May 23 Today in OPC History

Daniel Osborne professed his faith in Christ as a teenager in a Baptist church, then sensed a call to the ministry as a college student at King College in Bristol, Tennessee. As a sophomore, Dan met Carolyn Goad. They married shortly after graduation on this date in 1971. On New Year’s Eve in 1972, Dan was ordained a Baptist pastor, earning his master of divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, the following year. Serving three more Baptist churches, Dan slowly became Calvinistic as he studied Scripture and read G.I. Williamson’s book on the Confessions of Faith and other Reformed books. He embraced the Reformed doctrines, and met his first Orthodox Presbyterian minister—Everett C. DeVelde. In 1980, he became a minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, for a congregation in Woodbridge, Virginia, which became a Presbyterian Church in America congregation two years later. In 1985, he received his doctor of ministry degree from Westminster Theological Seminary.

Dan sought a call in the OPC because of its close adherence to Reformed and Presbyterian standards. The Presbytery of Ohio received him on July 29, 1988, where he pastored at Covenant OPC in Grove City, Pennsylvania, from 1988 to 1996. He became pastor of Westchester OPC in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1996. The first signs of a heart problem showed in the summer of 1997. By 2005, he collapsed while walking into the church building on a Sunday morning and learned that without a heart transplant, he would die. He received a new heart on May 7, 2006 at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

He has served on the Committee on Fraternal Relations in the Presbytery of Ohio and as moderator and on the Candidates and Credentials and Overtures and Papers Committees for the Presbytery of Connecticut and Southern New York.

Picture: Dan and Carolyn Osborne