The EPC's Unique Calling: Old School, New Side

Institutions that grow faster than they can digest themselves end up with a strange problem. The original DNA is still technically present, it's in the founding documents, the constitutional language, the statements from the early assemblies, but the living culture has moved on, and the DNA sits there like an unread inheritance. Everyone knows it's important. Nobody is quite sure what to do with it.

That, in broad strokes, is the situation facing the Evangelical Presbyterian Church heading into its 2026 General Assembly.

Writing at Mere Orthodoxy, discipleship pastor Joey Sherrard offers what I think is one of the more useful framings for understanding what the EPC is, and what it's supposed to be: the denomination is, at its best, an "Old School/New Side" church. That hyphenated label is doing more work than it might appear to, and unpacking it reveals something genuinely interesting about how a religious institution navigates controversy, and why history matters when it does.

What "Old School/New Side" Actually Means

The terms come from two separate but related controversies in American Presbyterian history, both of which shaped the tradition the EPC was born into.

The New Side impulse emerged in the 1740s, when George Whitefield's revivalism swept through the colonies and split Presbyterians over whether emotional, experiential conversion was a legitimate expression of Reformed faith. New Side Presbyterians said yes: warmly, enthusiastically, and sometimes controversially. Old Side Presbyterians worried about enthusiasm displacing order, and about itinerant preachers operating outside established ecclesiastical structures. The New Side eventually won that argument, and American Presbyterianism absorbed a lasting evangelical energy as a result.

A century later, a different fracture: Old School versus New School. This time the controversy turned on Charles Grandison Finney's "New England Theology" and what Old Schoolers saw as its distortions of Reformed anthropology and soteriology. As historian George Marsden observed, "The Old School's objection was that the New School taught or tolerated an un-Biblical view of man's nature." The New School prioritized moral activism and evangelistic pragmatism; the Old School insisted that doctrinal precision mattered, that a church's theological commitments were not heritage decoration but living constraints on what could and couldn't be taught.

These two pairings are easy to mix up, so notice carefully what the EPC inherits from each. From the New Side controversy, it takes the warmth: the experiential piety, the evangelical urgency, the willingness to meet people where they are. From the Old School controversy, it takes the confessional anchor: the Westminster Standards, the insistence that doctrine is not optional, the recognition that "lean biblicism", reading Scripture without the interpretive weight of historical theology, tends to drift in whatever direction the surrounding culture is pointing.

The synthesis sounds obvious when you say it out loud. Warm piety, deep theology. Missional hunger, confessional roots. Of course you'd want both. The difficulty is that each side of the hyphen has its own gravitational pull, and it takes deliberate, sustained institutional effort to hold them together.

The Founding and the Constitutional Moment

The EPC was established in 1981, initially organizing itself around "Essentials of Faith" rather than full Westminster subscription. That was a New Side instinct, practical, evangelistically oriented, focused on what unites rather than what distinguishes. Early voices associated with the denomination, including Francis Schaeffer and James Kennedy, reflected that cultural activist, broadly evangelical energy.

By 2001, after significant deliberation, the denomination made a formal Old School move: the Westminster Standards became the final doctrinal authority, with officers required to explicitly name their exceptions before church courts. That is a meaningful commitment. Many Presbyterian denominations ask officers to affirm the Standards "as containing the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture", language that can be interpreted quite loosely. The EPC's 2001 revision was considerably more concrete about what subscription actually required.

The Westminster Confession of Faith, together with the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, represents one of the most comprehensive summaries of Reformed theology ever produced, the result of an assembly that deliberated for approximately six years, from 1643 to 1649. Asking officers to own that tradition, and to name where they depart from it, is a serious ask. It was also, in retrospect, the high-water mark of Old School influence in the EPC's constitutional self-understanding.

What the 2006 Influx Changed

Then came 2006.

A wave of congregations departing the Presbyterian Church (USA) over questions of ordained leadership found their way into the EPC. Those congregations brought real gifts: energy, resources, genuine evangelical conviction. But Sherrard is honest about what else they brought: a denominational culture that was largely unfamiliar with confessional subscriptionism. Westminster Standards were not part of their previous vocabulary. The Old School consensus the denomination had been building toward since 2001 was, in practice, suddenly outnumbered by people who had never built it.

This is not an indictment of those congregations. It's an observation about what happens when an institution grows faster than its culture can transmit itself. The EPC today comprises approximately 600 congregations across North America, making it one of the more significant conservative Presbyterian bodies in the country. What it does not yet fully have, by Sherrard's account, and I think he's right, is a consistently internalized confessional culture. The denomination grew into its constitution faster than its members grew into their denomination.

The constitutional commitment was still there on paper. What was missing was the formation, the literacy, the habit, the sense that the Standards are not emergency resources to be consulted in controversies, but a way of reading Scripture, a spirituality, a whole philosophy of ministry.

The Two Failure Modes

It's worth being precise about how this can go wrong in either direction, because the EPC faces pressure from both sides of the hyphen.

Neither column describes a healthy denomination on its own. Old School without warmth produces precisely the kind of institution that drove early New Side Presbyterians toward revivalism in the first place — technically sound, spiritually cold. New Side without doctrinal rootedness produces what we've watched happen across much of American mainline Protestantism over the last century: the surrounding culture gradually sets the terms.

What the EPC has, if it chooses to use it, is both columns together. That is actually unusual. Most denominations have settled into one gravitational field or the other.

A Confession Is More Than a Document

I want to linger here, because this is the part I think matters most for anyone watching these denominational patterns.

Sherrard makes an argument worth sitting with: a confession represents "a way of reading Scripture, a system of doctrine, a spirituality, and a philosophy of ministry." That's the right frame. The Westminster Standards are not just a doctrinal checklist or a boundary-setting device. They represent a way of inhabiting Scripture over a lifetime — one that connects individual believers to a centuries-long conversation stretching back through Calvin, Augustine, and the early councils.

When a denomination treats its confession as an emergency resource — something you pull out when someone proposes something unusual — it has already lost the plot. The confession is supposed to be the ordinary grammar of theological reasoning, not the extraordinary weapon. And you cannot get from "confession as emergency resource" to "confession as ordinary grammar" quickly or by passing a resolution. You get there through presbyteries that assign reading, through officer examinations that take the Standards seriously, through pastors who preach out of the catechism over years rather than quoting it only in controversy.

That's the slow work. Institutional in the most unglamorous sense — attending meetings, learning parliamentary procedure, building a culture of expectation around doctrinal engagement. Yuval Levin's argument, which Sherrard draws on, is that institutions should form and restrain their members rather than simply reflect their preferences. That's a genuinely countercultural idea in an era when most institutions have inverted the relationship, functioning primarily as platforms for individual expression rather than as communities with a prior claim on their members.

The Evangelical Presbyterian Church adopted the Westminster Standards as its final doctrinal authority in 2001 — a constitutional commitment that many of its own congregations have since effectively set aside. That gap between what the constitution says and what the culture does is the core diagnostic challenge the EPC faces going into 2026.

What This Means Beyond the EPC

I've been watching institutional patterns in religious communities for a while now, and the EPC's situation is in some ways a concentrated version of a broader problem that affects almost every tradition that has tried to maintain a distinctive identity through a period of rapid growth.

Every tradition eventually faces a version of this choice: do you let the surrounding culture set the terms, or do you insist on being formed by something older and stranger than the present moment? The EPC has, baked into its founding documents, a specific answer. The Old School inheritance says: your confessional commitments matter at the center, not just at the edges, and treating them as peripheral will hollow out what you're trying to build over time. The New Side inheritance says: those commitments only matter if people are genuinely alive inside them.

Both halves of that are true, and they genuinely need each other. A church can be doctrinally precise and spiritually dead. A church can also be spiritually warm and doctrinally adrift. When a denomination's confession becomes an emergency resource rather than a guiding document, it has already lost something more important than a theological argument. The EPC's actual calling — the thing Sherrard is trying to name — is the harder and rarer project: confessional theology inhabited with genuine warmth, precise doctrine held with real humility.

The Real Test Is Always Formation

The EPC's 2001 constitutional commitment to Westminster subscription was a genuine and important step. What it wasn't was a finished project. A denomination that voted to take the Standards seriously and then absorbed several hundred congregations without a robust formation strategy should expect to find itself exactly where Sherrard is describing: constitutionally committed, culturally inconsistent.

That's not a failure of the founders. It's not even a failure of the congregations that arrived in 2006. It's the predictable result of institutional growth outpacing institutional culture. The EPC has been playing catch-up ever since, and the current controversies at the 2026 General Assembly are, in part, the fruit of that gap.

Three things would make a genuine difference, in my reading of Sherrard's argument:

• Presbyteries that take officer examinations seriously: not as a hazing ritual but as a genuine test of theological formation, something that signals what the community actually values
• Sessions that read the Standards together regularly: not just reference them when a dispute arises, but internalize them as a shared vocabulary for ordinary ministry decisions
• A recovery of the sense that confessional theology connects to the Great Tradition: that Reformed thought is not a narrow denominational preference but a way of engaging two thousand years of Christian wisdom

None of those require a constitutional amendment. They require a culture shift. And culture shifts in institutions are slow, unglamorous, and usually invisible until they've already happened.

The failed 2024 vote on baptism prerequisites for communion that Sherrard mentions is instructive here — not because of the outcome, but because of what it revealed about how the debate was conducted. If the Westminster Standards were genuinely functioning as the ordinary grammar of reasoning in those discussions, the conversation would have looked different. The fact that it apparently didn't is the diagnostic, not the vote itself.

The Hyphen Is the Point

Here's what I keep coming back to. The "Old School/New Side" label isn't just a historical description. It's a mission statement. It says: we are the kind of people who believe that doctrinal depth and evangelical warmth are not in tension — that in fact each one needs the other to stay healthy and honest.

That's a genuinely distinctive thing to be in the American Protestant landscape, where you can find plenty of confessionally serious but relationally cool denominations, and plenty of evangelistically warm but doctrinally thin ones. The combination is rarer, and harder to sustain, and worth the effort precisely because of how rare it is.

The Old School/New Side synthesis the EPC was built to embody represents one of the most distinctive — and most fragile — identities in American Protestantism. Whether the denomination can recover and inhabit that identity through its current controversies is a question worth watching carefully. The resources are there. The history is there. Whether the institutional will to use them is there — that's the live question heading into 2026 and beyond.

Jared Clark writes about institutional patterns in religious communities at Christian Counterpoint. For related analysis on how institutions preserve or lose their founding identity, see When Institutions Forget Who They Are.

Last updated: 2026-07-21

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC)? The EPC is a conservative Presbyterian denomination founded in 1981. In 2001, it formally adopted the Westminster Standards as its final doctrinal authority, requiring officers to name any exceptions explicitly. It occupies a distinctive space between strictly confessional Presbyterianism and broadly evangelical Protestantism.

What does "Old School/New Side" mean for the EPC? "Old School" refers to the tradition of strict confessional subscription to the Westminster Standards, emphasizing doctrinal precision and theological rigor. "New Side" traces to the First Great Awakening and refers to the experiential, evangelistically warm piety that George Whitefield's revivalism introduced to American Presbyterianism. The EPC's founding identity is defined by holding both together.

What controversies is the EPC navigating at its 2026 General Assembly? The 2026 General Assembly is deliberating questions about ordained leadership qualifications and related doctrinal matters. The deeper issue, as Joey Sherrard argues at Mere Orthodoxy, is whether the EPC's confessional commitments are being brought to bear on these debates or effectively sidelined in practice.

How did the 2006 PC(USA) exodus reshape the EPC? When dozens of congregations left the Presbyterian Church (USA) and joined the EPC after 2006, the denomination grew substantially. However, those congregations came from a tradition largely unfamiliar with confessional subscriptionism, which diluted the Old School culture the EPC had been building toward since its 2001 constitutional revision. The constitutional commitment remained; the cultural formation did not come with it.

What would it look like for the EPC to fulfill its unique calling? Fulfilling the EPC's calling would mean presbyteries conducting officer examinations that take the Westminster Standards seriously, sessions regularly engaging the Standards as a living vocabulary rather than an emergency reference, and a church culture that treats confessional theology as connected to two thousand years of Christian wisdom rather than a narrow denominational preference.