July 20 Today in OPC History

On July 20, 2003, Branch of Hope Church in Torrance, California was received as an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation by the Presbytery of Southern California. The Rev. Rollin Keller preached and the Rev. Michael Stingley gave the charge to Pastor Paul Viggiano.

Previously a Foursquare mission work and then nondenominational church, Mr. Viggiano and the elders were searching for theological answers to tough questions in the early 1990s. They came across G. I. Williamson’s commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. Mr. Viggiano would later remark about reading the Confession, “We felt like Israelites who wept at the reading of the law after the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem. There was a collective, “Who’s been hiding this from us?” The more the elders studied the Confession, the more they became convinced that they and the members needed to more away from their previous dispensational, antinomian, baptistic, evidentialist, soft Pentecostal, nonliturgical, nonregulative positions.

The rest of the decade of the 1990s was marked by a slow and gentle transition to the Reformed faith for the church leadership and members. According to Mr. Viggiano, the three major factors leading to the seamless transition in the church’s reformation and then its inclusion into the OPC were: (1) holding to a Presbyterian form of government, (2) preaching doctrines as a blessing rather than a polemic, and (3) making sure that the subordinate standards remained secondary.

Picture: Paul Viggiano