United Presbyterian Church of North America | |
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Classification | Protestant |
Orientation | Calvinist |
Polity | Presbyterian |
Origin | May 26, 1858 Pittsburgh |
Merger of | Northern branch of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (Covenanter and Seceder) and the Associate Presbyterian Church (Seceders) |
Merged into | The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (1958) |
Congregations | 839 in 1957 |
Members | 257,513 in 1957 |
Ministers | 996 in 1957[1] |
The United Presbyterian Church of North America (UPCNA) was an American Presbyterian denomination that existed for one hundred years. It was formed on May 26, 1858, by the union of the Northern branch of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (Covenanter and Seceder) with the Associate Presbyterian Church (Seceders) at a convention at the Old City Hall in Pittsburgh. On May 28, 1958, it merged with the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) at a conference in Pittsburgh to form the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA).
It began as a mostly ethnic Scottish denomination, but after some years it grew more ethnically diverse, although universally English-speaking, and was geographically centered in Western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, areas of heavy Scottish and Scotch-Irish settlement on the American frontier. Within that territory, a large part of its adherents lived in rural areas, which amplified the denomination's already traditionalist worldview.