Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church

Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church
The seal of the ARPC.
Abbreviation	ARPC
Classification	Protestant
Theology	Evangelical Calvinist
Governance	Presbyterian
Associations	World Reformed Fellowship and NAPARC
Region	United States, Canada, Mexico
Origin	1803 Winnsboro, South Carolina
Merger of	Associate Presbytery (Seceder) and almost all of the Reformed Presbytery
Congregations	296
Members	39,681
Official website	arpchurch.org

The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARPC), as it exists today, is the remnant of a small denomination, which was formed from the Synod of the South, a division of the Associate Reformed Church. The original Associate Reformed Church resulted from a merger of the Associate Presbytery (from the Seceder tradition of the 18th century) and most of the Reformed Presbytery (from the Covenanter tradition of the 17th century) in Philadelphia in 1782. It is one of the oldest of the United States' theologically and socially conservative denominations.

After the Westminster Confession was signed by its drafters in 1643, the "Covenanters," a Presbyterian group, left the Church of Scotland for the New World to avoid signing an oath to the monarch. These early believers seceded from the Church of Scotland over doctrinal differences. Some ministers stayed in the Church of Scotland to work out their differences. By 1739, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor Ebenezer Erskine led a group of ministers to leave the Church of Scotland who formed a separate group, the Seceders, which again opposed the main group and had doctrinal differences. Ebenezer Erskine and his brother Ralph Erskine preached sermons that later became the inspiration for the Associate Reformed Church in the American colonies. The monarch moved some of Ebenezer Erskine's followers to the northern Irish province of Ulster to quell religious disputes among Catholics and Protestants. These Ulster Scots Seceders and the Catholics continued to battle and some of the Scots later emigrated to the American colonies with Seceder ministers from Scotland in the mid-1700s. They settled with the Covenanters in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

Some churches of the Covenanter tradition and the Seceder tradition came together officially in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1782. The Synod of the South was formed consisting of churches in North and South Carolina and Georgia in 1803 and still another in Texas. Each tradition put aside doctrinal differences to come together as long as oath-signing to a central government could be avoided. The Northern Synod merged with the Associate Presbyterians in 1858 to form the United Presbyterian Church of North America.