August 18 Today in OPC History

On August 18, 1957, H. McAllister Griffiths died of a heart attack in Elmhurst, New York, at the age of 57. Born in San Francisco and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton Seminary, Griffiths was a constituting member (and served as presiding officer) of the first General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church on June 11, 1936, Previously, he had served as the ecclesiastical counsel for J. Gresham Machen when Machen was tried by the Presbyterian Church in the USA for his participation in the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, and he was the first editor of the Presbyterian Guardian when it was inaugurated in 1935.

On November 11, 1936, Griffiths withdrew from the five-month-old-church, and in the next year he was a co-founder of the Bible Presbyterian Synod. He served as the first general secretary of the American Council of Christian Churches at its founding in 1941. In 1946 he withdrew from the Bible Presbyterian Church, and subsequently joined the Protestant Episcopal Church. At the time of his death Griffiths served as a public relations consultant.