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December 4 Today in OPC History

Peter De Ruiter

2020

 

When the Presbyterian Church in America was founded on December 4, 1973, there were two ministers received by that first General Assembly who may have experienced a sense of déjà vu. Peter De Ruiter held the distinction, along with the Rev. Robert Vining, of also being among the constituting members of the first General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.

Born in South Holland, Illinois on December 13, 1900, De Ruiter was educated at Hope College and he attended Princeton Seminary for a year, then transferring to the newly formed Westminster Seminary, where he earned a diploma in 1931. Ordained by the Chester Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in the USA later that fall, he served as pastor of Nottingham (Pennsylvania) PCUSA for nearly five years when he withdrew from the church with about two dozen members to form Bethany OPC. As the OPC semi-centennial volume noted in 1986, “Bethany has been a self-supporting church from the beginning, although it must be acknowledged that Mr. De Ruiter served sacrificially at a low salary.” (Ironically, one of his successors in the Bethany pulpit was Robert Vining.)

After a seven-year tenure at Bethany, De Ruiter’s subsequent ministerial callings took him to two congregations in the Presbyterian Church in Canada for eight years, and then he served several Mississippi churches in the (southern) Presbyterian Church in the United States. At the time of the founding of the PCA, De Ruiter was serving as stated supply at Leakesville Presbyterian Church in Leakesville, Mississippi as well as minister of visitation at First Presbyterian Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He passed away on March 11, 1977.

 

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