This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 10 June 1983, at the World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, the Presbyterian Church in the United States and the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America united to form the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), ending a division that had lasted since 1861.
That division began during the Civil War, when Southern Presbyterians organized the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, a split that outlasted the war itself by more than a century before the two branches reunited.
Moderators John Anderson and James Costen led the reunion service, which included the reading of a Declaration of Reunion and a shared communion, and James Andrews was elected the new denomination's first Stated Clerk. The combined church held just over three million members at the time of the merger.
A new national headquarters followed in Louisville, Kentucky in 1988, replacing the separate offices the two predecessor churches had kept in New York and Atlanta and giving the reunited church one seat of administration for the first time since 1861.
What the 1983 reunion changed for Presbyterianism's spread in the United States was closing a 122 year old Civil War division in a single service, then consolidating the reunited church's own administration five years later under one Louisville roof.