The Old Side and New Side Synods Reunite as the Synod of New York and Philadelphia

Twenty nine years after the Synod of Philadelphia formally adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith in the Adopting Act of 1729, and thirty one years before the Presbyterian Church's first General Assembly convened in Philadelphia in 1789, both already recorded here, American Presbyterianism spent almost two decades split against itself. When the Synod met in Philadelphia in 1741, the revivalist Log College ministers who had thrown themselves into the Great Awakening found themselves outnumbered and excluded as schismatics, and they withdrew to found a rival body, the Synod of New York, splitting the young American church into an anti revivalist Old Side and a revivalist New Side. Age and death thinned the ranks of the original antagonists over the following years, and Gilbert Tennent, one of the New Side's own most outspoken preachers, publicly regretted the intemperance of his earlier attacks on Old Side ministers. In 1758 the two synods signed a Plan of Union in Philadelphia, reuniting as the Synod of New York and Philadelphia and formally recognizing the Great Awakening's revivals as a genuine work of the Holy Spirit, a reconciliation that repaired the denomination's institutional strength in the decades before its first General Assembly.