The origins of Great Commission Publications go back to the early days of both denominations. A common concern of the OPC when it separated from the northern Presbyterian Church in 1936, and the PCA when it left the Southern Presbyterian Church in 1973, was the liberalism in the Sunday school literature of those mainline churches. Christian education was a high priority for both churches from their start, if they were to persevere in faithfulness to the word of God.
Big Dreams and Small Budgets
In 1950, the OPC’s Committee on Christian Education adopted “Great Commission Publications” as the trade name for its curriculum materials. It also secured two remarkable writers: Meredith Kline and Edmund Clowney, though both tenures were short-term; each was serving as junior faculty at Westminster Seminary while pursuing graduate work. (Clowney himself remained a consultant and arguably the architect of the curriculum.)
These were challenging years for Christian education. Life magazine in 1957 dismissed Sunday school as “The Most Wasted Hour in the Week.” Responding to Life in the pages of the Presbyterian Guardian, Westminster Seminary’s Ned Stonehouse conceded that Sunday school had lost its way.
“We fear that [Life’s] analysis is far more accurate than we would like to suppose,” he wrote. “It discloses a most alarming situation.”
GCP’s’s response was to make its Sunday school curriculum more challenging. It pushed churches to devote one whole hour to instruction, doubling the actual class time in Sunday schools to allow for greater mastery of material. The curriculum was Bible-based, but not at the expense of catechism, which has always been regularly incorporated in GCP materials.
The OPC’s plan was bold for a small denomination: to develop a total Sunday school curriculum from pre-school to 12th grade. Although it took two decades to realize this goal, it was a remarkable accomplishment on a small budget. Still, the burden of printing, promoting, and distributing materials and the ongoing need to revise lessons all combined to pressure the committee beyond its resources.
From the start the OPC sought markets beyond its own churches, and it pursued partnerships with other denominations of similar faith and practice, including a decades-long consultation with the Christian Reformed Church, which ended in 1973. By this point the Christian Education Committee’s outlook became deeply discouraged. With a $138,000 accrued loan debt, it seemed that GCP was simply not a sustainable operation.
The Formation of the Joint Partnership
But there was one encouraging sign: it did not escape notice that among its non-OPC clients, a growing number of congregations were in the Southern Presbyterian Church. OPC desperation met PCA enthusiasm.
The prospect of a cooperative working relationship actually antedated the PCA’s founding. A year and a half before its birth, a steering committee was organized to lay the groundwork for a new denomination. Paul Settle, executive director of the Continuing Church Movement, was particularly passionate about Christian education, and he chaired a subcommittee on Christian education. Four months before the first General Assembly, an advisory convention mandated “that a publishing partnership with OPC be studied.”
In December 1973, the first General Assembly went even further. It endorsed and recommended to sessions the Sunday school curriculum published by Great Commission Publications and authorized the Committee on Christian Education and Publications to cooperate fully with GCP in developing further curricula.
The foundation having been laid, the partnership was formalized two years later when, on October 20, 1975, Great Commission Publications was incorporated as a joint venture of the two denominations. The OPC and PCA each appointed six officers to the board of the non-profit ministry, along with the coordinator or general secretary of the respective christian education committees serving in ex officio capacities. This board structure continues to this day.
As one would expect, the start of the joint venture was marked by growing pains. It was clear to both partners that this was risky business, and they needed to establish trust between the parties. Some in the OPC feared that the collaboration might compromise the quality of the materials. PCA board members were uncertain that their churches would embrace GCP as an agency of the church.
The financial relationship between the two churches was a particular concern. The partnership required denominational subsidies, and for a time the PCA had not fully paid its share of funding. This reached a resolution to the satisfaction of both partners, and over time, sales fully funded GCP, helped particularly with the publication of the revised edition of the Trinity Hymnal in 1991.
All of these challenges were placed in the hands of Tom Patete, the ministry’s first executive director. A young minister in the PCA, Patete quickly commanded the respect of the OPC. In his 34 years at the helm he built strong relationships within both denominations, employing writers, editors, and consultants, including Joey Pipa, Roger Schmurr, and G. I. Williamson. Allen Curry, who began at GCP in 1970, provided continuity in his capacity as director of curriculum until he accepted a teaching post at Reformed Theological Seminary in 1988.
After the sale of the OPC denominational offices in 1990, GCP moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta. The move better connected them to the PCA, and the number of churches using GCP materials increased to the point where the percentages of churches in using GCP in both denominations are now roughly equal.
The relocation also expanded the services that GCP could offer to churches, including teacher-training seminars. Eventually, regional seminars took place throughout the country. Much of this instruction is now also offered in video format, available on the GCP website.
Distinguishing Features of the Curriculum
Updating the curriculum has been an unending task for GCP, from refreshing the artwork to replacing biblical references from the New International Version to the English Standard Version. But these changes have never compromised the curriculum’s distinguishing features: GCP presents a redemptive-historical approach to Scripture with sensitivity to the process of faith formation in children.
The redemptive-historical emphasis in GCP materials owes much to the influence of Edmund Clowney, longtime minister in both the OPC (42 years) and the PCA (over two decades).
“Christian education must mean nothing less than Christian edification,” he insisted, “the great saving process by which Christ builds up his people in faith and new obedience.”
Clowney meant all God’s people, including the youngest. Pointing children to Christ as central to the story of all of Scripture keeps moral formation from reducing to moralism. Clowney was the inspiration for naming the younger curriculum “Show Me Jesus.” (Though some are surprised to discover that GCP never shows Jesus pictorially; this owes to a careful reading of the second commandment that guides the ministry’s artwork.)
Allen Curry likened preschool instruction in basic concepts (such as the heavenly Father’s loving care) to a set of beads that increases as a child’s vocabulary of the faith expands. When children become more conceptual in their thinking, these beads are grouped into themes, and students learn about the law, grace, the church, and even worship. By middle school, a survey of biblical history puts these beads in order and then follows the capstone of the curriculum: in a study of the coming of Christ in prophecy and history. The unfolding of the covenant of grace becomes the string that holds the beads together. High schoolers, having made profession of faith and claiming the Christ as their own, are to wear these beads, the blessing of the covenant now adorning their lives.
In this way, GCP presents covenant theology in age-appropriate ways to young people. It has also proven helpful to older disciples. Teachers find great benefit in this refresher in the Reformed faith. And a story has circulated at Westminster Seminary of a student who struggled to understand covenant theology until his professor encouraged him to look at GCP materials, and then it began to make sense.
When Mark Lowrey joined GCP in 1996 he further developed the curriculum’s sensitivity to childhood faith development. In his nearly three decades at GCP, Lowrey stressed that coming to faith was a divinely ordered learning process where children come to embrace Christ in unique and personal ways. The instruction is attentive to different types of learners — auditory, visual, and kinesthetic.
A United Effort
That GCP would be celebrating 50 years of a joint OPC-PCA publishing partnership is a milestone that nobody imagined in 1975. Many regarded it as a precursor to a denominational merger that seemed imminent (and which nearly happened within a decade), while others doubted that the partnership would last. But here we are, still a partnership of two denominations, even after Life magazine ceased regular publication.
The quiet success of the OPC-PCA partnership in bearing a Reformed witness may point to a way of rethinking ecumenicity: there are worthwhile ecumenical outcomes short of organizational unity. Westminster Seminary’s Cornelius Van Til often reminded his students that the ecumenical calling for confessional Presbyterians was to steward the Reformed faith for the entire church of Christ. This stewardship is happening in the joint partnership – 40% of GCP’s customers are neither PCA nor OPC churches. This includes clients in denominations that did not exist in 1975, like the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and the United Reformed Churches of North America.
Whether or not the PCA and the OPC become one church in the future, their joint partnership in GCP has demonstrated that in their ministry of calling little children and young people to Christ, the two churches are united.
John Muether is a ruling elder at Reformation OPC in Oviedo, Florida, and a member of the board of Great Commission Publications.