A Faithful Witness
Reflections on the launch of First OPC, almost seventy years ago.
In the summer of 1956, Pastor Henry Coray and a small group of believers were making plans to launch a new church in Sunnyvale.
This was not Pastor Coray’s first effort at starting a new ministry. In the 1930s, he served as a missionary in northern China. He and his wife left China in 1940 and lived in Southern California. These were the early days of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which had formed just a few years earlier in 1936. It was a time for planting new churches that would be faithful to Scripture and to the Reformed confessions.
Pastor Coray devoted himself to the work of church planting the next two decades. First, he led the effort to plant an OPC congregation in Long Beach, CA. That church is now Faith Presbyterian church. Within a decade, that congregation planted another new church, which is now Westminster Presbyterian Church in Westminster, CA.
In the mid-1950s, the Presbytery of California appointed Pastor Coray to plant churches in the area. At that time, the South Bay Area was rapidly growing in population. Sunnyvale had only 40,000 residents in 1956. A decade later, it had doubled in size!
Pastor Coray made various contacts in the area, and soon a group of key families gathered to begin the new church At first, they met in a schoolhouse in Cupertino, but soon they purchased the land for our present building at the corner of Bernardo and Brookfield Avenues.
Almost seven decades later, God has preserved and blessed our church’s ministry. As we approach the church’s seventieth anniversary next year, we will be making some efforts to remember how God has guided and helped us.
This is also an opportunity to renew our vision for ministry in the decades ahead of us. The church’s seventieth anniversary is an excellent occasion to prayerfully consider the spiritual needs of Silicon Valley, and the opportunities to advance God’s kingdom in the decades ahead of us.
For inspiration, here are a few words from our former pastor Don Buchanan, writing in 1993:
Through the years the church has ministered to people from many walks of life, including students from Stanford University, military and defense industry families, and employees of the great computer companies of Silicon Valley. Our prayer is for God’s on-going blessing upon the church as it seeks to maintain a faithful witness in this spiritually needy region.