At a time when even the most liberal Christian churches are losing members, the decidedly conservative Presbyterian Church in America is growing. Covenant Reformed Presbyterian Church of Pueblo West is a case in point.

Launched informally 10 years ago in private homes and operating as a mission of the Rocky Mountain Presbytery, the church next month will be bestowed with full-church status during an event that will include ordination of two ruling elders and the Rev. Mark Spellman as permanent pastor.

Spellman is pleased that what began as an exploratory “experiment” in 2001 has come so far, adding that he’s also happy that he’ll be formally removed from the denomination’s ranks of “church planters.”

“I’m happiest as a pastor, not a planter,” said Spellman, who began his career with PCA as a “planter” in Midland, Texas.

A Mississippi native, Spellman worked for 15 years as an architect before he felt the call to ministry and enrolled at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Miss., where he earned a theology degree before being ordained.

Although people of many faiths study there, Presbyterians — particularly those of conservative persuasion — dominate the census, he explained.

PCA churches until relatively recently have been concentrated in the South, where the denomination originated in 1973 following a fracture within the Presbyterian Church of the United States that also created Presbyterian Church of the United States of America.

The split was over a growing movement within PCUS toward “more liberal thought about the infallibility of the Bible” and ordination of women, Spellman said.

Those who agreed that much in the Bible was intended as “poetic” or as “allegory” intended to teach, and those who agreed that women should be admitted as clergy members formed PCUSA. Those who disagreed launched PCA in Birmingham, Ala., Spellman said.

Pueblo’s other two Presbyterian churches — First Presbyterian and Westminster — are involved in a similar nationwide discussion over the ordination of homosexuals, and Westminster is one of eight churches in the 27-church presbytery that are in the process of splitting from PCUSA to form yet another branch of Presbyterians.

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