Blog

Last week I visited Holy Trinity-Bethlehem Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia's Logan neighborhood, to help Elaine McCray and Bridget Jamison appraise a couple of room's worth of archival material. Elaine and Bridget drove the collection down here earlier this week, and its ten and a half cubic feet of records speak to the Logan congregation's enduring witness in its changing neighborhoods.

Holy Trinity-Bethlehem is a merged church -- its older ancestor, Bethlehem Presbyterian Church, was organized at Broad and Diamond Streets in Philadelphia in 1873. Bethlehem was an early adopter...

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is made up of many different denominations that came together over time. Some were large, such as the United Presbyterian Church of North America or the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Others were small, such as the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church that started in Wales and joined the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) in 1920. All connect back to the Reformed theology that emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century.

Beginnings

In the eighteenth century a lack of colleges and seminaries in Wales forced many...