Against requiring background checks

The PCA would set a dangerous precedent with a "shall"...

Overtures to the 51st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America that would require —with a “shall”—the purchase of background checks for all officer and ministerial candidates violate the principle that a church’s property is its own and cannot be taken by a higher court, agency, or committee of the church.¹ Many PCA churches incurred great financial loss to come into the denomination from the Presbyterian Church in the United States because of claims to local church property by the denomination and its presbyteries. Churches lost buildings, ministers lost pensions, or churches paid huge sums to keep what they rightly owned. Written into the PCA constitution are provisions to prevent such things from ever happening again. Money is property—requiring it to be spent is equivalent to taking it.

Book of Church Order 25-10:

The provisions of this BCO 25 are to be construed as a solemn covenant whereby the Church as a whole promises never to attempt to secure possession of the property of any congregation against its will, whether or not such congregation remains within or chooses to withdraw from this body. All officers and courts of the Church are hereby prohibited from making any such attempt.

Heretofore, monetary expense (the taking of church money or requiring that church money be spent) was not required to constitute a church or call an ordained man. That has been because the process was spiritual: separate and different from civil, governmental, or secular organizational methods and “best practices.”² Membership in the church or service in ordained office is not pay-to-play. Certainly, it costs something to travel to a presbytery meeting (or to the local church for a session meeting, for that matter). It even costs something to register for General Assembly, a fact that would at first appear to support requiring a church to pay for background checks. But the reverse is true: Because the PCA (due to the principles enshrined in BCO 25) cannot require a church to pay money to be part of the PCA it must charge a fee to cover the expenses of a large annual meeting which is optional for the participants—attendance at the meeting is not required to be an officer, pastor, or member church of the PCA. There are no taxes in the PCA, only freewill “askings” (just as we see in the Bible) to support the committees and agencies of the denomination according to the churches’ wishes.³

“Shall” vs. “should”

Background checks have great utility. Nearly every church and court will deem it wise to use them. Many already do. Churches ought to use them, but asking, encouraging, and even imploring churches and courts to use them is the most that the General Assembly of the PCA can or should do because the property of a church is its own. Local churches may require officers or those working with children to undergo background checks, but that is a local church spending its own money, not being required by anyone else to do so. It may even be proper for presbyteries to require candidates to undergo and even pay for background checks since a court can set the terms of its membership, but it is not for the General Assembly to require lower courts or churches to dispose of their property against their will. Writing such provisions into the PCA constitution would set a dangerous precedent and would undermine the freedom and rights of local churches.

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There is a second overture concerning this issue and at least one more to come. This X thread contains information about it: https://x.com/presbycast/status/1767561170947366959?s=20

by Brad Isbell

1. There are other reasons to oppose mandatory background checks, including privacy and information security concerns, and the issue of entanglement with (and reliance upon) the civil magistrate to approve church officers.

2. “We do this at work, so what’s the big deal?” is not a slam-dunk argument in favor of mandatory purchase of background checks. The church is a different type of organization operating by different rules.

3. Requiring a fee for services provided by the denomination (GA registration, GA minutes, etc.) is not the same as requiring a service to be purchased.