Provided by Dick Hunter, Church Historian
Check the history bulletin board highlights of the 70’s by the Communications Committee chaired by Joan Givens.
Below is an excerpt about a former FPCY Pastor.
“The 8th pastor was the Rev. Richard Wynkoop, who was called March 17, 1827 at a salary of $300, parsonage, and eight cords of wood. He was installed on June 14. He was born in the City of New York on December 16, 1798. He graduated from Columbia College, 1819. After studying law for a time, he determined to enter the ministry. He pursued his theological course at New Brunswick with Dr. Robert McCartee of New York. After serving for a time as missionary in the Dutch Church of Cato, NY, he accepted a call to this church where he remained until April 16, 1834 when the pastoral relation was dissolved that he might become pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Hagerstown, MD, where he died April 5, 1842. He was a man of rare energy, clear head, indomitable courage, fully determined, as far as lay in his power, that everything should be done decently and in order. Laws, civil and ecclesiastical, in his estimation, were made to be enforced. His sermons were doctrinal, and the purpose for which they were written was to instill into the people views of divine truth which were thoroughly Calvinistic. By nature and education he was essentially a lawyer, and this in a measure unfitted him for success in the ministry. He carried from the legal profession into the church ideas which, while proper in the former, were impracticable in the latter. The words compromise and conciliation were not in his vocabulary. Wrongs in the church were not to be righted by forgetting them, nor were breaches to be healed by conciliation, but by discipline; and we all know from history and experience that in church difficulties and divisions, discipline is useless. Tact and the balm of kind words and a forgiving and forgetting spirit are the only remedies which can remove them.
During his pastorship the two church came back together after separation in 1806. During Mr. Wynkoop’s ministry 16 were added to the church on examination and four by certificate.”