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"The church has found that it must contend not only with political upheaval and nationalistic religion but also with division in its own ranks" -- so the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.'s Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations wrote in 1967 about the state of Presbyterianism in Pakistan. Fifty years on, we glance back at the fractious period in the life of the Synod of the United Presbyterian Church of Pakistan, culminating in an assembly riot.

In 1967, the United Presbyterian Church of Pakistan and the Lahore Church Council counted membership of 70,000 -- some 10...

In the period following the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, many American Protestants viewed Russia and all of war-torn Europe as a field for the exercise of mercy. To commemorate the centennial of that momentous 1917, we recall the work of the Federal Council of Churches, and its representative to Russia, the Presbyterian minister John Sheridan Zelie.

In 1919, the Federal Council was chiefly concerned with the maintenance of Orthodox Christianity, establishing that February an ad hoc Committee on Religious Conditions in Russia. Conflict within Orthodoxy would...