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December 2 Today in OPC History

Trenton, New Jersey

 

On December 2, 1938, in the living room of Leslie and Inez Dunn, Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church began when fourteen members of the Presbyterian Church of Columbus, New Jersey affirmed their desire to become a particular congregation of the Presbyterian Church of America (later OPC). Mr. Dunn was pastor of the Columbus church, which had voted to leave and subsequently voted to rejoin the Presbyterian Church in the USA. Those meeting in the Dunn home refused to return to that denomination. To their number was added a another group that was meeting in Trenton at the time, known as Faith Presbyterian Church, and together they were received by the Presbytery of New Jersey and constituted as a church on December 16, 1938. In the following spring the Rev. Dunn was installed as the church’s first pastor.

In 1940, Dunn resigned to accept a call in Wildwood, N.J. Lawrence Gilmore succeeded him in the pulpit of Grace Church, and subsequent pastors have included Wilson Albright, Theodore Georgian, Donald Parker, William Rankin, Gordon Mouw, Douglas Kittredge, George Kirkwood, Richard Nelson, and Travis Yonkman.

In 1946, Edmund Clowney described the founding and early history of the church in the Presbyterian Guardian: “Grace Church, like the denomination to which it belongs, has not known a spectacular growth. The difficulties it has faced are repeated again and again in the history of other congregations of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church—and of the church universal. In a day of crowds, Grace Church has been small; in a time in which ‘church’ has come to mean an imposing sanctuary, Grace Church has met in the living room of a house. But in a day of apostasy Grace Church has witnessed to the truth, and has gathered in an increasing harvest of those whom the truth has made free.”

Picture: Les and Margaret Dunn in the late 1940s.

 

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