Meet Our Pastor:
Rev. Richard Scott MacLaren
Pastor MacLaren was born and raised in Philadelphia, living in the Roxborough section of the city. He attended Shawmont Elementary School, until his family moved into Montgomery county, a suburb of Philadelphia. After attending Hatboro-Horsham Junior High School, he was enrolled at Phil-Mont Christian Academy, which at that time was meeting in Dresher, PA. His family attended Manyunk Presbyterian Church while he was a boy, and then Maple Glen Bible Fellowship Church during his years as a teenager.
After high school, he attended Pinebrook Junior College, a school sponsored by the Bible Fellowship Church. There he played basketball and served as the Student Body President. He went on to Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, a Christian liberal arts college led by the Presbyterian Church in America. He wrote his senior thesis on the detective fiction of Dorothy Sayers, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy.
He then went on to Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia to earn his Master of Divinity degree. Westminster is a non-denomination seminary that operates on the foundation of the Westminster Confession of Faith. It began in the 1930's when Dr. J. Gresham Machen led a group of conservative theologians away from Princeton Theological Seminary to form a new, orthodox seminary. While at Westminster, Mr. MacLaren began to study a wide range of issues, including baptism, eschatology, and chuch polity. As he came to appreciate the depth and faithfulness of the reformed faith in its commitment to scripture, Mr. MacLaren decided to enter the Orthodox Presbyterian Church by joining Trinity Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Hatboro, PA.
Before completing his degree program, he took a summer internship at Covenant Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Abilene, Texas, serving under the Rev. Neil Lodge. This congregation later asked Mr. MacLaren to return to Texas to serve in a church planting effort they were making in Brownwood, Texas. Mr. MacLaren moved to Brownwood and was ordained by the Presbytery of the Southwest of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He served there for a year and a half before taking a call to another mission work in Lubbock, Texas, where he served for four and a half years until returning to the Philadelphia area. He was installed as an organizing pastor at First Presbyterian Church (formerly Good News Chapel) by the Presbytery of Philadelphia (OPC), and currently lives in the Perkasie community.
Beyond serving the needs of our local congregation, Rev. MacLaren also serves the Presbytery of Philadelphia's Committee on Sessional Records and Church Visitation and has an active ministry in providing care for other sessions and congregations of the Presbytery.
Rev. MacLaren has had a long and faithful commitment to the reformed faith and a thoroughly Christian world view. He is the product of some of our nation's finest Christian educational institutions that hold to the reformed faith, and has a strong interest in church planting and seeing the development of a Christian world view in the church today.
To contact Pastor MacLaren, you may call him at his office at 215-257-2956, or email him at MacLaren.1@opc.org. You can also meet him on his Facebook page, and see his Commentary on Youtube.com. Just search for Richard S. MacLaren or the MacLaren Commentary.