The changing faces of American Presbyterianism (1706-2006), Part 1
Editor's note: Three hundred years ago this year, the first presbytery was organized in what became the United States of America. This article is the first in a series exploring the historical overview of the Presbyterian presence in our country
Three hundred years. That's how long it has been since the first presbytery was organized by Francis Makemie (c. 1658-1708). Has anything remained the same through the years?
When reflecting on major changes in Presbyterian faith and life in America over the centuries, my thoughts focus immediately on my own ancestry. The first James Smylie landed on the Carolina Coast in the very early years of the eighteenth century. Over time these Smylies multiplied and gradually found their way to and settled in Mississippi Territory. I am descended from a John Smylie, brother of another James who made history, not the best kind of history. He wrote a pro-slavery tract in the 1830s which some contemporaries considered the "first shot" of the Civil War. Migrants from the British Isles, in the Smylies' case from Scotland and Northern Ireland, began to flow across the Atlantic in the latter part of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They faced the challenges of settlement up and down the eastern seacoast. Clergyman and entrepreneur Francis Makemie (c.1658-1708) helped us adjust. In his A Plain and Friendly Persuasive . . . for Promoting Towns and Cohabitation (1705) he urged migrants to move, in this case, to the west and south, in order to establish towns, churches, schools, and businesses. He even suggested that people in the new world might become strong enough one day to separate from the mother country -- although he did not encourage it.
He recommended putting drunks, or "sots," in stocks until they behaved. Makemie argued with the Anglican authorities, and won the right to settle and build churches. In 1706 he organized the first presbytery in Philadelphia and began raising up "meeting houses" (dissenters could not use the term church in some places, a term reserved for Anglicans). He prepared ministers to pastor the wave after wave of immigrants who flowed into the colonies. After some debate, members of the church agreed to an Adopting Act (1729) in which they embraced the Westminster Confession and Catechisms as being "in all essential and necessary articles, good forms of sound words and systems of Christian Doctrine," leaving the Presbytery the right to settle disagreements over interpretation of the documents.
