Blog

2017 marks the 300th anniversary of the Presbytery of Philadelphia. In honor of that major celebration, presbytery churches are writing brief, updated congregation histories. Susan Aggarwal, a member of the presbytery's History Team and of PHS's Delaware Valley Council, is collecting these histories and sharing them with PHS. All completed histories can be viewed on the PHS website using the Philadelphia Presbytery 300 blog tag.

Sixty-...

In different points in its life, the Philadelphia congregation known as Beacon has been a Sunday school mission, a nesting congregation, a mother church with its own college, a church in schism, and a new church development. A persistent thread in the fabric of Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, its population waxed and waned by turns, for 146 years.

Beacon began life in 1871 as a Sunday school mission of the First Presbyterian Church of Kensington. In 1872, the growing church bought a parcel of land from...