A Brief History…

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church is a Presbyterian Christian denomination spawned by the Second Great Awakening. In 2007, it had an active membership of less than 50,000 and about 800 congregations, the majority of which are concentrated in the United States. The word Cumberland comes from the Cumberland River valley where the church was founded.

The divisions which led to the formation of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church can be traced back to the First Great Awakening. At that time, Presbyterians in North America split between the Old Side (mainly congregations of Scottish and Scots-Irish extraction) who favored a doctrinally-oriented church with a highly-educated ministry and a New Side (mainly of English extraction) who put greater emphasis on the revivalistic techniques championed by the Great Awakening. The formal split between Old Side and New Side only lasted from 1741 to 1758, but the two orientations remained present in the reunified church and would come to the fore again during the Second Great Awakening.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Presbyterians on the frontier suffered from a shortage of educated clergy willing to move to the frontier beyond the Appalachian Mountains. At the same time, Methodists and Baptists were sending preachers with little or no formal training into frontier regions and were very successful in organizing Methodist and Baptist congregations. Drawing on New Side precedents, Cumberland Presbytery in Kentucky began ordaining men without the educational background required by the Kentucky Synod. This was bad enough for supporters of the Old Side, but what was even worse was that the presbytery allowed ministers to offer a qualified assent to the Westminster Confession, only requiring them to swear assent to the Confession “so far as they deemed it agreeable to the Word of God”. Old Siders in the Kentucky Synod (which had oversight over Cumberland Presbytery) sought to discipline the presbytery. Presbytery and synod were involved in a protracted dispute which touched upon the nature of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Ultimately, the synod decided to dissolve Cumberland Presbytery and expel a number of its ministers.

The Cumberland Presbyterian denomination was made up of the expelled members of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) and others in the area when the Kentucky Synod dissolved the original Cumberland Presbytery.[4] There is historical evidence in the writings of several of the founders that indicate they did not intend the split to be permanent and certainly did not anticipate a long-standing separate denomination.

On February 4, 1810, near what later became Burns, Tennessee in the log cabin home of the Rev. Samuel McAdow, he, the Rev. Finis Ewing and the Rev. Samuel King reorganized Cumberland Presbytery. After rapid growth, Cumberland Presbytery became Cumberland Synod in 1813 and the Cumberland Presbyterian denomination in 1829 when the General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church was established.
A replica of the Rev. Samuel McAdow’s cabin now stands where the three founded the church, and a sandstone chapel commemorating the event has been erected nearby. These two buildings are two of the main attractions in the surrounding Montgomery Bell State Park. An outgrowth of the Great Revival of 1800, also called the Second Great Awakening, the new denomination arose to minister to the spiritual needs of a pioneer people who turned from the doctrine of predestination as they interpreted it to embrace the so-called “Whosoever Will” gospel of the new church. The Red River Meeting House in Logan County, Kentucky, marks the location of the revival meeting thought by some to have given rise to the first organized Cumberland Presbyterian congregation.

In The Beginning…

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church grew out of the revivals on the Tennessee-Kentucky frontier in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The formation of the independent Cumberland Presbytery on February 4, 1810, at Dickson, Tennessee, by ministers Finis Ewing, Samuel King, and Samuel McAdow and the subsequent establishment of the Cumberland Synod (1813) and General Assembly (1829) followed controversies over Calvinist theology and church order raised by the “New Side/Old Side” division within the Presbyterian Church in general, and more specifically, the frontier revivals. (ref: L. Thomas Smith Jr., Johnson Bible College)

The Kentucky Synod, in October, 1802, divided the Transylvania Presbytery, constituting the congregations of Southern Kentucky and Middle Tennessee, into the Cumberland Presbytery. Shortly afterwards, growing out of differences of doctrine and practice relative to the measures used in the great religious movement known as the revival of 1800, the Cumberland Presbytery was, by order of the Synod, dissolved. Appeal was made by the protesting party to. the higher courts of the church, pending the decision of which a semi-organization was formed, called a “Council”. As such, the members refrained from all legislation, but provided for the regular ministry of the means of grace to the members sympathizing with them. It was just at this period that Maury County was formed, and many of the pioneer settlers were sympathizers with the protesting ministers, now commonly called the “Cumberland Party”. The result of the contention was the re-organization of the Cumberland Presbytery as an independent church court, which was done February 4, 1810, and from it has grown the denomination known as Cumberland Presbyterians . During the period of the “Council”, many of the protesting ministers visited the pioneer settlement of Maury County. As early as 1809, a camp meeting was held by them en the upper waters of Little Bigby, where the congregation of McCain’s now is located . One of the most prominent pioneers was Col. Joseph Brown, who located in 1806 on his lands, three miles south of the present site of Columbia. He was an elder in the Presbyterian Church before coming to Maury County, and in the formation of the Presbyterian Church in Columbia in 1810, became a member of the session. His sympathies, however, had been with the “Cumberland Party”, and soon afterwards, a difference arising between him and the Rev. Gideon Blackburn, he withdrew from the Presbyterian Church and cast his lot with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and for many years lived to serve it in responsible positions. Later in life, he was ordained as a minister. (from History and Directory of Maury County, 1906)