November 27 Today in OPC History

At an age when many retire from active church service, Addie Alcorn, Jeannette McKenzie, and Esther Porter became instrumental in starting Covenant of Grace Church, an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This congregation’s story began on this date in 1978 when Jeannette McKenzie, a former missionary to the Navajo Indians in Arizona, wrote a letter to Glenn Jerrell, pastor of the OP church in Roswell, New Mexico. Jeannette asked to become a long-distance member of his OPC congregation, writing that she could no longer be a part of the Presbyterian Church, USA. In June 1979, Jerrell drove 400 miles roundtrip monthly to lead a Bible study for six women. One of those women was Addie Alcorn, who had witnessed OPC founder J. Gresham Machen’s trials, served as a missionary at a Navajo mission school, and had started praying forty-three years earlier for an OPC mission work in Albuquerque. Esther Porter, a Reformed Baptist missionary among the Indians, was another key member. In 1980, Glenn Black, the OP missionary-at-large for the Dakotas’ presbytery, visited the group with Jerrell. Black reported, “(Addie and Jeannette) gave evidence they will do everything in their power to get a work started. They not only want a Reformed work, they want it to be an OP work …. (Esther) is committed to the Reformed faith but uncertain relative to baptism.”

On August 23, 1980, Christopher H. Wisdom, a Westminster Seminary graduate, led worship for fourteen people in their home for the first time. Jeannette helped with the typing and Addie assisted with bookkeeping. Wisdom, who was ordained the following year as their pastor, reported that Jeannette and Addie taught Sunday school and Esther played the piano. “What an example!” wrote Wisdom. “Here are ladies seventy years old who were still working in the life of the church. Hadn’t they already ‘done their time?’”

Read more about these women in Kathie Jerrell’s chapter in the newly published book Choosing the Good Portion: Women of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which is available on OPC.ORG here.

Picture: Left to right, Ginny and Thomas Wisdom, Addie Alcorn, Esther Porter, and Jeanette McKenzie