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Celebrating God’s faithfulness through GCP at 50
At 9:00 am on October 20, 1975, the certificate of incorporation for Great Commission Publications (GCP) was filed in the Delaware office of the Secretary of State. On that same morning in Orlando, Florida, I was likely being held in my mother’s arms as a 6-month-old baby eating breakfast, completely unaware that this auspicious event happened the same year of my birth.
Reflecting on the providence of God, I am celebrating my 50th year of life and my 23rd year at GCP—something I never planned nor would’ve guessed would have been my path as a little girl dreaming of becoming an astronaut while watching Space Shuttle launches. And yet, the mysteries of God’s sovereign purposes—the faithfulness of my mother raising me as a covenant child, her Covenant College friend Donna Williams working at GCP when I was moving to Atlanta—has led me to this point.
Over the past 23 years, I was discipled and mentored at work by Donna and a humble servant-leader in Mark Lowrey, our former executive director who began editorial operations anew in 1996 and went home to glory on a Lord’s Day in 2023 while still in his role at GCP. Now as we celebrate God’s faithfulness to his Church through the work of GCP, I see how our heavenly Father has sustained and flourished this unlikely joint venture of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) and the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), and I look forward to where he is leading us.
By the Grace of God It Was Done
GCP’s theology, operating principles, and distinctives are based on the Bible from a Reformed perspective as taught in the Westminster Standards. That commitment came from the values held by the OPC in its development of Sunday school materials beginning in the 1940s. Starting with senior high in 1961, a complete Sunday school curriculum was completed in 12 years’ time. In Confident of Better Things, a 2011 book celebrating the 75th anniversary of the OPC, the first executive director of GCP, Tom Patete, quoted a section from The Orthodox Presbyterian Church 1936–1986 regarding this accomplishment:
“What a tremendous undertaking! No denomination of the size of the OPC could possibly accomplish what needed to be done, or support the effort according to the best advice of experts. But by the grace of God it was done!”
Before the PCA was formed as a denomination, the OPC CCE had laid the groundwork for not only excellent Christian education materials but also produced the beloved Trinity Hymnal, still in use in its 1990 edition today.
Jesus’ Great Commission
From the beginning, the OPC recognized the need for its materials to serve not only its own churches but also to appeal to the broader Reformed and evangelical community. Their objective was worldwide outreach through Christian education. The CCE put it this way: “If the OPC had thought that its projected curriculum would be of use only within its own congregations, it would have never undertaken the project. In the providence of God, we have initiated the program, but we have done it on behalf of all who love the Reformed faith.” In the first year after all 12 grades were in print, 78% of the 558 churches using GCP curriculum were outside the OPC.
The operating name Great Commission Publications proved to be a wise choice for this global vision. The nondenominational name made it easy for the wonderful materials produced by GCP to be used in any Bible-believing church. GCP’s curriculum is faithful to the Scriptures while maintaining a distinctive focus on five key areas: the sovereignty of God, the centrality of Jesus in the unfolding story of salvation, the covenantal focus, a redemptive-historical approach, and the crucial connection between church and family. Children, parents, teachers, volunteers, and ministry leaders in diverse contexts who are simply looking for biblically sound resources are exposed to Reformed and covenantal theology each time they interact with GCP’s material. Praise God!
That carefully considered direction led to the PCA, a new denomination formed in 1973, to be able to partner with the OPC to produce doctrinally suitable curriculum in the joint venture. Over my years at GCP, I’ve come to see how Jesus’ Great Commission to his disciples over 2,000 years ago impacted even me. I grew up in a Christian & Missionary Alliance church, went to a Baptist university, and was not even looking for a Presbyterian church or ministry job when my husband and I moved to Atlanta. But God used GCP to bring my love for him and my editing experiences to this position, which led us to join a PCA church.
Over the years, my time at GCP has been a theological education (that paid me instead of me paying for it!) that has brought me to love and embrace Reformed theology. I do not remember the Sunday school curriculum I was taught as a child, and I realize that may be the experience of many of the children in our churches today. By God’s grace, we at GCP pray that each child who is under the teaching of our materials will come to know and love God through his Word, grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ, and embrace the blessings of the covenant.
Christ-Centered Resources for All Ages
Over my years at GCP, we’ve not only expanded and improved on our Sunday school curriculum, we’ve added catechetical curriculum, a Pilgrim’s Progress book and curriculum, and digital versions of Trinity Hymnal. First Catechism alone has touched the lives of at least 315,000 children as young as age two since 2003.
GCP serves not only our parent churches with combined memberships of 400,000 but hundreds more congregations across the Reformed tradition. We weekly reach more than 3,500 churches in the United States, 20% of whose congregants are children. This is also an exciting time for the PCA: It is the only non-Pentecostal denomination still growing in the United States, and Mission to North America is committed to facilitating the PCA’s vision to plant and revitalize more than 1,000 churches in next decade. GCP partners with a diversity of churches and is focused on a three-pronged initiative over the next five years: revised Show Me Jesus curriculum, a nationwide network of regional trainers to equip local churches, and new tools for parents to fuel robust family worship and discipleship.
We are excited to announce that our new Show Me Jesus Preschool curriculum will be available for fall 2025. This two-year program is flexible for four- and five-year-olds and will be in the English Standard Version translation, featuring captivating new illustrations and new digital resources for in-class and family discipleship experiences. You may download a sample lesson and learn more at new.gcp.org.
I have the Preschool fall teacher manual on my desk today as we prepare to finalize the files. In the introduction, it says, “From start to finish, the children learn that the Lord our Creator is gracious and merciful to his covenant people—forgiving them, saving them, and keeping them. With God’s blessing, each child who participates in these lessons will begin to develop a biblical self-image. He or she will begin to know: I am a child created in God’s image. My purpose is to glorify my Creator.” Wow, that is my prayer for each of the children who will be taught from this curriculum. Jesus is with us in this great task of the Great Commission, and his Spirit empowers each of us in our unique roles to make disciples.
As Preschool is published over the next two years, we will follow it with new Younger Elementary (1st–2nd grades) and new Middle Elementary (3rd–4th grades). We are prayerful that we will revise Toddler curriculum for our littlest covenant children during these next few years as well. We are also planning to launch new music resources to prepare children to be active worshipers on the Lord’s Day. In addition, a new digital platform for teachers and parents will help facilitate more discipleship opportunities.
I’ve lightheartedly dubbed this year of 50th celebrations as my year of Jubilee. The old covenant Sabbath cycles kept alive the hope for the reign of Jesus the Messiah. We new covenant people know that our Savior has now come. In a devotion on the year of Jubilee, Rev. Henry Huenemann wrote, “Blessed is the people that know the Gospel sound, the glad tidings of salvation. They shall walk in the light of God’s countenance, and in his name shall they rejoice.” We rejoice in the work of our triune God in his Church through GCP, and we anticipate with hope that many more will know the jubilee of his salvation until he comes again.
Heather Cossar is the Director of Content Strategy & Publishing at Great Commission Publications.