Questions for PCA officers on...offices
By Brad Isbell
The fact that a significant number (likely hundreds) of Presbyterian Church in America congregations “have” female deacons or deaconesses or present females as holding the office of deacon or the imaginary office of deaconess is indisputable.* Also beyond question is the fact that a number of PCA churches do not ordain male deacons (presumably to create a unisex, egalitarian board of deaconing persons) is also beyond dispute.
Questions for PCA officers:
1. Has anyone considered the incremental-but-inevitable effect of allowing quasi-/non-ordained "officers" in a denomination?
2. How many members of PCA churches with female "deacons" or deaconesses (a term with no set meaning in our polity) know that the female deaconing persons are not actually officers? If members are confused it may be because some churches use the same nomination, training, and election processes for females who are called deacons or deaconesses as they do for men who are part of the diaconate.
3. What is the long-term effect of allowing churches to forego the ordination of one of the two offices our polity requires?
4. Have the de facto three-office/three-office-attracted pastors considered the effect that their position may have on our supposed firewall against ordaining female elders (of one kind or another)? In other words, will we move from "women can never be elders" to "women can never be preaching (or senior) pastors."
5. What will be the effect of allowing churches to flout the BCO re: office and ordination?
6. When will female deacon advocates make another run at amending the BCO? (This effort in 2019 was withdrawn: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yAx8gjseKheH5MogOJGjZ20o1l6xQc_b/view )
7. Should we seek again by overture to "address the unordained diaconate"? (This effort failed in 2018: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YyDqgVKKmR4PSh-1C5bdxQgdeqyLWGr9/view - It should be noted that there is nothing to presently prevent presbyteries from inquiring into the state of their churches’ diaconates.)
- Bonus question: Is our present stalemate on these issues (really more a slow slide/drift rather than a stalemate) an acceptable, viable, or sustainable situation, or is it a recipe for disharmony and distrust?
- Bonus bonus question: Has any church that adopted a free-form, bespoke approach to offices ever maintained its doctrine of office?
- Ultra bonus question(s): What is the effect of (by non-compliance and lack of enforcement) rendering a section of the BCO optional and non-binding? Which section is next?
Final thoughts: It is difficult for PCA sessions which push the Book of Church order envelope on these issues to respond to criticism and questions, knowing that both the spirit and letter of PCA polity is (in some cases) being violated. Making biblicist arguments about one verse in the New Testament (Phoebe!) or appealing to the practice of other denominations is about the best they can do. Do not the vows taken by elders regarding the constitution of the PCA and submission to brethren require that we (all of us) follow and abide by the polity of our church (in letter and spirit) until such time as that polity is changed through orderly constitutional process rather than by the drip-drip normalization-by-tolerated-violation approach of ecclesial antinomians—no matter how winsome and missional they be?
*Finding PCA churches with female “deacons” or deaconesses or females listed as officers is as easy as visiting a few websites. Some churches even admit to commissioning (not ordaining) their unisex diaconates. An example of a church leader admitting that their church’s deacons are not ordained by the laying on of hands can be found in Tim Keller’s 2009 PCA General Assembly seminar with Ligon Duncan: https://presbycast.libsyn.com/bonus-duncan-keller-talk-deacons-deaconesses-2009
Brad Isbell is a ruling elder at Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Oak Ridge, TN, co-host of the Presbycast podcast, board member of MORE in the PCA and the Heidelberg Reformation Association, and a co-editor of the Nicotine Theological Journal.
This article was shocking to my wife. She was positively scandalized to learn there are pca churches who refuse to ordain their deacons and call women “deacon.”
Take a look at the PCA's Korean presbyteries. There will be few if any Korean churches in the PCA that do not have women as deacons, as deaconesses, or some other English translation of the relevant Korean word which is used for both male and female deacons.
For better or for worse, the PCA went down this road of tolerating churches ignoring the church order with regard to deacons many decades ago when it made the decision to accept Korean churches without requiring them to make some pretty major internal changes to the way their churches operate.
A case can be made that the PCA made the right decision, or that the PCA made the wrong decision. A case cannot be made that it was a good decision by the PCA to accept what quickly became not just dozens but hundreds of Korean Presbyterian churches, and now entire presbyteries, without changing the PCA's church order or requiring the Korean churches to change.
What would have been the alternative? As a practical matter, a decision to tell the Koreans to get rid of their deaconesses wouldn't have resulted in getting rid of deaconesses. That would have been a decision by the PCA to tell the Koreans to join a different denomination, most likely the Korean American Presbyterian Church.
(A historical point of significance: during the period that Korean churches were beginning to be organized in large numbers in the US, the Christian Reformed Church was allowing women in the diaconate but not the eldership, and had a relationship dating back to the 1950s with the Hapdong Presbyterian Church, one of the two large Presbyterian denominations in Korea. There are reasons why the CRC was the first choice for a number of Korean churches to join in the 1980s, though most of the large Korean CRCs left under the leadership of Dr. John E. Kim over women's ordination, tolerance of a gay CRC minister, and the other problems that were happening in the 1990s.)
Telling people in large and growing churches to go away isn't exactly the way PCA missions and church growth people operate. If a church is growing, and is evangelical, and practices infant baptism, and believes in the five points, and identifies itself as Reformed and Presbyterian, "minor points" of church order are not going to be a problem for a lot of people in the PCA.
Anyone familiar with Korean Presbyterianism will know that feminism is pretty strongly opposed. Most Korean Presbyterians strongly oppose women's ordination to the eldership or pastorate. However, Korean Presbyterians have had deaconesses almost from the beginning of Presbyterianism in Korea, based on the practice of late 1800s and early 1900s American Presbyterian missionaries. It's far from a new thing for them, and long predates any sort of feminist agitation as has been seen in the American church world as a reason for promoting women in the diaconate as an interim step to getting women ordained.
It's probably also relevant that Korean churches have an office known as "kwonsa." Originally it was used for elderly widows over the age of 60, following the directions of the Apostle Paul, and performed a similar role in allowing elderly women who were believers who had been rejected by their families to have a means of support while doing work for the church. For many generations, however, the kwonsa have not been required to be widows, and are usually married women who are older and function as mentors and spiritual leaders for younger women. The biblical warrant for women in such roles is clear, though creating a formal office is considerably more problematic.
Koreans also have "jondosa" -- seminary-trained women who do extensive work with women and children. The title is also used for male seminarians while still in seminary before they are ordained, though female jondosa do not get ordained following graduation from seminary.
I trust the way women fill these three roles -- deaconess, kwonsa and jondosa -- make clear that Korean PCA churches operate very differently from most of the rest of the PCA when it comes to internal church government.
This has been tolerated for decades by the PCA. It's going to be pretty hard to tell English-speaking PCA congregations to get rid of deaconesses when Korean deaconesses are the norm in most if not all Korean PCA churches.