First Reformed Presbyterian Communion in America
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
On August twenty-third, seventeen fifty-two, a scattered congregation of Scottish Covenanter Presbyterians gathered at a farm belonging to Joseph and Elizabeth Junkin, just outside what is now New Kingstown in Cumberland County. They had come for a communion service, the first of its kind ever recorded for their denomination on American soil.
It was held outdoors under an open-air canopy that became known as the Junkin Tent, a temporary shelter on the Pennsylvania frontier that served as a cathedral for a people who had carried their faith across an ocean and into an uncertain wilderness.
Presiding was Reverend John Cuthbertson, a Reformed Presbyterian minister sent from Scotland in seventeen fifty-one. He had been traveling among these scattered Covenanter communities since his arrival the year before, riding long distances on horseback to keep the denomination alive before it had a building to call its own.
The Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America traces a direct line from this farm. What Cuthbertson gathered at the Junkin Tent grew, over the following century, into congregations across the country.
