PCA Historical Center

01/15/2026

Dr. Paul Woolley's (Westminster Seminary) 1951 chart of the Presbyterian denominations in the U.S.

01/14/2026

Presbyterian History You Should Know - 1936:

09/30/2025

Another Reason to Pay a Visit

Praising God for this most recent blessing—the PCA Historical Center now holds a collection of twenty-nine sermons by members of the Westminster Assembly, all published between the years 1641-1647, with eleven authors represented in this collection.

09/26/2025

Robert Baillie: an overlooked Westminster divine:

"The sweetest exercise of a Christian is the improving of the privilege in hand, the making use daily of this mutual relation: We are God’s inheritance and God is our Portion. A soul truly religious must give itself up fully to be possessed and filled by God, to be replenished in mind, will, affections, memory, conscience, and every faculty, with the whole fulness of God, as an inhabitant, as a due, proper and only heritor. On the other part, it will claim and lay hold by faith on the power, the glory, the truth, the mercy, and all that is in God, as its own peculiar portion, as the only heritage which either in earth or heaven it desires to enjoy."
—Robert Baillie, Errors and Induration are the great sins and the great judgments of the time. (1645)

Printed at the request of the House of Lords

07/28/2025

Best preaching quote?

“​It is not what we seek for others, that usually profits them most. Commonly God makes us seek and find for ourselves, and then testify to others what we have seen, and speak what we know. It is the lack of this element that makes much of our preaching so powerless; for it is the God-taught man who is the God-sent messenger. It is Christ found by us for our own souls in solitude, who is Christ preached by us on the house-tops, and so lifted up that all men are drawn to him. "
—Alexander Moody Stuart

HT: Zach Dotson

07/24/2025

We Stand on Shoulders : How the Work Began.

The old Southern Presbyterian Church worked from 1866 to 1879 to come up with their first approved Book of Church Order. Except they had not tackled the Directory for Worship section. That work waited till the next year, and so they began in 1880 but it was only in 1894 that they finally agreed upon the text for this Directory.

News as posted Dec. 1, 1880:
THE DIRECTORY FOR WORSHIP
The proposed new “Directory for the Worship of God” is just at hand. The last General Assembly ordered that a copy of the same be forwarded to each minister of this church, and two copies to each session; also two copies to each stated clerk of Presbyteries for examination. It has many good points, and is in many points capable of improvement. Our elders and ministers will take pleasure in giving it a careful examination.

07/22/2025

Our BCO History Project is getting an update. We've just completed an update to the Directory for Worship section of the Project, with addition of commentary by Dr. Morton H. Smith, who served as the first Stated Clerk of the PCA (1973-1988). Now on to updating the first two sections of the BCO (Form of Government & Rules of Discipline).

This project is designed to provide a convenient summary of the history of each of the paragraphs in the Book of Church Order of the Presbyterian Church in America. The primary point of this exercise is to show where we've come from and how we got here, to point out the value of the text we have inh...

07/08/2025

READING THE MORNING PAPER
'Tis a fine day, reading the paper with coffee in hand.
Joking aside, I'm launching into a project to search out discussion and debate over the Directory for Worship section of the old Southern Presbyterian Book of Church Order. They first adopted the Form of Government & Rules of Discipline sections of their Book in 1879, but it wasn't until 1894 that they finally adopted that third and final section, the one covering worship. Hoping to find some great debate on the various chapters and paragraphs, many of which were eventually imported into the PCA's Book of Church Order and some of these remain unchanged to this day. More news as it develops.

04/03/2024

NEW MACHEN BIOGRAPHY:

The link below provides the table of contents for Machen's Hope, a new biography written by Richard E. Burnett. Dr. Burnett is Executive Director and Managing Editor of Theology Matters and the book is being issued on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Machen's Christianity and Liberalism.

This should provide for some interesting discussion!

03/05/2024

A Minor Machen Mystery:

The PCA Historical Center has just received with today's mail the donation of a small Greek New Testament formerly owned by Dr. J. Gresham Machen. Just nine pages bear some notes and we can't figure out the purpose of these notes. See the images in the link for a closer look: