January 10 Today in OPC History

In the January 10, 1945 issue of The Presbyterian Guardian, Gordon H. Clark labeled the OPC a “sectarian oddity.”

In Clark’s article, “Blest River of Salvation,” he accused the eight-year-old Orthodox Presbyterian Church of diverting its chief emphasis away from opposition to Modernism. As a result, the church had “earned an unenviable reputation” and “assumed the position of an isolationist porcupine.” An editorial in that same issue defended the testimony of the church as well as the work of the Guardian and Westminster Seminary. Within a few years, Clark and sympathizers would leave the OPC, an exodus that included churches in Quarryville and Willow Grove, PA.

Clark would join the United Presbyterian Church, followed by the Reformed Presbyterian Church, General Synod, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. After the RPCES joined with the Presbyterian Church in America, Clark’s credentials were in the PCA, but on a local level, he worshiped with the OPC congregation led by Henry Krabbendam and Barry Henning in Hixson, TN.

Picture. Gordon Clark