April 22 Today in OPC History

On April 22, 1994, the Presbytery of the Northwest received James Peter (“Pete”) Vosteen as a ministerial member. In the following year it received his flock, the Independent Reformed Church of Lynnwood, Washington, as a congregation of the OPC.

Born in Buffalo in 1931 and educated at the College of Wooster in Ohio, Vosteen graduated from Westminster Seminary in 1956. He served in the United Presbyterian Church in North America until that denomination merged with the northern mainline church to form the UPCUSA, when he transferred his credentials into the Christian Reformed Church. There he pastored CRC congregations in Ontario, Minnesota, British Columbia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Idaho, before moving to Lynwood in 1989. As Ross Graham noted in the pages of New Horizons, Vosteen’s “booming voice and powerful preaching style” were well known to many in the OPC from his years in the CRC. The Ministerial Training Institute of the OPC put those gifts to use in having Vosteen team-teach (with Bill Shishko) the MTIOPC course in homiletics for fifteen years.

On November 2, 2016 at the age of 85, Peter Vosteen passed into glory.