On February 4 1810 in the log cabin home (near what later became the town of Burns, Dickson County, Tennessee) of Rev. Samuel McAdow he together with Rev. Finis Ewing, and Rev. Samuel King organized the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

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 split between the Old Side (mainly congregations of Scottish and Scotch-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. 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. In this situation, Cumberland Presbytery in Kentucky began ordaining men without the required educational background, drawing on New Side precedents. This was bad enough for supporters of the Old Side, but what was even worse was that Cumberland Presbytery allowed ministers to offer a qualified assent to the Westminster Confession and only required 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 Cumberland Presbytery. Presbytery and synod were involved in a protracted dispute, which touched upon the nature of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Ultimately, Kentucky Synod decided to dissolve Cumberland Presbytery and expel a number of its ministers. The denomination was made up of members of the Presbyterian Church and others in the area left abandoned when Kentucky Synod dissolved the original Cumberland Presbytery and expelled many of its ministers. A replica of 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 to embrace the "Whosoever Will" gospel of the new church. "Cumberland" came from the area's name (the Cumberland River valley); "Presbyterian" described the form of government.

By 1900, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church was the third largest Presbyterian or reformed body in the United States.

In 1889, Cumberland Presbyterians were the first Presbyterian body to ordain a woman as a minister, Louisa Mariah Layman Woosley. Perhaps more importantly, Cumberland Presbyterians were the first body in the entire Reformed tradition to recognize the validity of clergy women.

In 1906, the Presbyterian Church (USA) proposed reunification with the CPC in the wake of revisions they had made to the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1903. As a result, a large number of Cumberland congregations re-entered the PC(USA) and those who remained in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church felt antagonistic towards the PC(USA).

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church maintains a four-year liberal arts college, Bethel College, in McKenzie, Tennessee, and a seminary, Memphis Theological Seminary, in Memphis, Tennessee. The Cumberland Presbyterian Center, also located in Memphis, Tennessee, houses other church boards and agencies. Many Cumberland Presbyterians have been attracted back into larger Presbyterian denominations over the years. There is a separate polity for some black Cumberland Presbyterians, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America, but relations between the two groups have for the most part been very cordial, and many of its ministers have trained at Memphis Theological Seminary.

Cumberland Presbyterian Congregations can be found all over the United States as well as in several foreign countries (Japan, Hong Kong, Columbia, etc.) but are primarily located in the American South and West.

See also: Meetings of the Cumberland Presbyterian General Assembly

External links

• Official Denominational Site
• History and Biographical Information
• Cumberland Presbyterian Magazine
• Cumberland Presbyterian Resources

Presbyterianism | Members of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches