Country United States Weekly attendance 1,400 Spire height 76 m Phone +1 215-735-7688 | Membership 1,500 Opened 1856 Capacity 1,082 Date founded 1829 | |
 | ||
Location 17th & Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA Denomination Presbyterian Church in America Previous denomination Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod Address 1700 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA Architects John McArthur, Jr., Frank Miles Day Similar Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Center for the Study of New T, Reformed Theological Seminary, Bethlehem Baptist Church, Reformed Episcopal Seminary Profiles | ||
Tenth presbyterian church 3 26 17 6 30pm live stream are we still under god s law
Tenth Presbyterian Church is a congregation of approximately 1,500 members located in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Tenth is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a denomination in the Reformed and Calvinist traditions. It is located at the southwest corner of 17th & Spruce Streets in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, in the southwestern quadrant of Center City.
Contents
Tenth presbyterian church 3 26 17 11am live stream while it is called today hebrews 3 7 19
History
The original Tenth Presbyterian Church, founded in 1829 as a congregation part of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, was located on the northeast corner of 12th & Walnut Streets. It established a daughter church in 1855–1856 called the West Spruce Street Presbyterian Church on the southwest corner of 17th & Spruce Streets. The two churches worked together, with the ministers exchanging pulpits each week. Because of membership decline in the original Tenth Church caused by population shifts, the two churches merged in 1893 at the 17th & Spruce Streets location, taking the name of the older church (Tenth Presbyterian Church).
West Spruce Street/Tenth Church was designed by architect John McArthur, Jr., who was a member of the congregation. Its 250-foot (76 m) tower-and-spire was the tallest structure in Philadelphia from 1856 to the erection of the North American Building in 1900. McArthur later designed Philadelphia City Hall. In 1893, architect Frank Miles Day was hired to perform major alterations to the church's exterior and interior decoration. The church's steeple and the 150-foot wooden spire, once the tallest structure in Philadelphia until the new City Hall (designed by McArthur as well) was built in 1901, collapsed due to structural decay and was removed in 1912.
The Philadelphia Presbytery(PC-USA) was the headquarters of conservative Presbyterianism during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s and 1930s, and Tenth Presbyterian was no exception. The congregation became the conservative Presbyterian Church in Center City of Philly, and it has remained so until this day. Senior pastors such as Donald Barnhouse (1927–1960) and James Montgomery Boice (1968–2000), the congregation embraced conservative Reformed theology. Tenth membership continued to grow after World War II, and ministry efforts to college students gave the congregation a metropolitan focus.
Under James Montgomery Boice pastorate Tenth Pres grew from 350 members to a congreagtion over 1,200.
In 1979, following a denominational ruling by the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America requiring congregations to elect both men and women to the office in ruling elder, Tenth Presbyterian left the UPCUSA in 1980, aligning itself with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. Three years afterward, that denomination in turn merged with the Presbyterian Church in America, bringing Tenth Church with it.
After a lengthy property battle the congregation was allowed to leave the denomination while keeping its Byzantine style property. Tenth Presbyterian remain the "big-steeple" PCA congregation in the northeast United States. The church sponsors an extensive global missions program, an outreach to the neighborhood includes a strong connection to the rising generation of doctors attending the medical schools in the neighborhood.
Senior Ministers
Some notable staff members of the church from its founding include:
Notable members have included C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General of the United States during the Reagan administration and one-time head of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.