June 10 Today in OPC History

On June 10, 1988, the 55th General Assembly of the OPC, meeting at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, took the painful action of commissioning members of a special “Committee on RES Matters” with the authority to withdraw the OPC from the Reformed Ecumenical Synod. The OPC had been affiliated with that international body since 1948, two years after the Synod’s inception. After four decades of active membership, the OPC was frustrated by the Synod’s failure to discipline one of its founding members, the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (GKN), for doctrinal drift and confessional infidelity.

The Committee on RES Matters withdrew from the RES at the 1988 Harare, Zimbabwe Synod (meeting later that month), when the RES refused to declare the GKN to be no longer eligible for RES membership. As the OPC delegation explained in its statement, until that point it could not withdraw because of conscience but now it could no longer remain because of conscience.

Continuing to follow the mandate of the 55th Assembly, the Committee on RES Matters sent observers to the 1989 meeting of the International Council of Reformed Churches (founded in 1982), and the OPC soon became a member of that body, thus maintaining its ties to international Calvinism.

Picture: 1988 Reformed Ecumenical Synod meeting at Harare. OPC representatives, Jack J. Peterson (second row, fifth from the right), Thomas E. Tyson (third row, seventh from the right), G. I. Williamson (left of Mr. Tyson), and R.E.S. chairman, John P. Galbraith (fourth row, third from the left).