This recording is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison archive, part of the “Lectures” series, delivered January 1, 1996.

As I kind of indicated a moment ago, I think my first recollection of Charlie was being at a at a General Assembly, and this guy kept standing up saying, got books over here, got a special price for you today. And that was Charlie Dennison. He is a lover of books. He’s a lover of history. And most importantly for us this evening, he’s a lover of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Reformed faith, which he preaches. It’s a privilege to have Charlie with us. He is the historian of the denomination, has been for quite a few years now, as long as I’ve been around the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He is the Bishop of Swickley, Pennsylvania.

We’ve been looking forward to your time with us, Charlie. The Lord bless you as you speak to us. We’re sorry we don’t have any snow to share with you. Maybe you’d feel more at home if we had some, huh? I’m very grateful for Bill Warren’s contact at last year’s General Assembly and also for the invitation of this session to come and be here with you this weekend.

There’s two things that I would like to say before we get into the lecture. The first is, as you have already heard, I do love the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and I want you to remember that, because it may seem that I am saying some very mean things in the course of these lectures. Now, of course, I do not intend them to be mean-spirited, but to be helpful, to be positive actually in building our church. But I do want you to keep in mind as we go through this that I do love the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I want you also to keep in mind that I do love this country. It’s very important for you to keep that in mind as we go through these lectures and you will find out why. And before you start throwing things and getting up and running down the aisle, I want you to know that I do love this country.

Now, these lectures have a particular orientation. If you have seen the brochure or seen some advertisement concerning them, if you have seen the title, There is a subtitle to the lecture. That subtitle is the meaning of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. That means that these lectures are not going to be facts and figures.

If you want the facts and figures Do I have a deal for you? David has books in the back and more than have been mentioned here, and also there is the OPC video. I’m sure that some of you have seen that. I guess there is plans to show that on Sunday morning during the sunny school hours. So if you want the facts and figures, That’s where to go to get the facts and figures.

I’m not going to be overwhelming you tonight with an avalanche of dates and particular items from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s past. The scripture text that I have chosen to give us some orientation, and I know that this presents something of a. Unique approach to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but.

I suggested to you in the title. Hebrews 13 verse 14, if you could keep that in mind here, we have no continuing city, but we seek one which is to come. There are four lectures. They are entitled Prelude, Meaning, Confirmation, and Finale. Tonight’s Prelude. It is Tuesday, November 8th. 1838. 1838. The Reverend Cutting Marsh, that’s right, Cutting, C-U-T-T-I-N-G, don’t ask me.

A Presbyterian missionary in Stockbridge, Wisconsin, receives two early morning visitors. a young David Palmer and a Delaware tribesman named Big Deer. The reason for their visit? Big Deer’s desire to deliver up his idol, a doll given him by his mother twenty-nine years previously, a doll he had worshipped until he began to hear about Jesus. Now, he stopped worshipping that doll, but at the same time, he kept it by him as a token, a momentum, a reminder of his mother’s love and his ancestral background. But now, on this fall morning, he wished to give up all to follow Christ. The scene changes.

It is Sunday, October 13, 1991, over 150 years later. The Reverend James Andrews, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the denomination of Reverend Cutting Marsh, is joined by many others in a ceremony in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Present are Cherokees, Seminoles, and Delawares. The occasion?

To return to the Delawares a sacred health guardian doll, valued highly among the Delaware’s described as an integral part of the spiritual well-being of their community. The event is marked by religious drum beating and dancing. As part of the U.S. government’s and the mainline church’s effort to support, quote, Native American communities trying to reclaim their cultural heritage and religious dignity. So much for the separation of church and state. The doll in question? The very one Big Deer had delivered up when he decided to follow Jesus.

In February 1989, those ever so urbane, sophisticated, and culturally alert readers of the now defunct magazine, the Reformed Journal, were treated to a rather sentimental, if not silly editorial written by Richard Mouw. M-O-U-W. Richard Mao was a member of the Reformed Church of America, who at that time was teaching at Calvin College, the college of the Christian Reformed Church. Richard Mao is now president of Fuller Seminary, located in Southern California, nearby Pasadena.

His editorial served as the means to let the Reformed world know that he had on one occasion prayed to the Virgin Mary, and that he was not the least bit sorry for having done so. It was an act, he felt assured, that achieved its end. My prayer, he said, arrived at the right destination. Indeed. It is the spring of nineteen eighty seven. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s Committee on home missions and church extension. Has purchased a full page ad. In another defunct magazine. Eternity. Think of. Eternity is to follow. You must be careful what you name your magazine.

The whole missions committee had purchased this full page ad for the purpose of soliciting contribution from the general evangelical population and beyond. Hopefully these contributions would replenish the committee severely depleted reserves. That had been nearly exhausted by the committee’s pursuit of the church growth agenda during the decade of the.

The ad featured a very attractive woman on an exercise machine. To the bold headline, she wants it all. According to the ad, the OPC commended itself to the general Christian public because it used, quote, street smart techniques, unquote, in planting new churches. The criticisms of this ad and the committee. During the subsequent General Assembly very. Some charge that we were guilty of false advertising. I’m not sure. What they had in mind. The woman. Or the byline. I think it was the bylaw. Is that really our fort in home missions and church planning efforts? That we have church smart, we have street smart techniques that we can use in those endeavors.

Others saw this ad as a violation of the common standards of Christian decency. and outrage. And still others saw it as a flagrant surrender on the part of our denomination to crass commercialism for the purpose of selling the church. A traditionally strong and circumspect denomination like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, abandoning the heights of its heavenly identity and calling, and descending to the very worldly level of viewing the church and her message as commodities to be bought and sold in the great mass religious marketplace of the world. A Reformed Christian, so-called Richard Mao, with ties to the Christian Reformed world, collapsing into the arms of a romantic superstition in an act his forefathers in the faith would have found indistinguishable from idolatry? A mainline church, the Presbyterian Church USA, dignifying outright paganism by commending in the name of public civil religion, the outrageous religious beliefs which a courageous convert, a hundred and fifty years previously, had surrendered when he decided to give up all to follow Jesus. Each of these instances evidence of the sad, dangerous and precarious state of the Presbyterian and Reformed Church in the twentieth century as we approach the end of this century.

The question being, how in heaven’s name did we get here? It will be painfully clear, I hope, from these lectures As it is from these three illustrations. That blame cannot. Be assigned solely to the radical and liberal wings of the church. In giving an accounting of the sorry state of affairs we cannot ignore conservative complicity. But even more difficult. We must move even closer to home.

We must look at ourselves. There is a great scene in John Huston’s version of the classic Moby Dick. Starbucks, the chief mate, is very much aware now of Ahab’s maniacal bent. Says Starbuck to Ahab, let Ahab beware Ahab. Indeed, even given liberalism’s betrayal of the gospel, even given evangelicalism’s present courting of contemporary culture to the point that the gospel itself is in the balance. Let the OPC beware the OPC.

Now in order to draw into focus the danger we are to ourselves, and to answer the question how in heaven’s name did the Presbyterian and Reformed Church come to such a sad and precarious state of affairs, let me take you back a few years to 1924. twelve years before the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

My interest in this year is the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA. It convened in Grand Rapids, Michigan, interestingly. But not since The PCUSA’s first General Assembly in 1789 had there been a more defining, a more direction-determining assembly for the Church. The 1924 General Assembly of the PCUSA was a watershed assembly. The Church would never be the same afterwards. I say this not simply because of liberalism’s triumph at that assembly, but because of conservative ambivalence and complicity, which became all too painfully apparent.

There were three major events at that assembly. And these events bring into focus the emerging personality of the once great Presbyterian Church. Setting the stage was the first of these events. The election of the moderator elected was Clarence E. McCartney, a somewhat eccentric, very proud. And yet. To be perfectly honest opportunistic. Man. At the same time, he was a great conservative defender in the P. C. U. S. A. Of Orthodox Calvinism, and he was the pastor of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.

McCartney was the most formidable and popular leader of the conservative cause in the PCUSA at that time, and he had been nominated for the moderatorship of that assembly by another world-famous conservative, William Jennings Bryant, the man who had run for the presidency of the United States. McCartney won the moderatorship over Charles R. Erdmann. a moderate evangelical from Princeton Seminary, where J. Gresham Machen taught, but a favorite among the liberals. McCartney, upon his victory and upon assuming the chair of the moderatorship, placed conservative clergy at the head of every committee in the Assembly. The conservatives at that assembly, because of the tone and strains in the church at that time, the conservatives at that assembly, and as word spread throughout the denomination as a whole, were euphoric.

But just how hollow conservative elation was would be exposed by the two other major events marking that assembly. Another major event. was the resolution of the so-called positive case. Very briefly. Harry Emerson positive was the bright articulate popular spokesman for liberalism. And an outspoken enemy of McCurdy.

He was also a Baptist He had come to the nation’s attention as the associate pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, a church famous for its ecumenical policies, thus the presence of this Baptist in a Presbyterian pulpit. On May 21st, 1922, Fosdick preached his most famous, or shall we say infamous, sermon entitled, Shall the Fundamentalist When, in it, he took exception to the infallibility of the Bible and the historic doctrine of Jesus’ virgin birth. He said the church should be large enough and broad enough to welcome those who hold divergent views on such subjects. When this sermon was distributed widely across the country, an ecclesiastical war broke out. with the conservatives headed by Clarence McCartney. The whole matter came to a head at the 1924 assembly, but a strange thing happened.

Even though the assembly seemed to be dominated by the conservative rank-and-file, And despite that rank-and-file power having been demonstrated in McCartney’s election, the Assembly pursued Fosdick on a technicality only. He was a misplaced Baptist, and he should decide whether he wanted to become a Presbyterian. here was a piece of political maneuvering all too transparent to the liberals. The fact that the conservative assembly of 1924 failed to pursue Fosdick directly for his public statements and doctrinal deviations built confidence for the liberals Here was an all-too-clear indication of what the PCUSA was becoming. The high ground of doctrine was being abandoned for the more political and practical and pragmatic approach. Although the liberals had lost in the moderatorship vote, and though they themselves were a minority in the assembly, They could not help but think that the Conservatives were cautiously calculating their political options. Raised, therefore, was the question of whether the Conservatives had bought into an administrative view of the Church, and thus severely crippled their commitments to a doctrinal understanding of things. Put quite frankly, Were the doctrinal standards of the PC USA going to play any significant role in the church’s future? A review of the remaining major event of that assembly will conclude the issue. It would be this event that conclusively revealed liberal power and conservative complicity.

Here, we deal with the Auburn Affirmation. What was the Auburn Affirmation? On December 26, 1923, a group of 150 Presbyterian ministers met at 10 Nelson Street, Auburn, New York. Jointly, they expressed their dissent to actions of General Assembly’s past. the General Assemblies of 1910, 1916, and 1923. By which, in those actions, Presbyterian ministers were declared bound by five essential doctrines, the infallibility of scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, his miracles, his substitutionary death on the cross, and his bodily resurrection.

These actions in successive assemblies were, as we can say now from our position as Monday morning quarterbacks, unconstitutional and superfluous, even though they were generated by honest conservative folk. They were unconstitutional and superfluous in light of the already orthodox standards of the PCUSA, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and its catechisms. The Auburn group rightly pointed out the unconstitutional character of the Assembly’s actions. It had an advantage.

But it did so not because these folks, these Auburn affirmationists, had any real deal for the church’s orthodox standards. Instead, their interest ultimately was to declare themselves free from traditional doctrinal restrictions. The Auburn group, therefore, declared the five doctrines in question, but theories over against which other theories could be placed.

By the time of the 1924 General Assembly, 1,274 Presbyterian ministers had signed the Auburn Affirmation. The 1924 General Assembly, therefore, became a defining moment in the history of the mainline Presbyterian Church. There was an overture from the Presbytery of Cincinnati, calling upon the Church to respond forcefully and quickly. And one would have expected the 1924 Assembly to do just that, given the leadership of McCartney as moderator and the presence of a clear majority for the Conservatives in the Assembly. But even beyond these considerations, the fate of the signers of the Auburn Affirmation seems sealed, since the all-important Bills and Overture Committee of the General Assembly had among its members two of the most famous conservatives of the time, Maitland Alexander, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, and William Jennings Bryan himself. But what happened?

First, the Bills and Overtures Committee, despite the presence of these stalwart conservatives, proposed no action be taken in response to the Cincinnati Overture, and thus against the signers of the Auburn Affirmation. There was no dissent in the committee to this decision. There was no minority report submitted. None.

So the committee brought that recommendation to the floor of the assembly, and one would have expected a fierce debate on the floor. But the assembly voted unanimously to table the entire matter. And interestingly, the motion to table, and thereby dismiss, if you’re aware of the peculiarities of Robert’s rules, the motion to table was made by the famous conservative pastor, Dr. Mark A. Matthews, from Seattle. No one at that assembly recorded a negative vote. No one filed a protest, and in the time proximate to this decision, and therefore within the prescribed statute of limitations, no one filed any charge against any signer of the Auburn Affirmation.

He’s starting to feel a little uncomfortable. My friends, we’re not talking about liberals. Do you really think that everyone who wears a conservative badge is your ally? It ain’t so. What explanation can be given for the conservative failure of 1924?

The answer to that question goes a long way in answering the question with which we began tonight. How did we, in heaven’s name, get where we are presently in the Presbyterian and Reformed world? At least this much is clear, is it not? As responsible as liberals are for the ecclesiastical and doctrinal debacle of this century, conservatives have a great deal to answer for themselves.

The sad fact is, however, that conservative and evangelical and even reformed analysis of the failure of 1924 has been quite disappointing. One typical remark at the time was that the failure was a, quote, grave mistake. I can just see the jowls. Grave mistake.

Actually, it was the liberal leader. On occasion, you find yourself thanking God for a liberal. Actually, it was the liberal leader, Henry Sloane Coffin of all people, who came closest to the mark. He was at the assembly, he wrote his wife from Grand Rapids, telling her that although the conservatives controlled the assembly, they lacked nerve. They are frightened, he told his wife, and shrink from extreme measures. Coffin’s remarks to his wife signal the coming liberal victory.

But they also imply the social and cultural dimension to the conservatives reticence to act. The social and cultural dimension of the conservatives reticence to act. His comment to his wife raises the question of conservative motivation. Were the conservatives driven by sincere religious conviction in the interest of the sure and certain biblical faith they confessed, or were they actually controlled by a religion of appearances? whereby they wished to be perceived in the churches and in the public eye as agreeable. Put a bit more crassly, did the conservatives fail to act in 1924 because they judged the stakes too high and the embarrassment and scorn before the watching world and the watching church too potentially damaging? But of course, the reasons for conservative failure go far deeper than I have as yet suggested.

For example, we must not overlook the fact that the Presbyterian Church in the USA in the early 1900s was an established and yes, highly secularized institutions. Nor should we overlook the fact that the mainline Presbyterian body had achieved this status in large measure because of conservative contribution.

The PCUSA, the mainline church, was established It was an enfranchised church. It was a church of privilege and prominence. It was a fixture in the American landscape with property, large tracts of real estate, huge buildings, and a great amount of money. It boasted of this position, however, at tremendous cost. Aspects of that cost unperceived even by the most hawk-eyed conservative One area of Uniform blindness in the peace USA Was the rising tide of nationalism I’m setting you up.

I’m setting you up. That’s why I said to you at the beginning that it’s important for you to know that I love my country. It is important for Orthodox Presbyterians to love their country. But while we love our country, we do not surrender ourselves to nationalism. Let me spell it out. about the political realities of the church’s American environment. There are both conservatives and liberals in the political makeup of this country.

They all get along well enough without running each other out of the country. Shouldn’t it be the same in the church? You following me? We all live here. We’re all Americans. Some of us are conservatives. Some of us are liberals. But we don’t run each other out of the country. It should be the same way in the church. Do you understand where Fawcett’s getting his theology? He’s looking to the culture. He’s reading the church off the face of the culture. He’s right in sync with the times. It’s up the ante a little bit.

What about the decretal theology of historic Presbyterianism? You know what I’m talking about? God’s eternal decree, the doctrines precious to historic Presbyterianism, God’s eternal election, His predestination, the working out of His will. How is this going to play? in a nation that is increasingly controlled by the attitude and convictions that rise from free will and a conviction and commitment to equality for all.

How are you going to be able to make any distinctions among anyone? Historic Calvinism is saying there are the elect here and there are the reprobate over there. The rising tide of nationalism says you cannot make those distinctions. We are all Americans. If there is any salvation, it is ours together. See what’s happening to the consciousness of America. Radical transformation.

The old Calvinism, therefore, just wasn’t American. so early in, as early as 1903, by additions and deletions, conservatives and liberals embraced within the PCUSA to qualify in some instances and eliminate in others the express Calvinism of the Westminster standards.

The harsh statements in the judgment of some with regard to double predestination were removed. Chapters were added to the Westminster Confession that were intended to soften the blow that historic Presbyterianism and Calvinism had delivered. In 1906, Again, liberals and conservatives cooperated in drawing the Armenian Cumberland Presbyterian Church into the embrace of the Peace USA. Many conservative Presbyterians, therefore, bore the stamp of American culture above all else, no more committed to Calvinism than were their liberal opponents. Among the conservative clergy, it seemed, the greater commitment was to American independency and individualism than to Presbyterian doctrine and polity.

Un-Presbyterian and even anti-Calvinistic strains begin to appear in the Church. Dispensationalism, fundamentalistic Arminianism, broad-based evangelicalism and even early forms of Pentecostalism were found in many conservative Presbyterian pulpits in this land.

Those pulpits, becoming the centers of highly developed personalized ministries, ministerial superstars, all the credentials, all the statistics, huge buildings, Do you think church growth is a modern phenomenon? Recent development? Not so. In some cases, the blending of these forms of ministry with the developing entrepreneurial style of American culture meant the incorporation into ministry of the most tawdry commercialism. Worship became entertainment, preachers became personalities, preaching became a matter of sales, technique, and enterprising, with the gate all important.

Such interests, noted one Orthodox Presbyterian historian, Paul Woolley, my name, such interests are indistinguishable from American preoccupation. After all, he said, numerical growth is an American enthusiasm. It is a national sport. All of these commitments in what was judged a good cause. a good and just enterprise.

All of these commitments to the gospel of nationalism left conservative strength compromised, easily exploited by the growing liberal party in the Peace USA. However, no development among the conservatives in the mainline church proved more devastating than the unanimous contempt for church discipline. You could define the Orthodox Presbyterian movement as an attempt to recover church discipline. Somehow, by 1924, sadly, tragically, conservatives in the PCUSA had been convinced that there was only one sin more heinous than signing the Auburn Affirmation, and that was bringing charges against the signer of the Auburn Affirmation. The reasons for this are very complicated. But let me say that they are not unrelated to the emerging, growing national perception of what religion is and should accomplish.

As far as the conservatives were concerned when it came to the matter of church discipline, they had now come to rely upon revival. Do you understand why some in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church are very hesitant when the issue of revival is raised in our midst? Do you understand why when we see certain revivalist tendencies beginning to gain a foothold that we begin to become very nervous? What was the legacy of the revivalism of the nineteenth century in which many Presbyterians participated enthusiastically, in fact, giving themselves to that with everything they had. The legacy was the disappearance, the evaporation of any substantive, any meaningful church discipline. Why? You just waited for the revival. That would take care of all the sins. You didn’t have to address the man personally. You didn’t have to go to the woman and confront her. You didn’t have to do any of that. Just wait for the revival. It’ll take care of everything.

That’s not to say that many of us in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church would not welcome strengthening of spiritual life, vibrancy in our churches. But revivalism does bring some baggage, and you have to be aware of that. But there was another factor in the disappearance of discipline. We are a Christian nation. This means that our government and our courts are Christian. We need not discipline our membership because our Christian government will discipline our membership.

By 1924, the type of church discipline necessary to bring the Auburn affirmationists to justice was non-existent. It seems that within this church, as established and as culturally attuned as was the PCUSA, Discipline was more than impolite, it was an unthinkable and unforgivable breach of ecclesiastical etiquette. You were violating the Presbyterian gentleman’s code by even suggesting such a thing. And so in 1924, no one thought about it. not even J. Aggressive Machen.

It is a very good thing that you are sitting down. He was a commissioner to the 1924 General Assembly. The previous year he had just finished his tour de force, his great book, Christianity and Liberalism. That book which so eloquently and powerfully stated the truth of the matter. Liberalism was not a variation of Christianity, not even an aberrant form of it. It was an entirely different religion. But at the 1924 assembly, when liberalism so blatantly raised its vile form in the highest court of the church, Machen sat frozen and mute, just like everyone else.

Two years earlier, That is, two years before he had written his book, three years before the assembly, Machen had visited B. B. Warfield prior to Warfield’s death. In fact, the month before Warfield passed away. Machen asked the ailing Warfield about the state of the PCUSA and about the advisability of a split in the church for the purpose of securing a continuing conservative cause. Warfield’s response was, you can’t split rotten wood. Truly not Machen, possibly not even Warfield himself fully comprehended how rotten the wood was.

So rotten was it, in fact, that Machen had not been able to escape the effects of the Machen’s tragic silence at the 1924 Assembly is sobering to all self-assured, if not self-righteous, Orthodox Presbyterians. If someone as great as Machen was not immune to the spirit of complicity, what about us of lesser ability? If Machen need beware of Machen, what about you and me?

In answering the question, how in heaven’s name did we come to this present situation in the Presbyterian and Reformed Church, we do well to look at ourselves. At the same time, and for the purposes of our encouragement and progress in the faith, we need also to consider what God did to J. Gresson Machen.

I frame it that way deliberately. It’s not a matter of a man just merely following his ideas, principled and all that. It’s not merely a man being a moral example and living by his will in keeping with his moral attitudes and estimations. History is what God does to us. So, for the purposes of your encouragement and for your progress in the faith, You need to consider what God did to J. Gresson Machen.

Over the last 13 years of that man’s life, God would force him to face the truth about himself and about the conservatives most closely aligned with him. It was an extremely painful experience. Near the end of his life, he wrote out his own public repentance in the pages of the Presbyterian Guardian. He said, What a fearful sin of omission it was that an effort was not made in 1924 in every single Presbytery in which any of us stood to bring the Auburn Affirmation to trial.

That confession by nation goes a long way towards reasserting and putting into practice the proper definition of a church. But it also rises from a finer spiritual consciousness. that is being forced to see all the more clearly that here we, the Church of Jesus Christ, have no continuing city.

Thank you. Charlie, we appreciate so much your being here and quitting our appetites for tomorrow. We trust you’ll all be back tomorrow if at all possible. One other thing I was going to say before we began, but it’s just as good I didn’t, we’ll do it now in a slightly different way.

As we were sitting at supper, as my want often is, I asked my family, great dessert do we have to go with this great meal? I love dessert. And my wife, somewhat to my utter amazement, said none. I said, oh? And then she said something like, don’t you read the bulletin? I hope you all did read the bulletin and are reminded that now, after this first lecture, dessert is being served in the fellowship hall. So I was told my dessert would come after the lecture. I hope you’ll stay with us and have a moment of fellowship and a little bit of dessert maybe.

Let us stand for prayer. Father and God, we are reminded again of who you are, of your greatness, of your majesty, that you are indeed the God of history, that you are active in history, not just in biblical history, but you’re active in history today. You’re active in our history. It was you who indeed raised up and formed Dr. Machen, and through him, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We pray that even again as we hear our own history, that we might be humbled and reminded that you are the God of that history.

We pray that it might give us a new commitment to be the kind of people that you would have us to be. We might serve you with all of our hearts and soul and mind, that we might glorify you with our words, with our actions as well. But indeed, it might not be merely a shibboleth with us, that our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. that it might be truly our desire, our commitment, our longing to glorify you and to enjoy you forever. Thank you for what we’ve heard this evening. Bless us with a good night’s rest. Refresh us in body and spirit. Bring us back tomorrow, we pray, with an eagerness to learn more about who we are and what you’re doing in our history. Amen.

The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.