Reformed and Presbyterian

The Swiss reformation, begun independently of Luther under Zwingli in Zurich and consolidated by Calvin in Geneva; parent of the Presbyterian, Huguenot, and Dutch Reformed streams. A sibling of the Lutheran branch, not its child.

France's Reformed church organized nationally in 1559 amid persecution, growing from a handful of represented congregations to a reported 2,150 churches by 1561; the wars of religion, the Edict of Nantes (1598), and the Revocation (1685) with its refugee diaspora are the node's timeline annotations.

Scotland's Reformation under Knox made the Kirk Calvinist in doctrine and, by 1592, presbyterian in government; the recurring battle of its history — the church's spiritual independence from state patronage — produced the secessions of 1733 and 1761 and the Disruption of 1843, healed in stages by 1929.

The Netherlands' Reformed church, confessionalized at Dort (1618–19); the state reorganization of 1816 set up the 19th-century secessions — the Afscheiding (1834, Hendrik de Cock, ~120 congregations) and Kuyper's Doleantie (1886), which united in 1892 as the Gereformeerde Kerken.

American Presbyterianism's main line: colonial presbyteries, national organization in 1789, and a history of paired schisms and reunions (Old Side/New Side, Old School/New School, Cumberland) — the trunk from which the OPC departed in 1936 and into which the UPCNA merged in 1958.

After the civil courts overrode the Veto Act (1834), a third of the Kirk's ministers surrendered stipends, manses, and churches rather than concede state control of pastoral appointments — a division over the church's spiritual independence, not doctrine. The majority stream returned via the United Free union and the reunion of 1929; a continuing Free Church remains, strongest in the Highlands and islands.

Dutch Seceder immigrants who had joined the Reformed Church in America separated in 1857, holding the older body too accommodated to American ways (the freemasonry dispute crystallized it in 1882); the CRC carried the Afscheiding's confessional temper, later reinforced by Kuyper's influence.

The Civil War division: when the 1861 Assembly's Gardiner Spring Resolutions required allegiance to the Federal government, the southern presbyteries withdrew, arguing a political test had been imposed on church membership — slavery and secession the underlying causes; the separation outlasted the war by 118 years.

The conservative departure at the close of the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy: J. Gresham Machen and colleagues, disciplined over the Independent Board, formed a church committed to the Westminster Standards against what they judged the modernist drift of the PCUSA.

Conservative PCUS congregations, citing the denomination's theological liberalism and a union plan without an escape clause, organized separately in 1973; now the largest conservative Reformed body in North America, spread well beyond its southern origins. The EPC (1981, from the UPCUSA) and ECO (2012, from the PC(USA)) are companion departures listed in the fact bank.

The 1983 Atlanta reunion of the northern and southern churches closed American Presbyterianism's longest-running schism; the mainline body since, with conservative departures (EPC 1981 pre-merger, ECO 2012 post) tracked in the fact bank.