and start to regulate worship in a substantial way. So there was a fear rather than maybe an action. Yeah, right. So yeah, that's a great point. You can have fear and spin that into more of a reality, but then. Every day. Yeah, this is why news outlets exist basically. So spin fear. Yes. Yeah, I would think everybody involved in those churches. So a letter sent out to all the congregations produced in some way, maybe published in the congregation at that point for everybody that was a member of any of these Presbyterian churches. So yeah, that's a great point. I'm glad you pointed that out. I take that as, like today, in the OPC, there are reports, like a report on creation, for instance. And it's not the church saying, here's the church's stance on creation. It's saying, the church has studied the issue of creation, and here's the way we would like everybody in the congregation to think about these things, to pray about these things, to work out your belief when it comes to these things. So I take the pastoral letter as sort of like a prototype of that. And you can imagine that, like colonists saying, Should we be rebelling against, you know, the King of England? And you could see the tension right in that 1775 letter. Loyalty to the King, pray for the Continental Congress. Good question. When the Revolutionary War comes, this is a real interesting quote from a German captain on the British side, and he says, call this war not an American rebellion. It is nothing more or less than an Irish Scotch Presbyterian rebellion. So again, you read these, maybe your education is different than mine, but you read about the Revolutionary War, George Washington, all of these aspects of history, and you don't realize that, you know, it's Presbyterian history. connected in such a substantial way. Presbyterian ministers are labeled ringleaders of rebellion, arrested, sometimes their homes are ransacked, services are disrupted, churches are razed, soldiers broke up pews for firewood. I mean, these are real things that happen. So even if there was on the colonists' side, a overreaction to the in-reach and the government reach of England and King George, certainly when it got to the point of arms and war, Presbyterians were in the crosshairs and were seen as rebellious and treasonous and were targeted. Again, things to think about in our American Presbyterian history. Now, after the war, there's another pastoral letter, a letter out to the churches, and kind of a different tone here, not so much about, actually nothing at all, about loyalty to King George anymore. This is 1783 after the war, and it says, we cannot help congratulating you on the general and almost universal attachment of the presbytery body to the cause of liberty and the rights of mankind. The Synod, therefore, requests you to render thanks to Almighty God in particular manner for establishing the independence of the United States. So you can see there something that in a real way you could see all the way back with John Knox and the Church of Scotland, a separation of church and state. The King of England will not be the head of the church in the United States. He doesn't get to set up a bishop over all of us and tell us how to worship and throw us in jail for planting churches. We're going to be governed by the Bible. We're going to have Jesus Christ as the head of the church. If you want to see what the Bible says about how we govern under the headship of Jesus Christ, you could see our Book of Church Order, our Westminster Standards. And 1789 is kind of the point at which is pointed to the most in saying this is the beginning of the American Presbyterian Church. Of course, it's the beginning of America, so that makes sense. But through all of this, the Great Awakening, the old side, the new side split, the Revolutionary War, Presbyterians, Presbyterian ministers being targeted as rebellious and treasonous to the crown, through all of this, it's growing. The Church is growing. And it has that beautiful feel of the Book of Acts, where they undergo persecution and affliction. And even the Church itself isn't as faithful as it should be at various points And yet, because God provides the increase, it grows. So 1789, it's at 177 ministers, 16 presbyteries, which I believe is how many presbyteries are in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church today, all these years later in a very different situation. But in any case, 16 presbyteries. So think about that, 16 regions, 16 pluralities of elders, 420 churches. Too big for one synod. And so the church establishes a general assembly. And now you have that grouping of elders. All of them, each one of these is a plurality of elders. But you have sessions of the 420 churches, plurality of elders. Then you have 16 presbyteries, a greater plurality of elders. And then those 16 presbyteries are grouped into four different synods, greater plurality of elders. a general assembly, so an even greater plurality of elders, and that all goes back in so many ways to Acts 15, which we looked at last week, providing these courts of appeal. So if you don't believe you receive justice at the session level, at the congregational level, at one of those 420 churches, you could appeal to a presbytery. If the presbytery isn't sure what to do, they could appeal to a synod. If a synod isn't sure what to do, they could appeal to a general assembly. Expanding the plurality of elders, the same way you see in Acts 15, where the elders are all called to Jerusalem to weigh in on the issue of their day. And then very interestingly, and also in some ways pointing back to last week, the Westminster Confession of Faith is revised at this point. So if you use those links on the document from last week and pull up the Westminster Confession of Faith, the cover says Westminster Confession of Faith, but inside will say, according to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And that's just a footnote of sorts saying, It's basically the same document, but we've changed it at various points in our history. And this was the first substantial change in 1789 in which portions of it which gave civil authorities administration or discipline in the church, or maybe just seemed to do that. I think that's debated. But in any case, they were removed. It's interesting, all the ways in our day and age in which we hear separation of church and state, that's actually the legacy of Presbyterians for quite different reasons, saying the king doesn't get to, no earthly king, no human king gets to call the shots for Christ and his church. So there does need to be a separation between church and state. The civil authorities do not get to administer and bring discipline in the church that's reserved for Christ and his ministers. Questions, comments? Yes, Brian? Yeah, that's a great question. I would think that is like a lot of church planting And my guess is that they had elders that were kind of more involved with leading worship and leading worship services. I don't know if you, I think you did actually need an ordained minister even back then to do the Lord's Supper. So they were probably rotating around through some of those churches. But yeah, I mean the whole idea of like church planting, serial church planting, setting up six different church plants and, you know, adjacent towns and stuff, that goes all the way back to this period. But, yeah, that's a great question. Bob? You talk much about transformationalism and yet it was used. Can you talk just briefly? Yeah. Two sentences about transformationalism and its effect on the creature. Yeah, so I think I'll get more into transformationalism next week. It looks like next week you're going to be talking about going from formation to day. Yeah, so I'm behind. OK, great. Good. I'm behind. But yeah, transformationalism comes into play before machen. So maybe that's what you're getting at. I'm trying to get out of the mist. Right, right. So there's always the temptation to say, in essence, forget the gospel message. We want cultural transformation. Love your neighbor. Feed the poor. Abolish everything that's wrong with culture and the world. and we are forfeiting the poor and want to see things transformed even in culture. But you'll see how that's brought into really a heretical dimension late 1800s, early 1900s and then it's Machen and other men like him, B.B. Warfield and others that get back to correct teaching orthodox Presbyterianism. and saying, yes, we also are concerned with society and transformation, but not at the expense of experience or theology. So thank you. Yeah. Well, yeah. We're behind. Next week, hopefully, we'll do more with 1800s American Presbyterian Church History, J. Gresham Machen, The Beginning of the OPC. Thanks, Bob. Anything else? I guess we're out of time. All right, let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for the time together, for reminding us of the story that we're in, for the heritage we have. We thank you for all the wonderful men you've used throughout history. We know from experience that they were sinners like us, and yet bringing your will here on earth, even as it is in heaven, as we're called to do today. We pray now for all of us throughout this Lord's Day. Make it a celebratory and special time in which we rejoice in your continued goodness towards us. In Jesus we pray. Amen.