Presbyterian Beliefs and Churches

1. Who Presbyterians Are

Presbyterians are Protestant Christians in the Reformed tradition whose churches are ruled by elders meeting in courts, from the local session up to a national General Assembly. The name comes from the Greek presbyteros, elder, and it describes the government rather than a doctrine, which is why Presbyterian bodies range from strictly confessional to broadly liberal while all keeping the same shape of assemblies. The tradition took its lasting form in Scotland after the Reformation Parliament of 1560, spread through Ireland and the American colonies with Scottish and Ulster Scots settlement, and later took deep root in Korea.

Presbyterian doctrine descends from Geneva. John Calvin taught a pattern of ministry with pastors, teachers, elders and deacons, and John Knox and his colleagues carried that pattern into Scotland in the First Book of Discipline of 1560. The Westminster Assembly, summoned by the English Parliament and sitting from 1643, produced the confession and catechisms that most Presbyterian churches still name as their subordinate standards. For the doctrinal system behind those documents, see our guide to Calvinism and Reformed theology, which this page assumes rather than repeats.

Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational, Episcopal

Four words are easily confused, and the distinction is worth fixing at the start. Reformed names a body of doctrine. Presbyterian, Congregational and Episcopal name three answers to the question of who rules the church. Episcopal government places authority in bishops who ordain and oversee. Congregational government places it in the gathered local congregation, which calls and dismisses its own minister. Presbyterian government places it in elders sitting together in graded courts, so that no single man rules and no single congregation stands alone. A church can be Reformed in doctrine and any of the three in government, and the Congregationalists of New England were a standing example of exactly that.

How Presbyterians Describe Themselves

Presbyterians describe their government as the pattern of the New Testament church rather than a later human arrangement, and they treat that claim as a matter of obedience. The Westminster Form of Presbyterial Church Government, adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1645, argues from the appointment of elders in every city (Acts 14:23, Titus 1:5) and from the Jerusalem council of Acts 15, where apostles and elders met to settle a question binding on other churches. In the Presbyterian reading, Acts 15 is the first presbytery. Most Presbyterians will also say that the graded courts protect against two dangers at once, the isolation of a congregation left to itself and the concentration of power in one bishop.

2. How a Presbyterian Church Is Governed

A Presbyterian church is governed by graded courts of elders, each one able to review the acts of the court below it. Authority is held by assemblies rather than by individuals, decisions are taken by vote, and every court contains both ministers and lay elders. The four classic courts are the session, the presbytery, the synod and the General Assembly, and several denominations now work with three because they have dissolved their synods.

The Session

The session, called the consistory or the kirk session in some traditions, is the court of the local congregation. It consists of the ruling elders elected by the congregation together with the minister, who serves as its moderator and has no veto over it. The session receives members, oversees the Lord's Table, exercises discipline, approves the order of worship and manages the congregation's spiritual life. In most bodies a separate board of deacons or trustees handles finance and property, which keeps the session free for pastoral oversight.

The Presbytery

The presbytery is the regional court and the load-bearing institution of the whole system. It is composed of every minister within its bounds along with ruling elders commissioned by each congregation, and it examines, licenses, ordains and installs ministers, receives them from other presbyteries, and holds their membership. A Presbyterian minister is a member of his presbytery rather than of the congregation he serves, which is the practical expression of the belief that ordination belongs to the body of elders. The presbytery also plants and dissolves congregations, hears charges against ministers, and can dissolve a pastoral relationship.

Synod and General Assembly

The synod gathers several presbyteries and reviews their records, and the General Assembly is the highest court of the denomination. The Assembly meets annually in most Presbyterian bodies, hears appeals from below, interprets the constitution, and elects a moderator who presides for the year and holds no continuing authority afterwards. Constitutional amendments usually require more than an Assembly vote: in most bodies the Assembly sends the proposal down to the presbyteries, and a majority of presbyteries must approve before it becomes law. That send-down procedure, called the Barrier Act in the Scottish tradition after the Act of 1697, is one of the strongest built-in checks in Presbyterian government.

Ruling Elders and Teaching Elders

Presbyterians distinguish two kinds of elder without making one a higher order than the other. Ruling elders are members of the congregation, elected by it, ordained for governing, visiting and sitting in the courts. Teaching elders, more usually called ministers of Word and Sacrament, are trained and examined for preaching and the administration of the sacraments. The distinction rests on 1 Timothy 5:17, where Paul writes that elders who rule well are worthy of double honour, especially those who labour in preaching and teaching. Because both kinds sit and vote together, a Presbyterian assembly is normally balanced between clergy and laity in a way that has no exact Catholic parallel.

Deacons

Deacons in Presbyterian churches serve the poor and manage the temporal affairs of the congregation, and they do not govern. Presbyterians read Acts 6:1 to 6 as the institution of the office and 1 Timothy 3:8 to 13 as its qualifications, and they treat the diaconate as a permanent office rather than a step toward ministry. Practice varies on whether women may be ordained as deacons: some bodies ordain women deacons while restricting the eldership to men, some open both offices, and some open neither.

The four-court structure is described here in the form common to the Westminster tradition. Names and powers differ between denominations, and the governing text is each body's own constitution, such as the Church of Scotland's Church Courts Act, the PCUSA's Book of Order or the PCA's Book of Church Order.

3. The Claim That Bishop and Elder Are One Office

The central Presbyterian argument is that the New Testament uses episkopos (overseer, from which the English word bishop descends) and presbyteros (elder) for the same men in the same congregations, so the apostolic church knew two ordained offices rather than three. Presbyterians conclude that a bishop set over other ministers is a later development of church order which lacks divine warrant and cannot bind the churches, and that oversight belongs to the elders acting together. The argument is exegetical before it is historical, and it deserves to be stated with the texts that carry it.

The Texts Presbyterians Cite

Five passages do most of the work. In Acts 20:17 Paul sends from Miletus to Ephesus and calls the presbyterous, the elders, of the church, and in Acts 20:28 he tells those same men that the Holy Spirit has made them episkopous, overseers, to shepherd the church of God. In Titus 1:5 Paul instructs Titus to appoint elders in every town, and two verses later gives the qualifications on the ground that an overseer must be blameless, moving between the two words in a single sentence. In 1 Peter 5:1 to 2 Peter addresses the elders and tells them to shepherd the flock, exercising oversight, using the verb form of the same root. Philippians 1:1 greets the overseers and deacons at Philippi with no third group named, and 1 Timothy 3 gives qualifications for overseers and then for deacons with no separate section for elders. Finally, 1 Timothy 4:14 tells Timothy not to neglect the gift given him when the body of elders, the presbyterion, laid hands on him.

The Argument From the Early Church

Presbyterians add a historical layer to the exegesis. The First Letter of Clement, written from Rome to Corinth around the end of the first century, speaks of the appointment of bishops and deacons and uses the language of presbyters for the men whom the Corinthians had deposed, without describing a single bishop over the Corinthian church. Jerome, writing to Evangelus in the letter numbered 146, states plainly that a presbyter is the same as a bishop, and that before there were parties in religion the churches were governed by the common counsel of the presbyters, adding that the bishop's superiority came by custom rather than by the Lord's own arrangement. Presbyterians treat that letter as a Catholic doctor conceding their case.

What Follows for Ordination

The practical conclusion is that ordination belongs to the presbytery. Since 1 Timothy 4:14 credits Timothy's ordination to the laying on of hands by the body of elders, and since there is no separate order above the elders, Presbyterians hold that a court of elders ordains and that no consecration by a bishop is needed or possible. Nothing is thereby taken away from the seriousness of the act: Presbyterian ordination requires examination in theology, Scripture and the church's standards, a trial sermon, a call from a congregation, vows of subscription and the laying on of hands. The claim is about who has authority to ordain rather than about how lightly ordination is to be taken.

Two Further Presbyterian Points

Presbyterians commonly make two additional arguments that are worth naming because Catholics often miss them. The first is the headship of Christ: the Scottish tradition in particular insists that Christ alone is King and Head of the Church, so that no earthly officer can claim a monarchical place in it, and that principle drove the Covenanters against the Stuart bishops and the Free Church out of the establishment in 1843. The second is the parity of ministers: every minister is equal in order and authority to every other, which is why a Presbyterian moderator serves for a term and then returns to the ranks. Both convictions are held as safeguards for the freedom of the gospel rather than as mere constitutional preferences.

4. The Catholic Answer: Lumen Gentium 21

The Catholic Church answers that the fluid vocabulary of the New Testament does not settle the question of the office, and that the episcopate is a distinct degree of the one sacrament of Holy Orders received from the apostles. The Second Vatican Council states the position in Lumen Gentium 21: episcopal consecration confers the fullness of the sacrament of Orders, together with the offices of sanctifying, teaching and governing. Lumen Gentium 20 teaches that the bishops have by divine institution taken the place of the apostles as shepherds of the Church, and 28 describes priests as sharing in the bishop's priesthood in a dependent degree.

Yes, the Words Overlap

Catholic scholarship grants the linguistic point without granting the conclusion. The terminology of ministry in the first century was still settling, and the same men in a given town could be called elders and overseers in the space of two sentences. Words settle into offices later than the offices themselves. The Catholic argument is that the New Testament also shows a function of oversight held by individuals over local bodies of elders: Timothy at Ephesus and Titus in Crete are each told to appoint elders, to hear charges against them (1 Timothy 5:19) and to correct the churches, which places them above the elders they appoint. James at Jerusalem in Acts 15:13 to 21 speaks with a settled personal authority in his own church. The apostles themselves ordained and sent, and the pastoral letters show the handing on of that role.

Ignatius of Antioch and the Second Century

The clearest early witness is Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, writing on his way to martyrdom in Rome around 107. His letters distinguish three orders by name and by function in every city he addresses. He tells the Magnesians to do nothing without the bishop and the presbyters, the Trallians that the bishop stands as a type of the Father with the presbyters as the council of the apostles and the deacons entrusted with the service of Jesus Christ, and the Smyrnaeans that no one should do anything pertaining to the church apart from the bishop, and that the Eucharist is valid which is celebrated by the bishop or by one he appoints. Ignatius writes as a man describing a settled arrangement rather than proposing a new one, within living memory of the apostles, across churches in Asia Minor that he had no power to reorganise.

What Jerome Actually Held

Jerome's letter to Evangelus is quoted accurately by Presbyterians and read too narrowly. Jerome does say that presbyter and bishop were once the same, and in the same passage he holds that bishops alone ordain, which he treats as the standing difference between the two. He was arguing against deacons at Rome who were putting themselves above priests, and his point was the dignity of the presbyterate rather than the abolition of the episcopate. Jerome served the Church under bishops, defended the see of Rome in his letters to Pope Damasus, and never proposed a church governed without bishops.

What Is at Stake

The question matters because Orders carry the sacraments. The Council of Trent, in the twenty-third session of 1563, taught that there is in the Catholic Church a hierarchy instituted by divine ordination consisting of bishops, priests and ministers, and that bishops are superior to priests and can confirm and ordain. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the three degrees in paragraphs 1554 to 1571. The Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio 22, says of the ecclesial communities born of the Reformation that because they lack the sacrament of Orders they have not preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness, while affirming in the same paragraph that their members are truly incorporated into Christ by baptism. The Catholic case for the ministerial priesthood as a distinct order is set out on our page on the Catholic priesthood, and the case for the Petrine office on our page on the papacy.

The Catholic column cites Lumen Gentium 20, 21 and 28, the Council of Trent session 23, and Unitatis Redintegratio 3 and 22. The Presbyterian column follows the Westminster Form of Presbyterial Church Government (1645) and the ordination provisions of the constitutions named in section 2.

5. The Westminster Standards

The Westminster Standards are the Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms produced by the Westminster Assembly, which the English Parliament summoned in 1643 and which sat at Westminster Abbey through the Civil War years. The Confession was completed in 1646 and the catechisms in 1647. England abandoned the settlement at the Restoration in 1660, and Scotland kept it: the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland adopted the Confession in 1647, and it remains the principal subordinate standard of most Presbyterian churches worldwide.

What the Confession Teaches

The Confession opens with Scripture, which it calls the only rule of faith and obedience, sufficient, clear in what is necessary for salvation, and self-authenticating by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit. It teaches one God in three persons, the eternal decree by which God foreordains whatsoever comes to pass without being the author of sin, and the election of a definite number of persons to everlasting life. It sets out the covenant of works with Adam and the covenant of grace in Christ, justification by faith alone with works following as its fruit, adoption, sanctification, the perseverance of the saints and assurance. It closes with the last things: death, the resurrection and the last judgement. The Shorter Catechism begins with the question that has been memorised by generations of Presbyterian children, asking what is the chief end of man, and answering that man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

Subordinate Standards and Subscription

Presbyterians call the Confession a subordinate standard because Scripture stands above it, and they differ sharply among themselves about how tightly ministers are bound to it. Strict subscriptionists require assent to the system of doctrine in every part. Others permit stated exceptions recorded at ordination, which is the ordinary practice in the Presbyterian Church in America. The Church of Scotland and several other bodies have passed declaratory acts allowing liberty of opinion on points not entering into the substance of the faith, a formula introduced in the nineteenth century that conservatives regarded as a loosening of subscription to the Confession. Since 1967 the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has used a Book of Confessions containing the Westminster documents alongside the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds, the Scots Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Barmen Declaration, the Confession of 1967 and, since 2016, the Belhar Confession.

What Catholics Should Know About the Text

Two points about the Confession bear directly on Catholic readers. The original chapter 25, paragraph 6, identified the Pope as antichrist. Most American Presbyterian bodies, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America among them, use a version of the Confession from which that clause has been removed, while some smaller conservative bodies retain the original wording. The American churches also revised chapter 23 on the civil magistrate in 1788, removing the powers over the church that the seventeenth-century text had given the state. Naming both revisions matters, because quoting the 1646 text at a living Presbyterian without checking his denomination's edition is a way of arguing with a document he does not hold.

The Confession and the Catholic Reader

A Catholic reading the Confession will find much to affirm and three deep divisions. The affirmations are real: the Trinity, the natures of Christ, the necessity of grace, the resurrection of the body, the reality of judgement. The divisions are Scripture as the only rule apart from Tradition, the doctrine of election as the Confession states it, and justification by faith alone as the Confession defines it. Our page on faith and works takes up the third of those at length, and our page on Sacred Tradition and Scripture the first. The 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, was formally associated with by the World Communion of Reformed Churches at Wittenberg in July 2017, which narrowed the third division in stated terms without closing it.

6. Worship and the Two Sacraments

Presbyterian worship is built on the regulative principle: what God has commanded in Scripture may be done in public worship, and what he has not commanded may not. The Westminster Directory for the Public Worship of God, approved in 1645, replaced the Book of Common Prayer in England and the Book of Common Order in Scotland, and it gave orders of service as guidance rather than as fixed liturgical text. The result is a service centred on the reading and preaching of Scripture, with prayer, psalms and hymns, and the sacraments celebrated at intervals rather than weekly.

Psalms, Hymns and Instruments

Singing has been a point of division within the tradition. Older Presbyterian practice was exclusive psalmody, the singing of metrical versions of the biblical psalms without instrumental accompaniment, on the reasoning that God has supplied his own book of praise. The Scottish Metrical Psalter of 1650 is still in use, and the Reformed Presbyterian churches and the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland continue unaccompanied psalm singing. Most larger Presbyterian bodies introduced hymns and organs during the nineteenth century, and the Free Church of Scotland changed its own practice by a decision of its Plenary Assembly in 2010.

Baptism

Presbyterians baptise the infant children of believing parents, normally by sprinkling or pouring, and they ground the practice on covenant theology rather than on any effect they attribute to the water itself. The argument runs that the covenant of grace is one across both testaments, that circumcision marked the children of the covenant under the old, that Peter tells the crowd at Pentecost that the promise is for them and their children (Acts 2:39), and that entire households are baptised in Acts 16:15 and 16:33 and 1 Corinthians 1:16. The Westminster Confession calls baptism a sign and seal of ingrafting into Christ and denies that grace is so tied to it that no one can be saved without it. Catholic teaching goes further, holding that baptism itself effects the regeneration it signifies. The Catholic Church recognises Presbyterian baptism as valid when it is administered with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and a Presbyterian entering the Catholic Church is therefore not baptised again. Our page on baptism sets out the Catholic doctrine and the reasons for that recognition.

The Lord's Supper

Presbyterians hold that Christ is truly present in the Lord's Supper and received by faith, and they deny transubstantiation. The Westminster Confession, chapter 29, teaches that worthy receivers really and indeed, yet spiritually rather than carnally, receive and feed upon Christ crucified, while the elements remain bread and wine in their own substance. That is Calvin's doctrine of a real spiritual presence, and it stands between the Lutheran and the Zwinglian positions. Older Scottish practice held communion seasons, several days of preaching and self-examination ending with the Supper served at long tables, with communion tokens given to those admitted by the session. Most congregations now celebrate quarterly or monthly, and the minister fences the table by warning the unworthy away. Catholic teaching on the Eucharist as the body and blood of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine is set out on our page on the Eucharist, and the Catholic understanding of the Mass as a sacrifice, which the Westminster Confession explicitly rejects in chapter 29, on our page on the Mass.

The Sabbath and the Church Year

Presbyterian tradition keeps a strict Lord's Day and historically kept almost no church year. The Confession devotes chapter 21 to the Sabbath, requiring a whole day set apart from ordinary work and recreation for public and private worship, a discipline still visible in the Hebrides and in conservative congregations elsewhere. The Scottish Reformation abolished Christmas and Easter observance as holy days without scriptural warrant, and Christmas was not a public holiday in Scotland until the middle of the twentieth century. Most mainline Presbyterian churches restored the seasons of Advent, Lent and Easter during the twentieth century, so a visitor today will usually find a liturgical calendar in use. Our guide to the liturgical calendar explains the Catholic year that the reformers set aside.

7. The Church of Scotland and the Disruption of 1843

The Church of Scotland is the mother church of world Presbyterianism, established as a Reformed national church by the Scottish Parliament in 1560 under the leadership of John Knox. Its history is a long argument about two things: whether the church should be governed by bishops or by presbyteries, and whether the state or the church controls the appointment of ministers. The second argument produced the Disruption of 1843, the division that shaped Scottish Presbyterianism for the century that followed.

From 1560 to the Revolution Settlement

The Reformation Parliament of 1560 abolished papal jurisdiction in Scotland and adopted the Scots Confession, and the First Book of Discipline laid out a Reformed order of ministry. Presbyterian government was not secure for another century and a half. The Stuart kings pressed bishops on the Scottish church repeatedly, the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 were sworn against that pressure, and the years after 1660 brought the killing time in which Covenanters were hunted and executed for attending open-air conventicles. The Revolution settlement of 1690 finally established Presbyterian government in the Church of Scotland, and the Act of Union in 1707 guaranteed it.

Patronage and the Secessions

Parliament restored lay patronage in 1712, giving landowners the legal right to present a minister to a parish whether or not the congregation wanted him. Presbyterians regarded that as the state intruding on the headship of Christ over his church, and the grievance produced repeated separations. Ebenezer Erskine and three colleagues formed the Associate Presbytery in 1733, the origin of the Secession churches, and Thomas Gillespie's Relief Church followed in 1761. Those bodies later united as the United Presbyterian Church in 1847. Every one of these divisions began with the same question of who chooses the minister.

The Ten Years Conflict and the Day Itself

The final crisis ran from 1834 to 1843 and is called the Ten Years Conflict. The General Assembly passed the Veto Act in 1834, allowing a congregation's male heads of family to reject a patron's presentee. The Auchterarder case tested it: a presentee rejected by the parish sued, and the Court of Session and then the House of Lords ruled that the church courts had acted unlawfully in refusing to induct him. Further cases at Lethendy and Strathbogie deepened the collision, and in 1842 the Assembly adopted the Claim, Declaration and Protest, known as the Claim of Right, asserting the church's exclusive jurisdiction in spiritual matters. Parliament declined to act on it.

On 18 May 1843, at St Andrew's Church on George Street in Edinburgh, the retiring moderator read a protest and walked out of the General Assembly, followed by a long procession of ministers and elders down the hill to Tanfield Hall at Canonmills, where they constituted the Free Church of Scotland and elected Thomas Chalmers as moderator. Roughly a third of the ministers of the Church of Scotland left, and they left their manses, their stipends and their church buildings with them. Within a few years the Free Church had raised money for hundreds of new churches, a college in Edinburgh, and a school system, all of it funded by congregations that had just given up the parish buildings they were used to.

The Disruption figure given here is the traditional estimate of about a third of the ministry, and precise counts differ between historians because ministers continued to come out over the following months. The narrative above follows the standard accounts of the Ten Years Conflict and the surviving Assembly records.

After the Disruption

Patronage was abolished by Parliament in 1874, removing the original cause of the split, and reunion followed slowly. The Free Church merged with the United Presbyterian Church in 1900 to form the United Free Church of Scotland. A minority that refused the union continued as the Free Church of Scotland, sued for the property, and won in the House of Lords in 1904 in the case usually cited as Bannatyne against Overtoun, an outcome so unworkable that Parliament passed the Churches (Scotland) Act 1905 to divide the assets by commission. The Church of Scotland Act 1921 recognised the church's spiritual independence from the state in matters of doctrine, worship, government and discipline, which removed the last obstacle, and the United Free Church rejoined the Church of Scotland in 1929.

The Kirk Today

The Church of Scotland remains the national church of Scotland without being a state church in the English sense, since the 1921 Act secured its spiritual independence, the Assembly elects its own moderator, and the sovereign is represented there by a Lord High Commissioner who attends without taking part in its business. It has ordained women as elders since 1966 and as ministers of Word and Sacrament since 1968. Its General Assembly voted in 2022 to allow ministers and deacons to be authorised to conduct same-sex marriages, with a conscience provision for those who decline. Membership has fallen steadily over recent decades, a pattern shared with most historic churches in western Europe, and the church has responded with large-scale reorganisation of presbyteries and parishes. Our page on whether Christianity is dying examines those trends across denominations.

8. The Scottish Presbyterian Bodies

Scotland has several distinct Presbyterian denominations, and their differences are intelligible only through the sequence of divisions and unions described above. The list below names each body and the point at which it separated, which is the fastest way to understand who is who.

The Church of Scotland

The national church, established 1560, Presbyterian in settled form since 1690, reunited with the United Free Church in 1929. It holds the Westminster Confession as its principal subordinate standard with liberty of opinion on points not entering into the substance of the faith, under the Declaratory Articles of 1921. It is the largest Presbyterian body in Scotland and the broadest in theology.

The Free Church of Scotland

The body formed at the Disruption in 1843, continued after 1900 by the minority that declined union with the United Presbyterian Church. Conservative and confessional, it holds the Westminster Confession without a declaratory act, ordains men only, and trains its ministers at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, the successor of its Disruption-era college. Its Plenary Assembly permitted hymns and instrumental accompaniment in 2010, ending a long-standing practice of unaccompanied psalmody.

The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland

Separated from the Free Church in 1893 in protest at the Declaratory Act of 1892, which the seceders held to have loosened subscription to the Confession. It keeps exclusive unaccompanied psalmody, the Authorised Version, and a strict observance of the Lord's Day, and it is strongest in the Highlands and the Western Isles. The Associated Presbyterian Churches separated from it in 1989 after a disciplinary case.

Smaller Scottish Bodies

The United Free Church of Scotland continues as the remnant that declined the 1929 union with the Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland (Continuing) separated from the Free Church in 2000 over a disciplinary dispute. The Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland descends from the Covenanters who stood outside the Revolution settlement of 1690 and keeps unaccompanied psalmody. Each of these is small, and each is a live denomination with congregations rather than a historical footnote.

Relative sizes are described here in words rather than in numbers. Each of these denominations publishes its own membership and congregation counts in its annual General Assembly reports, and the Scottish Church Census, published by Brierley Consultancy, is the standard independent comparison across Scottish denominations.

9. Presbyterian Churches in the United States

American Presbyterianism began with Scots and Ulster Scots settlement and has divided and reunited repeatedly ever since, which is why a search for a Presbyterian church in an American town can return several denominations with similar names. Francis Makemie, an Ulster minister, organised the first presbytery in America at Philadelphia in 1706, a synod followed in 1717, and the first General Assembly met in 1789. The pattern of American divisions has run along three fault lines: revivalism, slavery, and the authority of Scripture.

The Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Divisions

The Adopting Act of 1729 set the terms of subscription to the Westminster Confession and left room for scruples on points not essential to the system of doctrine, a compromise that has shaped American Presbyterian argument ever since. The Great Awakening split the church into Old Side and New Side from 1741 to 1758 over revival preaching and ministerial education. The Cumberland Presbyterian Church formed on the frontier in 1810, objecting both to the educational requirements for ministry and to the Confession's teaching on predestination, and it revised the Confession accordingly. The Old School and New School division of 1837 turned on doctrine, revival methods and the church's voluntary societies, and the national split over slavery in 1861 produced the southern church that became the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

The Twentieth-Century Divisions

The fundamentalist and modernist controversy of the 1920s and 1930s produced several of the conservative denominations still active today. J. Gresham Machen, a New Testament scholar at Princeton, left to found Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929 and an independent mission board in 1933, was suspended from the ministry, and in 1936 led the formation of the church that took the name Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1939. The Bible Presbyterian Church separated from it in 1937 under Carl McIntire over premillennialism and Christian liberty questions. The Presbyterian Church in America was constituted in 1973 by conservative congregations leaving the southern church, and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church was formed in 1981 by congregations leaving the northern church. The two largest mainline bodies reunited in 1983 as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), healing the division of 1861. ECO, A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians, was formed in 2012 by congregations departing the PCUSA.

The Older Continuing Bodies

Two older bodies carry Scottish traditions directly. The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church traces itself to a 1782 union of Associate and Reformed Presbytery congregations descended from the Scottish Secession and Covenanter movements, and its continuing General Synod is centred in the Carolinas and the southeast, with Erskine College and Erskine Theological Seminary as its institutions. The Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America is the American continuation of the Covenanters, keeps exclusive unaccompanied psalmody, and trains ministers at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh.

Korean-American Presbyterianism

Korean immigration since the 1960s has made Korean Presbyterian congregations a substantial part of American Presbyterianism. Some are congregations and presbyteries within the PCUSA and the PCA; others belong to Korean-American denominations such as the Korean Presbyterian Church Abroad and the Korean American Presbyterian Church, or to American branches of the Korean general assemblies. Korean-speaking and bilingual congregations are a substantial presence in American cities, and their seminaries and mission agencies work on the same presbyterian pattern described in section 2.

Founding dates and constitutional positions above are drawn from each denomination's own published history and constitution. No membership numbers are given here because reliable current figures require each body's own annual statistical report, and a number quoted without its source and year is worth nothing.

10. Presbyterians Around the World

Presbyterianism spread with Scottish and Irish emigration and with nineteenth-century missions, and the tradition is now far more widely established outside Scotland than within it. Korea in particular has become a centre of the tradition, and Presbyterian churches are substantial in parts of Africa, in Taiwan, in Brazil and across the English-speaking world.

Ireland, Wales and England

The Presbyterian Church in Ireland grew from Scottish settlement in Ulster in the seventeenth century, with the first presbytery at Carrickfergus in 1642, and it is the largest Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland. It is conservative in doctrine, holds the Westminster Confession, and ordains women as ministers. The Presbyterian Church of Wales grew out of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist revival and organised itself as a distinct connexion in 1811, adopting presbyterian government and its own confession of faith in 1823. English Presbyterianism largely merged into the United Reformed Church in 1972 with the Congregationalists, so a Presbyterian in England today is more likely to be found in the United Reformed Church or in a small conservative body than in a denomination bearing the Presbyterian name.

The description of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland as the largest Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland follows the religion and religion-brought-up-in tables of the 2021 census, published by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.

Korea

Presbyterian churches account for a large part of Protestant Christianity in South Korea. American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in the mid-1880s, Horace Allen as a physician in 1884 and Horace Underwood as a missionary in 1885, and the mission adopted the Nevius method, which pressed self-support, self-government and self-propagation on Korean congregations from the beginning. That policy produced a church led by Koreans early, and it grew rapidly through the colonial period, the war and the industrial decades that followed. Korean Presbyterianism is also heavily divided: the Koshin churches separated in 1952 over the shrine worship compromises of the colonial period, the Kijang group in 1953 over biblical criticism, and in 1959 the main body split into Tonghap and Hapdong over membership in the World Council of Churches and related disputes. Dozens of smaller general assemblies exist alongside them, and Korean missionaries in the presbyterian tradition now work across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Africa, Asia and Latin America

Presbyterian and Reformed churches carry significant membership in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Cameroon and South Africa, several of them descending from Scottish missions of the nineteenth century, such as the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian in Malawi and Zambia and the Presbyterian Church of East Africa in Kenya. The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, founded through English and Canadian Presbyterian missions from the 1860s, has been a notable public voice in Taiwanese civil life. The Presbyterian Church of Brazil dates from American mission work begun in 1859. In India, most Presbyterian congregations entered the united Churches of North and South India in 1970 and 1947 respectively, while the Presbyterian Church of India remains strong in the northeastern states. Our page on Christianity in Africa sets the African churches in their wider context.

Australia, Canada and New Zealand

In each of these countries the majority of Presbyterians entered a union church in the twentieth century and a minority continued separately. The Presbyterian Church in Canada saw the larger part of its congregations join the United Church of Canada in 1925, with the continuing body keeping the older name. The Presbyterian Church of Australia saw most of its congregations enter the Uniting Church in Australia in 1977, and the continuing church has grown more conservative since. The Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand remained a single national body and is among the larger Protestant denominations there.

International Bodies

Most Presbyterian denominations belong to one of two international families. The World Communion of Reformed Churches, formed in 2010 by the merger of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Reformed Ecumenical Council, is the broader body and includes most mainline Presbyterian churches. The World Reformed Fellowship and the International Conference of Reformed Churches gather more conservative and confessional denominations. Membership in one rather than another is often the quickest indicator of where a given church stands.

11. Where Catholics and Presbyterians Meet

Catholics and Presbyterians share the Trinity, the Incarnation, the atoning death and bodily resurrection of Christ, the Scriptures of the New Testament, and one baptism that each recognises in the other when it is given with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Second Vatican Council teaches in Unitatis Redintegratio 3 that those baptised into Christ outside the visible communion of the Catholic Church are joined to Christ in a real if imperfect communion, and calls them brothers in the Lord. That is the ground on which any Catholic conversation with a Presbyterian should begin.

The Formal Dialogue

An international theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, now the World Communion of Reformed Churches, has run since 1970. Its published reports include The Presence of Christ in Church and World in 1977, Towards a Common Understanding of the Church in 1990, and The Church as Community of Common Witness to the Kingdom of God in 2007, with a later phase taking up justification and sacramentality. In July 2017 at Wittenberg the World Communion of Reformed Churches formally associated itself with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the 1999 agreement between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation. National dialogues have run alongside these, including a long-standing Catholic and Presbyterian and Reformed consultation in the United States.

What Still Divides

Four differences remain load-bearing. The first is authority: Scripture alone as the final rule against Scripture and Tradition read under a living teaching office. The second is Orders and the Eucharist, treated in section 4. The third is the number and effect of the sacraments, with two against seven and a difference about whether a sacrament effects what it signifies. The fourth is the place of Mary and the saints, since the Westminster Confession forbids religious worship to be given to any creature and Presbyterians read Catholic devotion as violating that, while the Catholic Church distinguishes the adoration owed to God alone from the honour given to the saints. Our page on Catholic and Protestant differences works through the wider list, and our page on the saints sets out the Catholic distinction in detail.

What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

State the Presbyterian position from Presbyterian sources before answering it, because a caricature convinces nobody and dishonours the person in front of you. Read the Westminster Confession itself in the edition your neighbour's denomination actually uses. Know that a Presbyterian minister has usually studied Greek, Hebrew and systematic theology at a level most Catholic laypeople have not, so arriving with three proof texts and a confident manner will go badly. Learn the two texts that matter most, Acts 20:17 with 20:28 for the office question and 1 Timothy 3:15 for the Church as the pillar and bulwark of the truth, and know what each side does with them. Pray for unity, which Christ asked for by name in John 17:21. Our guide to ecumenism sets out how the Catholic Church approaches that work, and our guide to the Reformation tells the sixteenth-century story behind the division.

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