Children from Different Mothers
Ben Glaser
It’s helpful every now and then to re-evaluate why and who you are, and how you got to where you are at the moment. To that end the Bethany ARP Church in the Lord’s Day evening service back in April began a series on “What is an ARP?”. Our purpose in that is to help our newer members who didn’t grow up ARP understand a little bit more about what those letters mean. The goal isn’t to just spew tradition out of a water cannon. It is to really think through why we exist as a denomination, both locally as a Christian church in our community and writ large as separate from other Presbyterians in the United States, Canada, Pakistan, Mexico, and elsewhere.
Our purpose this morning in this piece for Seventeen82 is to poke a little into history in order to look at our foundation as a people in the pre-revolution colonies to helpfully then bring us back into comformity for the why and where we are now in 2024. We have great need in the ARP of 2024 to find our identity, to boldly testify to our personhood and reason for being in confidence.
It’s important to remember that from the very beginning of the 1730s to the present we have not and did not fit in with everyone else in these parts, and for good reason. We are different, and that is okay, as long as we biblically contemplate the right testimony for the gospel of Jesus Christ and His kingdom. Our focus must always be on the first order of business, and that is to see sinners come to know Jesus Christ and His gospel of grace. Not everyone on these shores has seen eye-to-eye with us, either as Associates or Reformed, as to the best way to accomplish it.
That’s where our story begins today.
When the Rev’s Arnot and Gellatly were sent by the Anti-Burgher Associate Synod of Scotland to the colonies as the first Seceder missionaries they arrived on these shores in 1754. To put that in perspective it was only twenty-one years after Ebenezer Erskine, James Fisher, Alexander Moncrieff, and William Wilson met at Gairney Bridge. That’s the same distance in time to 2024 as when the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy appeared in theaters. It’s not that long of a spread. To see our forefathers in the faith so active in outreach so early in the life of the church is a lesson for us to heed. Other dates to consider in relation to our purpose is that when these two young men showed up in Pennsylvania the “General Assembly Presbyterians” (what is today the mainline church and her descendants, the PC(USA), PCA, EPC, and OPC) had been organized since 1707 and confessing their adopted version of the Westminster Confession of Faith since 1729. They not only had a head start, but were not super happy that the Seceders (as they were derisively known in the colonies) were jumping into their game.
Many of the GA Presby’s took offense to Arnot and Gellatly’s presence. So much so that the Presbytery of New Castle sent a cease and desist letter to the two Associate ministers banning them from preaching, and most certainly from organizing churches. This caused a pamphlet war to break out between the two parties. Mr. Robert Smith, pastor of the General Assembly church in Pequa, PA and Mr. Samuel Finley the same of West Nottingham wrote a near one-hundred and fifty page missal in response to Mr. Gellatly’s first salvo. While unfortunately Mr. Gellatly’s work is no longer accessible, we do have access to Mr. Smith’s, which is full of stuff that would get you canceled on the internet nowadays for lacking winsomeness. The General Assembly men called the Seceders everything from Judaizers to Unstable Ruffians.
What got them in such a hot and bother? Let’s look into it.
The main bone of contention between these early Associate church planters and the status quo ministers of New Castle Presbytery were the Covenants of 1638 and 1643 and the free offer of the gospel, ironically similar issues as had caused the trials of 1722 in Scotland with the republishing of the Marrow of Modern Divinity. The National Covenant of 1638 was signed by those opposing the Erastian and Anglican reforms of Charles I. The other covenant, the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, was endorsed by the Scottish Covenanters and the Parliament of England in regards to Covenanter support in the ongoing English Civil War. Both of these documents served to bring confession of faith and submission to the Lord Jesus Christ on Church and State as well as make clear what was expected of each in their own respective domains. While it is true that we have a hard time understanding these things in 2024, due to the fact our minds are warped a little on questions surrounding politics and the gospel, these ideas shouldn’t be that far from our own understanding of the Lord’s purposes for both.
Our forefathers in the faith saw no disconnect between the rule of God over His Church and His rule over His State. In the first chapter of our ARP Form of Government it clearly states that:
God the Father is the source of all power and authority. No authority, either civil or ecclesiastical, exists except that which God has established in His Word. Civil authority is instituted by God the Father through civil offices. Ecclesiastical authority is instituted through the officers of the Church in the name of Christ, Son of God and Redeemer. God’s authority is given to serve and build up others for His glory.
Mr.’s Gellatly and Arnot would readily say yeah and amen to this, whereas Mr. Smith and Finley would balk at its boldness. But why again did this cause such difficulty between otherwise brothers in Christ, so much so that dander covered a tri-county area? The question really at heart at this juncture, twenty years before the Declaration of Independence, was what kind of nation would it be here in the New World. For Gellatly and Arnot, and both the Associate and Reformed Presbyteries they believed that in order to see God’s blessings on this fledgling land the Presbyterian Church needed to lead the way in asking the Lord’s mercy and grace on Church and State by the renewing of those 1638 and 1643 covenants in Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere, wherever governments had been formed. In other words the Seceders believed that the promises made by their forefathers were still binding on the colonies. To abandon them was to abandon a future hope of good order and grace.
Gellatly and Arnot and others also saw a connection between the free offer of the gospel, a doctrine which Mr. Smith in his treatise against the Associates would call Arminian (an old canard with which the Erskine’s were readily used to), and this need to covenant before God at the beginning of the organization of a new nation across the sea. To establish the promise in State would allow the liberty of the Church to go out unmolested by civil or ecclesial authorities to bring the good news of salvation, of the shed blood of the Lamb, to all men. It’s part of the reason why in the 1799 Little Constitution we have this line in Chapter XX:4 of the ARP adopted Westminster Confession of Faith on Christian Liberty:
. . . And for their publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such practices, as are contrary to the light of nature, or to the known principles of Christianity, whether concerning faith, worship, conversation, or the order which Christ hath established in his church, they may be lawfully called to account, and proceeded against by the censures of the church and in proportion as their erroneous opinions or practices, either in their own nature, or in the manner of publishing or maintaining them, are destructive to the external peace of the church, and of civil society, they may be also proceeded against by the power of the civil magistrate.
Mr. Arnot and Gellatly may not have been invited to many ACLU meetings, or welcomed in many libertarian or Con, Inc, circles in 2024. However, they weren’t exactly loved for their principles in their own day either. The General Assembly Presbyterians were largely successful in reducing, if not outright overwhelming, the influence of the early Seceders in the land north of the Mason-Dixon, yet their work was not without success. Witnessing to all of this hullabaloo in the 1750s was a minister by the name of Alexander Craighead. Space does not allow to fully flesh out his role in this. Yet it was Mr. Craighead whose presence and ministry in 1760s Charlotte, North Carolina that directly influenced the creation of the realDeclaration of Independence, the Mecklenburg Declaration. Mr. Craighead was a staunch believer in the Covenants and there is no doubt his preaching and teaching moved the hearts of the patriots to take a stand against the usurpation of rights and duties, just like their Covenanter forefathers.
We have barely begun to scratch the surface of this question. This piece is already too long and too full. However, as descendants of the Seceders, these men who loved the Covenants and the gospel of free grace for sinners, it would be good for us to consider again their teaching, to remember what it means to be an Associate Reformed Presbyterian, and to be so on purpose, and to defend with assurance and faith the well-worn understanding of Social Covenanting that we may take up their mantle. No longer settling for the second-hand calumnies of General Assembly Presbyterians, but standing strong in our Confession for the good news of Jesus, for both Church and State.
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church