Talk:List of Presbyterian churches

development, split

Hi editors, thanks for contributing to this still-new list-article. Altairisfar, thanks so much for doing so much development with numerous U.S. churches with pics and coords and more, and for adding important South Korea and other countries' sections. Your work really stabilized and developed this. Thanks also Jfhutson for recent edits.

About the U.S. ones, I'd like to add more NRHP-listed ones, but it will be a lot of them--hundreds--and I think it could be time to split out the U.S. section to List of Presbyterian churches in the United States. Altairisfar, would you care to make the split or should I?

And, in my original few edits I set up a table of "most significant" U.S. presbyterian churches, which were mentioned in the Presbyterianism article or another like that. And then I started a table to be organized by state then city for the rest. I wonder if that "most significant" list could be restored to the U.S. section, with the comprehensive list by state in a separate article. The concept of a "most significant" list I think is relatively new, and requires some justification as to which ones should be included, of course. But it has come up in parallel development of List of Methodist churches, where it has been pretty obvious which are some of the most important U.S. Methodist churches. I think it could work well here, too, if there can be some agreement here on some or all of the U.S. presbyterian churches that should be included. --doncram 17:37, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

P.S. For "most significant" candidates, I had started with individual churches mentioned at Presbyterianism#Architecture. This included Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, one of the largest U.S. Presbyterian churches and I think clearly enough among "most significant". And it included Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago which also looks like a good candidate for highly significant to me, with its Ralph Adams Cram-designed church and its history back at the time of the Chicago fire, and so on (but the article could more developed). Cathedral of Hope (Pittsburgh), also known as East Liberty Presbyterian Church, is also an important Ralph Adams Cram work. Shadyside Presbyterian Church's article asserts it is a large congregation. First Presbyterian Church of Dallas's article asserts it is a "mother church" for the area. There's not any urgency to identify which ones are "most significant", but I think these could be candidates, and I wonder if there could be interest in having such a section. --doncram 17:48, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for the heads up, but however you would like to split them out is fine by me. I won't have any additional time for intricate work until after the new year. Altairisfar (talk) 23:34, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

It'd be difficult to support any "most notable" list, since list selection criteria is supposed to be objective. Right now I'm assuming the selection criteria is having a WP page, let me know if you have ideas to limit the scope. I'd propose for now we split the list into continents (with the Americas as a continent because there appears to be only one Presby church on WP in S. America; and I'm going to add some continental Euro churches from Category:Church of Scotland churches in Europe so that we can have a Europe list). This way we have three sizable lists and no need for a "main list." Presbyterian churches in the Americas would still be a huge list, as would Presbyterian churches on the National Register of Historic Places. I don't know what to do about that if there is no more selective objective selection criteria, except to split by state (see, for example, Category:Lists of bridges on the National Register of Historic Places by state). --JFHutson (talk) 16:43, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Article title

I wonder if we should move this to List of Presbyterian church buildings. Presbyterian denoms almost always describe themselves as churches, see List of Reformed churches and List of Reformed churches in North America#Presbyterian denominations in North America (all the names of the Presby denoms use "Church," I'm thinking about renaming this section Presbyterian churches in North America). --JFHutson (talk) 18:53, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

There is similar discussion, unresolved, at List of Methodist churches. There, and here, I wish for the list to be about "churches" meaning the common term (which conflates congregation and location and buildng), and not merely be about dead old buildings. I happen to have worked mostly on historic buildings articles in Wikipedia, but the point of a church, if you ask anyone in the church, is not about its building. One could make a very noncontroversial nice list of dead Presbyterian church buildings, but those already exist (see many Lists of listed churches in England such as Grade I listed churches in the East Riding of Yorkshire). There is need for a list of notable active churches in non-historic buildings, and to cover churches in spectacular modern buildings, too.

I see where you are going, Jfhutson, I think, and I disagree that's the way to go. Let this grow and include notable past and present churches in the normal, not-excessively-focused-upon-buildings sense. Obviously for now it is heavily weighted with the historic building ones, but that's because it is easiest to establish their notability and to list them from databases of Listed buildings and NRHPs. --doncram 19:05, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I understand that this list is a list of active congregations (though in that case we should delete Church of St. Andrew), and I think that's what it should be, I just see that there is currently a List of Reformed churches made up of denominations, and List of Presbyterian churches in North America redirects to a list of denoms, so we're being inconsistent. The problem is that Presbyterian denoms call themselves churches, but they also call their local congregations churches. If we want to get real technical Presbies call local churches particular churches, but I think that would just confuse things more. I'm now thinking that in the interest of common usage and consistency it might be a good idea to move the list of Reformed churches to List of Reformed denominations and keep this one as is. --JFHutson (talk) 19:25, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I want this to be a list of notable churches (congregations and/or buildings, past and present). Notability is not fleeting, so I think the Church of St. Andrew should stay though i am not looking at it in detail. I see what you mean, about the denominations being termed churches too, yes, of course they are. This requires editing in the lede at least and maybe hatnotes, to address the ambiguity. I had put into the lede already, "For Presbyterian denominations, see List of Presbyterian denominations." I guess I think that the lists of churches as denominations should be called "lists of denominations", allowing "lists of churches" to be about local, individual churches. I dunno if the redirect "List of Presbyterian churches in North America" should be deleted (as confusing), or left as is, or redirected to, say, List of Presbyterian churches in the United States (currently a redlink) after that is created and made into a list of local churches. I guess the redirect doesn't matter. The section it points to is clearly self-identified as a list of denominations, though, I'll note. I had not yet found my way to List of Reformed churches. Offhand I guess I agree that could/should be moved to something like "List of Reformed denominations". Maybe there needs to be a big combo move request and discussion, with notice to WikiProject Christianity and other places, sometime. For now I want to develop this and other lists of churches more. Thanks. --doncram 19:37, 17 December 2012 (UTC)