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September 11 Today in OPC History

Robert Churchill

 

Robert K. Churchill was born on this day in 1903 in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, a fishing and farming community on the easternmost shores of the Atlantic Ocean. He was the second oldest of six children. Due to family circumstances, Bob entered adulthood with barely a seventh-grade education. He made up high school work and started courses at the Wheaton Academy and College. In 1933 he graduated from the University of Washington and went on to earn a degree in theology at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia in 1936. He married Dorothy Jenkins in 1932, and they had four children, one of whom died in infancy.

Bob was ordained at the first General Assembly of the OPC and tirelessly served the church until the time of his death on September 20, 1980. He pastored congregations in Berkeley, California; Cedar Grove, Wisconsin; Sonora, California; Roswell, New Mexico; and Amarillo, Texas. His book, Lest We Forget, is his personal reflections on the founding of the OPC. During his years of ministry, Bob served on the denominational Home Missions Committee and was a trustee of Westminster Seminary for over thirty years.

Upon his death, the Board of Trustees of Westminster Theological Seminary said the following: “His life exemplified to a marked degree a personal devotion to his Savior, a profound appreciation of the divine revelation in Scripture, and with this, an exceedingly high view of the all-glorious triune God.” Commended for his fruitful life, unflagging zeal for Christ’s church, and his deep yearning for the souls of lost men, “he was the epitome of the high and rugged purposes of the founders of Westminster Theological Seminary with constantly strong determination that these purposes be preserved against every demeaning thought and action.”

 

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