Tenth Presbyterian Church


Tenth Presbyterian Church is a congregation of approximately 1,600 members located in Center City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Tenth is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America, 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.

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.
West Spruce Street/Tenth Church was designed by architect John McArthur, Jr., who was a member of the congregation. Its 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 was built in 1901, was weakened due to structural decay of the timber frame, and was removed in 1912 due to fears that it would collapse.
The Philadelphia Presbytery was the headquarters of conservative Presbyterianism during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s and 1930s, and Tenth Presbyterian was no exception. Under the influence of longtime pastor Donald Barnhouse, The congregation became the conservative Presbyterian church in Center City, and it has remained so until this day. Under James Montgomery Boice, the congregation continued to be a center of 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 Boice's pastorate, Tenth grew from 350 members to a congregation 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, joining the more conservative Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. Three years afterward, Tenth followed the RPCES into the Presbyterian Church in America.
After a lengthy property battle the congregation was allowed to leave the UPCUSA while keeping its Byzantine style property. Tenth Presbyterian remains 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.

Ministries