Origin from 1789
On 21 May 1789, Presbyterian ministers and elders gathered at Second Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for the first General Assembly of the newly reorganized Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, convened the assembly as its senior minister present and served as its first moderator. The Assembly gathered representatives from four synods and sixteen presbyteries spanning New York, New Jersey, Virginia and the Carolinas, roughly four hundred twenty congregations in all, and adopted the new denominational name in keeping with the recently ratified United States Constitution. Where the Synod of Philadelphia had answered to no single national body since organizing the first American presbytery in 1706, the Assembly now vested much of its authority in the presbyteries themselves rather than in a centralized hierarchy, a deliberately republican structure distinct from the Church of Scotland's own government. The Assembly adjourned on 26 May 1789.
Facts
Dates
StatusEstablished marks this 1789 reorganization into the General Assembly and its first meeting in Philadelphia, not Francis Makemie's 1706 organization of the first American presbytery already recorded here, nor the denomination's later mission bringing Presbyterianism to Brazil in 1859. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Americas directly: "On 21 May 1789, Presbyterian ministers and elders gathered at Second Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for the first General Assembly of the newly reorganized Presbyterian Church in the United..."
This source names New Jersey directly: "John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, convened the assembly as its senior minister present and served as its first..."
This source names Virginia directly: "spanning New York, New Jersey, Virginia and the Carolinas, roughly four hundred twenty congregations in all, and adopted the new denominational name in keeping with the recently ratified United..."
Occurred In
Spread Event Of
Adds a specific, dated institutional milestone between Francis Makemie's 1706 organization of the first American presbytery and Ashbel Green Simonton's 1859 mission bringing Presbyterianism to Brazil already recorded here: the 1789 reorganization of American Presbyterians into the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, meeting for the first time in Philadelphia under a deliberately decentralized, presbytery led structure.
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