Wittingly or unwittingly, this alternative practice creates a new quasi-office or serves as a sort of “ecclesial disobedience” protest against the existing BCO provisions. The effect of not ordaining deacons (if allowed) will, in effect, change the meaning and undermine the authority of the BCO by ignoring or contravening it rather than using the difficult and slow (but honest) constitutional process.

Dozens of congregations of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) communicate to the church and to the world that ordination is not essential to the holding of church office or to bearing the titles thereof. The two-office polity of the PCA is simple and clear; its on-the-ground manifestation is too often confused and confusing.

The confusion is apparent in at least two ways. First, dozens of PCA churches list, portray, or refer to women as deacons (not the sexed, informal term deaconess) or as members of the diaconate (see one church’s explanation above). The problem here is that every reference in the denomination’s Book of Church Order (BCO)[1] to deacons refers to the ordained office,[2] and ordained office in the PCA is limited to men. Furthermore, the diaconate is only mentioned in conjunction with the session of ordained elders. Saying there are unordained members of the diaconate (deacons)  would seem to imply that there could be unordained members of the session (elders), and that could never be. Or could it?
At least one church[3] in the PCA has a female “pastor” (see image below). Or we could also put it like this: One PCA church “has” a female pastor, since you can’t actually have an impossibility — pastors are ordained and no one in the PCA ordains women. But, apparently, a PCA church can assign the title of pastor to someone who is not and cannot be a pastor.

Ordination matters, according to the church in every age and to the PCA’s Form of Government (Part I of the BCO). Focusing on ordination reminds us that the issue is not ultimately about the sex of the officeholder. And ordination is an inescapable factor in Presbyterian polity. In the instance of the female “pastor” cited above, the fact that she is called a “Pastor to Women” is quite beside the point. The use of “Pastor” (whether of youth, music, administration, or outreach) is inappropriate for any unordained person.  Non-ecclesial titles like “Director” or “Coordinator” have typically been used by PCA churches for unordained staff, whether male or female. Curiously, the “Pastor to Women” was referred to as “Director” several years ago, but now is called “Pastor.”
Titles seem to matter even more in these credentialistic days. They obviously matter to the givers of the titles and to those who receive them. Otherwise, why go to all the trouble? But does the actual meaning and definition of the title matter in an ecclesial-denominational context? Postmodern deconstruction questions the meaning of words (and titles are words) but also the meaning and understanding of texts — even of a text so dry and technical as the BCO. Postmodern deconstruction tries to find the meaning behind the glossary definition or might dwell on what a word or phrase should or could mean using critical methods.
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[1] The PCA Book of Church Order may be viewed and downloaded here.
[2] In noting that the PCA office of deacon is limited to men, we do not denigrate other denominations (e.g., the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church [ARP] or the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America [RPCNA]) that explicitly allow and make provisions for females in the office of deacon.
[3] This folder contains links and screenshots concerning the PCA church that gives the title of pastor to a female. This folder gives a small sampling of the range of iterations of diaconates in the PCA. The data is from freely accessible public websites. No attempt has been made to contact the churches for explanations of these practices. It is assumed that the public-facing websites, videos, and documents of local churches express their actual practices and convictions. No offenses are alleged: it is for presbyteries and the PCA General Assembly to determine if churches are deviating from denominational standards of polity.

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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Nietzsche noted it takes a long time for societies to grasp the significance of the death of God. But we are surely at that point now. Our artistic class makes that very clear, and so it is time to put these artists in the dock: We get it. You hate Christianity and the Western cultures that it informed.

One of the hallmarks of the modern age has been the death of the sacred. Nietzsche’s Madman understood that this was one of the central consequences of the death of God. But he, unlike the polite atheists he berated in the town square, knew that this was both an exhilarating and a terrifying matter: Now human beings would themselves have to rise to be gods, to create their own systems of value, their own sacred rites, their own meaning of life.
This was never going to be either easy or stable. Nor has it ultimately led human beings to transcend themselves and ascend to some higher, übermenschlich plane. Today we witness merely the desecration of all that was once held to be sacred. Our culture remains trapped by the sacred idioms of the past and doomed to the constant and increasingly conformist transgression of old boundaries.
Take, for example, the latest “art” promoted by the European Union: A series of photographs, currently on display at the European Parliament building, taken by lesbian artist Elisabeth Ohlson. The images depict, among other things, scenes of Jesus surrounded by gay men dressed in leather bondage gear. Now, if Jesus were alive today he would certainly be speaking to such people, as he spoke to prostitutes and tax collectors in first-century Palestine. But Ohlson claims that her work represents Christ “loving LGBT rights.” Whether all gay people like to see themselves caricatured in bondage gear might itself be an interesting question to ask. The left’s favored word “fetishization” came to my mind as I looked at the pictures. What is not interesting, however, is the artwork itself.
The display represents both the bankruptcy of modern culture and its inability to offer anything even approximating a positive vision for humanity. For generations now the artistic establishment has been in thrall to the notion of transgression. But transgression is only significant if there is something—some rule, some custom, something sacred—to transgress. Without such, transgression itself rapidly degenerates into a series of empty gestures that tend to become both more extreme and more vacuous at the same time. Art then ceases to be about embodying and transmitting cultural value and is instead a momentary iconoclastic performance that parasitically and paradoxically depends upon resurrecting icons that have long since fallen. Only because there is a folk memory of religion does the general public have some notion that these banal photographs are meant to be shocking. And only to the increasingly marginal numbers of actual Christians are they truly so.
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The new free documentary Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood spotlights five young men who have decided to tell their stories. Alex, Brian, Njada, Ritchie, and Torren come from a variety of backgrounds. No two of their stories are exactly the same. Each is like a fingerprint, unique to the storyteller. But all five men have something in common: courage.

I would definitely like to have been a woman, because I feel, whether rightly or wrongly, that then everything would have fallen into place. The way I speak, the way I walk, the way I move, and the thoughts in my head would not any longer have been remarkable. They would have been acceptable. What I’m so bad at is being a man. — Quentin Crisp
When transgenderism was a budding fad, some people looked into their crystal balls and shrewdly predicted that a reckoning was coming. It wouldn’t be immediate, of course. It would take time for young people to realize they’d been screwed over. And it would take courage. Lots and lots of courage.
Over the past few years, a number of women have displayed that courage, coming forward to tell their stories and sue the medical professionals who harmed them. A few men have as well. But many more women than men.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Statistically, men are also more reluctant than women to report sexual assault, which also requires a great deal of courage for both sexes. But for men, it carries an extra weight of shame. The same is true when it comes to identifying as a victim of transgender “medicine.” Like telling one’s rape story, it’s not easy for anyone. But it will always be easier for a woman to stand up and say, “I thought I was a bro” than it is for a man to stand up and say, “I thought I was a sissy.”
The new free documentary Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood spotlights five young men who have decided to tell their stories. Alex, Brian, Njada, Ritchie, and Torren come from a variety of backgrounds. No two of their stories are exactly the same. Each is like a fingerprint, unique to the storyteller. But all five men have something in common: courage.
Their stories are interwoven with reflections from two therapists, Joe Burgo and Az Hakeem, and Irish writer-activist Graham Linehan (who lost his reputation, family, and career after publicly opposing trans ideology). Linehan doesn’t have very much screentime, but his presence is a sad reminder that we’re dealing with a top-down cultural contagion, enforced by people with enough power to completely demolish someone’s social capital.
There is also a sixth young man whom we never see. Instead, we see his father, Steven. Steven tells us how the boy “came out” transgender in his senior year of high school, walked away, and has never come back. He remains “lost.” “The last thing I think about in a day is my son,” Steven says, “and first when I wake up, before I’m even out of bed.”
Although each story is unique, there are certain recurring patterns. One running theme is that the men in these boys’ lives often seemed to be either absent, predatory, or weak. This is not a grand unifying theory. There’s Steven, after all, apparently a loving and present father who reports that he and his wife were “blindsided.” But it ties several stories together. Ritchie Herron, a young Englishman, only ever talks about his “mum” showing up to appointments with him and being pressured to make decisions. But he found plenty of men willing to enfold him into a “community” online. These men, of course, were predatory.
Meanwhile, Torren grew up in a blue-collar American subculture where the men occupied themselves with a narrow range of “manly” interests (cars, beer, hunting), while the women, in his words, “ran the show.” Similarly, Njada’s father tried to push his son towards “manly” interests and tasks, but when Njada drifted into gender confusion, he ironically failed to “man up” to his own wife. Njada recalls how she instantly took the driver’s seat and began to insist, “You better use the pronouns.” Like the women in Torren’s world, she was definitely running the show. These two stories are particularly interesting, because they complicate simplistic narratives of “toxic masculinity.” If anything, they evoke a world in which men become absorbed in “manly” pursuits while simultaneously failing to embody masculine leadership in the home. Thus lacking immediate models of how to be their own distinct selves while still being healthy men, these boys sought guidance from the broader culture. But as they discovered, that broader culture of teachers, therapists, and influencers was not going to help them become healthy men. Quite the opposite.
In the film, Joe Burgo proposes a nuanced third way for how men can properly lead and nurture misfit boys—neither by questioning their manhood if they diverge from rigid norms of masculinity, nor by “problematizing” all distinctly masculine traits, a trend which he believes has increased male depression. If boys do in fact like distinctly “boyish” things, that should be fine. If they don’t, that should also be fine.
I once discussed this in person with Burgo at a cocktail party in Washington. When I asked him what he thought of Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men, which is generally sympathetic to the plight of boys, he said he still disagreed with Reeves’ idea of nudging boys towards more “feminine” trades—teaching, nursing, etc. As a disclaimer, I still need to read Reeves for myself, but I agree that particular idea isn’t going to solve the masculinity crisis. As I put it to Joe, it’s less urgent to mix up more statistically feminine trades and more urgent to re-dignify masculine trades. Here Joe looked up with a little smile, very taken with this, and said, “One thousand per cent.”
The other featured therapist, Az Hakeem, is also very concerned about the masculinity crisis, and he makes a further connection to the co-factor of autism. He’s consistently observed that young male patients on the spectrum followed a certain rigid chain of logical reasoning, based on their tendency to create rigid categories: “To be male, you have to be like this, this, and this. I’m not like this, therefore I’m non-male. Therefore I must be female.” Burgo adds the observation that autistic young people will struggle more than average with the changes their body undergoes in puberty, more likely to feel disgust or a desire to disassociate from who they’re physically becoming.
Several of the young men in this film are themselves either on the autism spectrum or, relatedly, on the OCD spectrum. Depression and anxiety are also recurring themes, as is p*rnography addiction. Yet the “professionals” who should have cared for them bypassed all these cofactors and glibly promised that everything would be “solved” not by treating their mental health, not by quitting p*rn, but by female hormones. All of them took estrogen, though Brian, Njada, and Torren seem to have reversed their process before pursuing surgery. Njada recalls how the therapist he sought out in college informed him that “transition is the typical treatment that makes people feel satisfied with their life.”
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