For Presbyterian and Reformed Christians in the United States, the first two decades of the twentieth century were a time of unity, activity and influence afterwards fondly recalled as a golden era. Nineteenth-century Evangelicalism was still a fruitful force in the churches and in society at large.

The Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA) was thriving, with many congregations, well-attended services, a network of colleges and seminaries, a vast national and foreign missions enterprise, and a large membership including many national leaders: politicians, statesmen and jurists; industrialists, merchants, and financiers; educators and scholars; evangelists and social reformers. A host of smaller denominations were likewise flourishing, such as the United Presbyterians (UPCNA), the Reformed Presbyterians (RPCNA), the Associate Reformed Presbyterians (ARPC), and stalwart Dutch bodies such as the Reformed Church in America (RCA) and the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). President Theodore Roosevelt was a devout member of the RCA, and President Woodrow Wilson, descendant of the Covenanters, was an active Presbyterian layman.

One center of Presbyterian intellectual life was Princeton Theological Seminary. Benjamin B. Warfield was producing a vast body of writing as a New Testament scholar, theologian, and polemicist. Old Testament scholar John D. Davis left a lasting monument in the form of his Dictionary of the Bible. Little known at the time, but very influential on later generations was Dutch-born Geerhardus Vos, who wrote such seminal works as Biblical Theology and Pauline Eschatology. Other Princeton men of that era include Oswald T. Allis, William P. Armstrong, Caspar W. Hodge, Francis L. Patton, and Robert D. Wilson.

Golden as the times may have been, shadows were also creeping across the landscape. The modern ecumenical movement, which even then denigrated and relativized doctrinal truth in the interests of fostering organizational unity, was beginning to stir at home and abroad. The growth of cities depopulated and destabilized rural churches. The huge influx of immigrants to the US resulted in great urban masses with no attachment to the Protestant faith, evangelical or otherwise. New views of the Bible's inspiration and authority and other challenges to historic Christian belief were at work as a kind of dry rot in academic centers and among the leaders of the PCUSA. Campaigns led by Presbyterian revivalist William ('Billy') A. Sunday only postponed for a time the impact of these various destructive forces.

A storm was brewing which would break dramatically on the scene in the 1920s. The aftermath was an ever more categorically divided Christian community, polarized between the opposing camps of Fundamentalism and Modernism. The onset of strife was signalized by the publication of The Fundamentals, twelve volumes published between 1910 and 1915, pre­senting the work of 64 writers chiefly from the US and Canada. An equally substantial product of conservative scholarship appeared in 1915 as The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. The Princeton men and United Presbyterians such as Melvin G. Kyle and William G. Moorehead took a leading role in such efforts.

Bitter strife erupted in the PCUSA in the early 1920s. A Baptist minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, at that time filling the pulpit of New York's First Presbyterian Church, drew fire with the publication of his sermon, 'Shall the Fundamentalists Win?' Fosdick championed what had come to be known as Modernism or Liberalism. Presbyterians opposing Fosdick's Modernism found a leader in J. Gresham Machen of Princeton Seminary, Professor of New Testament and author of numerous books, such as The Origin of Paul's Religion, The Virgin Birth, and Christianity vs. Liberalism. Closely allied with Machen at first was Clarence Macartney, a prominent preacher and staunch conservative whose books of sermons and sermon illustrations are still in print today. Efforts to bind the PCUSA to her historic beliefs provoked stiff resistance from Modernist leaders such as the framers and signers of the notorious Auburn Affirmation of 1924.

Machen and his collaborators were finally out-numbered and out­-maneuvered by the Modernist party. In 1925 Fundamentalism acquired its reputation for bellicosity and backwardness in the famous Scopes trial at Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, Presbyterian layman, played a large but embarrassing part in proceedings which became a media circus. PCUSA Modernists launched a direct attack upon Princeton Seminary with a reorganization plan designed to bring Princeton into line with current trends in the denomination. In 1929 Machen left Princeton to found West­minster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. With the help of Robert Wilson and O.T. Allis, he recruited a faculty of younger men including John Murray, Ned Stonehouse, Cornelius Van Til, and Paul Woolley.

The 1920s was a turbulent era for some of the smaller Reformed bodies as well. The Christian Reformed Church was rocked by controversies over Dispensationalism, Higher Criticism, and Common Grace. Prominent in all three battles was the Rev. Herman Hoeksema. Deposed from office in 1925, Hoeksema became father to the Protestant Reformed Churches. A gifted preacher, teacher, and writer, Hoeksema's personal monument is his three-volume exposition of the Heidelberg Catechism, entitled The Triple Knowledge.

In 1925, under the leadership of John McNaugher, the United Presbyterian Church of North America elected to discard her whole-hearted commitment to the Reformed orthodoxy of the Westminster Standards and the practice of exclusive Psalmody. The end result was the death of the denomination in 1958 by way of a merger with the PCUSA, but not before the UPCNA had produced such leaders as Jay Adams, John Gerstner, Addison Leitch, Robert McQuilkin, and G.I. Williamson.

Controversy broke out again in the 1930s when Machen joined others in organizing the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Greatly offended, the leadership of the PCUSA succeeded in having Machen deposed from the ministry. At this juncture many of Machen's colleagues, such as Macartney, turned their backs on his cause. Machen and a handful of young men ('Machen's Boys') went on to organize the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.

Machen's new denomination was only a year old when internal pressures erupted in a second split, producing the Bible Presbyterian Church under the leadership of J. Oliver Buswell, President of Wheaton College, and Carl McIntire of Collingswood, New Jersey. McIntire is still alive and still making headlines as the century comes to a close. One of McIntire's early supporters was seminary student Francis Schaeffer, who with his wife Edith went on to establish a youth ministry of international scope in Huemoz, Switzerland, called L'Abri ('The Refuge').

In the wake of World War II America seemed eager to return to the old paths. The GIs came home to find jobs, get married, buy homes in new suburban tracts, father America's baby boom, and go to church in record numbers. In the PCUSA, 1920s-style Modernism was supplanted by the Neo-Orthodoxy inspired by Swiss theologian Karl Barth. In 1949 Billy Graham caught the ear of the nation and stepped into the shoes he has filled ever since as evangelist to America and the world. Today a Baptist, Graham was reared in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, and his wife Ruth is the daughter of the late Nelson Bell, medical missionary and staunch conservative leader among Southern Presbyterians.

Graham, Bell, and others fostered the beginnings and growth of what came to be called Neo-Evangelicalism. Since the 1950s this movement has flourished as a loose network of individuals, churches, schools, institutions, and agencies of many kinds. The nexus of the movement for many years was the magazine Christianity Today. Many Presbyterian and Reformed men and women have been prominent in the ranks of Neo-Evangelicalism, but the movement as a whole lacks any definite theological identity, and more so as time passes.

In the 1950s the PCUSA seemed to be one of the nation's stable and enduring institutions. Membership, including President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, rose to all time highs. Controversy seemed a thing of the past. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church grew slowly in spite of conflicts such as the Gordon Clark case or the Psalmody question. In 1956, conflict among Bible Presbyterians ended in schism. McIntire and his followers withdrew to form a body of their own, the Bible Presbyterian Church, Collingswood Synod. In 1965 the continuing BPC, including J. Oliver Buswell, Gordon Clark, and Francis Schaeffer, renamed the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, united with the Reformed Presbyterians (General Synod) to become the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES).

During the 1950s the Christian Reformed Church exploded in size as she rose to meet the challenge of thousands of Dutch immigrants pouring into Canada and the US. A schism in the Protestant Reformed Churches brought many PR ministers and congregations into the CRC after 1953. Louis Berkhof's Systematic Theology and the New Testament commentaries of William Hendriksen began to circulate widely. Immigration also stimulated growth among the Netherlands Reformed Congregations and produced two new Reformed denominations: Members of the Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerk founded the Free Reformed Churches, and followers of Klaas Schilder planted the Canadian Reformed Churches.

As the 1960s unfolded, great upheavals threw American society into dis­order. The civil rights movement began in hope and ended in violence. The US became mired in a war that increasingly appeared pointless, endless, and bloody. Drug abuse became rampant and moral standards tumbled. Every cherished belief, ideal, or institution was called in question or rejected outright.

The PCUSA (after 1958 and until 1983, the United Presbyterian Church in the USA) lurched away from Neo-Orthodoxy and began her descent into theological anarchy and ecclesiastical fragmentation, described by writer John Fry as The Trivialization of the United Presbyterian Church. Membership melted away at an alarming rate. Tensions rose sharply in the UPCUSA and in her Southern sister, the Presbyterian Church in the US. Conservatives were offended by the use of church funds to promote violent revolutionary movements at home and abroad. Sadly, many of these conservatives also took offence at long-overdue efforts to end racial segregation in national life and institutions, including the nation's churches.

As the 1970s began Neo-Pentecostalism swept through Canada and the US. Many embraced this movement as a cure for what seemed to be ailing the churches at the time. The long-term effects have been extremely negative, however: heightened emotionalism and subjectivism, doctrinal indifference, degradation of public worship, and alienation from the Christian past in general.

In 1973 conflicts among Southern Presbyterians resulted in the with­drawal of conservatives of many stripes to form the Presbyterian Church in America. Sometimes chaotically but always vigorously, the PCA has grown to extend into all parts of the US. One milestone in the process was the receiving of the entire RPCES into the PCA in 1982. Early in her history the PCA was thrown into bitter controversy over Theonomy, the system of ethics vigorously propounded by Greg Bahnsen.

In the same period the Christian Reformed Church began to experience unrest. A new generation challenged the staunch Reformed confessionalism of the old order. The doctrine of Biblical inerrancy was subjected to re-examination, and the result was to raise a plethora of questions about Biblical authority and interpretation. The impact of 1970s feminism ('Women's Lib') was felt in the form of calls to open the offices of minister, elder, and deacon to women. Conservatives were outraged by views on creation and biblical hermeneutics advocated by Calvin College professor Howard Van Till in his book The Fourth Day, published in 1986.

For many Americans the 1980s was a time of recovery of national confidence and prosperity under the inspiring conservative leadership of President Ronald Reagan. Sadly, it was not a time of recovery for America's Presbyterian and Reformed churches. The UPCUSA continued her down­ward spiral, losing members even after reuniting with the PCUS in 1983. During the reunion process a large number of churches opted to with­draw, some to the PCA or ARPC, and others to regroup as the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in 1981. Radical feminists raised shrill voices in the denomination's institutions, agencies, and assemblies, and they were soon joined by gay rights advocates.

The smaller denominations continued to grow throughout this period, but they were not immune to the chaos mounting among America's evangelicals.

Destructive experiments resulted in the substitution of quasi-Pentecostalism for historic Reformed liturgical practice. The Church Growth movement resulted in the substitution of marketing methods for biblical evangelism. Psychology and therapy replaced Bible exposition and doctrinal preaching as Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller, both ministers in the RCA, promoted the Human Potential movement. Unrest and dissatisfaction with the trend of things in the CRC continued to mount, resulting in the loss of thousands of members in the early 1990s. One exception to these negative developments was the substantial recovery of Biblical and Reformed ortho­doxy in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church during these years.

During the 1990s, Presbyterian and Reformed Americans have shared fully in the nation's astonishing prosperity. They have the means to support their churches generously, and to invest in a wide array of schools, missions, relief agencies, and other causes. There is a large market for books, videos, computer software, and "Christian products" of many kinds. Seminaries enroll large numbers of new students every year. Even so, Reformed Christians seem trapped in an ever deepening and ever more complex identity crisis. Too many biblical, confessional, and liturgical landmarks have been defaced or removed. Everyone has a different answer to the question of what it means to be Reformed.

Here and there are hopeful signs. The conservative denominations are planting new churches and increasing in membership. New bodies such as the United Reformed Churches and the Heritage Netherlands Reformed Congregations have emerged. Groups of disillusioned Neo-Pentecostals knock on Presbyterian doors, looking for something more substantial to believe in. Vigorous efforts by the Banner of Truth Trust, Soli Deo Gloria, and other publishers have brought a vast array of historic Reformed literature back into print for today's readers. Effective communicators such as R.C. Sproul, James M. Boice, and Michael Horton reach large audiences via radio broadcasts and nationally-promoted conferences and seminars. Large numbers of Korean Presbyterian immigrants are just beginning to make their presence felt.

It remains to be seen whether America's Reformed community can overcome its present weaknesses and begin to capitalize on its remaining strengths. Though there is a growing hunger for Reformed, experiential preaching and teaching, what seems to be lacking is a large-scale, wide-ranging movement of the Holy Spirit. 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the LORD of hosts' (Zech. 4:6). It is a time to work and to pray.