Cumberland Presbyterian Church

Cumberland Presbyterian Church
Classification	Protestant
Orientation	New School Presbyterian
Polity	Presbyterian
Associations	World Communion of Reformed Churches, World Council of Churches
Region	United States, Hong Kong, Colombia, South America, Japan, Macau, China
Origin	February 4, 1810 Dickson County, Tennessee
Separated from	Presbyterian Church in the United States of America
Separations	Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America (separated 1878); just over half of the Cumberland Presbyterian congregations rejoined the PCUSA in 1906
Congregations	709
Members	74,853

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church is a Presbyterian Christian denomination spawned by the Second Great Awakening. In 2012, it had 74,853 members and 709 congregations, of which 51 were located outside of the United States. The word Cumberland comes from the Cumberland River valley where the church was founded.

The divisions which led to the formation of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church can be traced back to the First Great Awakening. At that time, Presbyterians in North America split between the Old Side (mainly congregations of Scottish and Scots-Irish extraction) who favored a doctrinally oriented church with a highly educated ministry and a New Side (mainly of English extraction) who put greater emphasis on the revivalistic techniques championed by the Great Awakening. The formal split between Old Side and New Side lasted only from 1741 to 1758, but the two orientations remained present in the reunified church and would come to the fore again during the Second Great Awakening.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Presbyterians on the frontier suffered from a shortage of educated clergy willing to move to the frontier beyond the Appalachian Mountains. At the same time, Methodists and Baptists were sending preachers with little or no formal training into frontier regions and were very successful in organizing Methodist and Baptist congregations. Drawing on New Side precedents, Cumberland Presbytery in Kentucky began ordaining men without the educational background required by the Kentucky Synod. This was bad enough for supporters of the Old Side, but what was even worse was that the presbytery allowed ministers to offer a qualified assent to the Westminster Confession, only requiring them to swear assent to the Confession "so far as they deemed it agreeable to the Word of God". Old Siders in the Kentucky Synod (which had oversight over Cumberland Presbytery) sought to discipline the presbytery. Presbytery and synod were involved in a protracted dispute which touched upon the nature of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Ultimately, the synod decided to dissolve Cumberland Presbytery and expel a number of its ministers.

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