Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) carries a name that describes an ending rather than a beginning. Twice in its history American Presbyterians divided over the country's deepest wound, and once, more than a century later, they came back together.

The first division came in 1861. As the Confederate states seceded, Presbyterians within them withdrew from the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America rather than remain bound to a body that would not endorse the southern cause, forming what eventually took the name Presbyterian Church in the United States, commonly shortened to PCUS. The northern body carried on under its own name until 1958, when it merged with the United Presbyterian Church of North America, a smaller denomination with its own separate nineteenth century roots, to form the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, or UPCUSA.

For 122 years after the Civil War split, the northern and southern Presbyterian traditions developed along separate, sometimes divergent paths, differing at times on questions of biblical interpretation, ecumenism and social witness as much as on the memory of secession itself. Reunion talks gathered pace through the 1970s, and on 10 June 1983 delegates meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, voted to reunite the UPCUSA and the PCUS as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), closing a division that had outlasted the war that caused it by more than a century.

Presbyterian government runs on a chain of graded councils rather than on individual authority, a structure the tradition traces to John Calvin's Geneva and to the Scottish Reformation that carried it to America. A local session of ruling elders governs each congregation; sessions answer to a regional presbytery of ministers and elder delegates; presbyteries answer to a synod; and a General Assembly, meeting annually and drawing commissioners from every presbytery, speaks for the denomination as a whole. No single bishop, and no single congregation acting alone, holds final authority.

Doctrine follows a similarly plural pattern. Rather than subscribing to one confession, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) holds a Book of Confessions gathering the ancient Nicene and Apostles' Creeds alongside the seventeenth century Westminster Confession and Catechisms and several twentieth century statements, including the 1967 Confession and A Brief Statement of Faith adopted at the 1983 reunion itself. Ministers vow to be instructed and led by this whole collection rather than bound to any one document within it.

Ordination has followed two separate timelines that only merged in 1983. The northern stream approved ordaining women to the ministry of Word and Sacrament in 1955, and in 1956 the Cayuga-Syracuse Presbytery ordained Margaret Towner, its first woman minister. The southern PCUS reached the same decision in 1964, ordaining Rachel Henderlite the following year. Both practices simply continued, unremarked, when the two churches reunited.