Whether the ordination of women to the offices of deacon, then ruling elder was inevitable and just a symptom of the slide or whether it actually made the slope all the more slippery…well, that’s a subject of debate. Women pastors in the PCUSA did not gain approval until 1956, two decades after Machen’s untimely death. It seems that it took so long for women to climb into pulpits, considering the movement for full women’s equality began in 1930.

Ordained female deacons in the Northern church resulted largely from the receiving into the PCUSA in 1905-1906 of the greater part of the old born-in-revival Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which already had female deacons. Sometime between 1905 or 1906 and 1922 the PCUSA went from having informal deaconesses or inherited (grandmothered in?) Cumberland lady deacons to the real, official thing. Here’s the first mention of official lady deacons in a copy of the PCUSA constitution to which we have access (1922):

Section II is not a triumph of the English language. *By comparison, the PCA Book of Church Order is much more expansive on offices and the qualifications of officers.) To make things even less clear, we have a stray reference to deaconesses a page or two later:

It’s not entirely clear whether this refers to a more informal, unordained, locally-variable quasi-office or to the fairly new office of female deacon. Maybe it’s the former…a thing that had been around for a while. If so, the PCUSA of the 1920s was much like the PCA of the 2020s, which seems to have a de facto “office” of deaconess or female deacon, though unordained. (More to come on the PCA situation in a future article.) The PCUSA constitution was frustratingly short on definitions. Deacons (whether of the XY or XX type) seem not to have been a big deal in the Northern church. They were not for Machen…as far as we know. I considered why this might be about a year ago in the NTJ:
Machen vs. Women – A War He Never Fought
To anyone familiar with J. Gresham Machen’s biography the words, “Machen and women” will bring two facts to mind: that Machen never married and that he had a particularly intimate relationship with his mother. Much of what we know about Machen comes from the voluminous trove of letters to his mother. His views on segregation (shared in an early letter or two) have gotten him in particular trouble in the era of Wokeness. And in the era of Revoice there is new, if unfounded, speculation about his bachelorhood. And there is ongoing disagreement about the nature of his one (and only?) alleged romance with a Unitarian lady.
The more ecclesial-minded Machenite might well have another question: Where did Machen stand on the issues of women, office, and ordination in presbyterian churches, particularly his own? I, at least, have thought a lot about this murky issue. No biographers have cited comments from Machen on these issues, and if such comments existed, they would loom large in women’s ordination debates that bubble up from time to time in conservative Presbyterian and Reformed churches. Some consider women’s ordination a sort of canary in the confessional presbyterian coal mine: any talk of approving it being viewed as an indicator of faltering biblical fidelity or as symptoms of cultural compromise.
History may be our only helper in discerning Machen’s views, so here’s some history. The northern Presbyterian Church in the USA (in which Machen labored until 1936) first ordained women as deacons, serving equally with men, in 1923, though there may have been a less-formal deaconess role previously allowed or maintained, somewhat like many PCA churches have today. Machen’s opinion on admitting women to the ordained officeriate is unknown. Maybe he was indifferent. Maybe he shared the views of his Princeton colleague, the great B.B. Warfield, who favored some sort of “deaconing women,” to use a Tim Keller term….
…By 1930 when women ruling elders were first ordained, Machen was fighting for his own ecclesial life, having become persona non grata with PCUSA elites, and was fighting for the life his newly-established seminary, having resigned from Princeton after nearly 25 years of association with the northern church’s flagship theological school.

Machen was a busy man. Maybe he never married for that reason alone, He may also have lacked the time or energy to address the women-as-officers issue. We’ll never know.
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Written by C. R. Carmichael |
Friday, June 16, 2023
What the Virtuals (which include technocrats and all varieties of trans-ideologues) fail to realize, however, is that God has created a world that has been perfectly constructed to give mankind every opportunity to thrive. Even with the devastating introduction of sin and death through Adam, the world is still fundamentally an environment where men and women can “be fruitful and multiply” for the glory of God if they choose to live for that righteous purpose and submit to His will.

For thousands of years, the bulk of humanity has joined together to search for an understanding of the physical world around them in order to thrive and find their righteous purpose under God. But lately this pursuit has been abandoned by many who feel it is better to find refuge in an alternate reality that primarily serves the will of the Self. To do so not only involves the creation of an artificial environment to their liking but necessitates the destruction of any opposing elements that might threaten its existence, including God Himself.
This kind of willful rebellion against our Creator is not new, of course, but it has been emboldened in recent years by our advancing science and technology which has given us the potent tools in which to create alternate realities on a scale that has never before been seen. With the power of artificial intelligence and digital control over every stream of information, the minds of the unwitting masses are in danger of being systematically brainwashed to accept the creation of a new world without God.
Thus, as we witness the technological rise of the Digital realm over and above the Analog world, we find that this latest attack against God and His creation has resulted in the manifestation of a great societal divide between two opposing parties, which journalist N.S. Lyons has dubbed, “the Physicals and the Virtuals.”
The “Physicals” Versus the “Virtuals”
Generally speaking, the Physicals are the salt-of-the-earth folks often found in the “working” class who joyfully engage their minds and hands in the real, physical world as carpenters, farmers, mechanics and the like. Though they may find happy occupation in the white collar sector, their overriding desire is to find purpose and fulfillment in their active interaction with God’s physical creation.
The Virtuals, on the other hand, are the “thinking” class and ruling elites who wish to remove themselves from the messiness of the natural world and have dedicated themselves to the task of building ideological “safe zones” and acquiring the informational control of the world’s financial systems, science, technology, academia, media, and so forth.
With this control of information, therefore, the Virtuals stand to be the gods of the Digital realm, or as Lyons rightly frames it from a spiritual perspective, our “priestly class, and the keepers of the Gnosis” who primarily sit in front of their screens in a digitized temple of power dispensing or censoring information as they see fit. Though they appear to be progressive, their ownership of data and knowledge actually thwarts any real moral enlightenment or cultural progress when they suppress raw truth that might bring critical pushback against their godless, dehumanizing agenda and thus undermine their position of power (Romans 1:18).
In his book The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch brings incredible insight into why these Virtuals (or who he calls the “thinking classes”) are so intent on building up the Digital as a better, more satisfying world in which they alone can prosper while enslaving the rest of us:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality — “hyperreality,” as it’s been called — as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women.
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Don’t be a pastor if you want a low-stress job. Remember the doctrine of providence. In addition to this being par for the pastoral course, they aren’t random sand traps. Nothing is outside of God’s sovereign control. God in his infinite power upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all creatures and things.” (2LCF 5:1) The trials are not merely permitted; they are ordained, for our good and his glory (James 1:2–3; Rom. 8:28). Far from being accidental, random, or pointless—they are, like everything else, according to the counsel of his will, to the praise of his glory (Eph. 1:11–12).  

[Note: this post is part of the series on enduring in ministry. Other posts can be found here]
It’s early morning, and you wake up with a knot in your stomach. Thinking about the difficult conversations from the day before has you reeling. You head over to make a cup of coffee and check your phone. Attempting to resist the inbox and get your mind on something else, you check the news for a few minutes. But soon enough, you give in and check your email. Two messages in there get your attention. The first is a cryptic request for a meeting from a person with whom you suspect there is trouble. And the other a summary of the giving trend, reflecting a substantial deficit for the year. You take a sip of coffee and wince. You want to return to bed, and the day hasn’t started. 
And right here, you have a choice to make. You may not realize it, but it’s an important decision. How are you going to respond to this?
What’s going on? You’re experiencing the stress of pastoral ministry. If you want to endure long-term, you have to be able to identify if and properly deal with it.
A Description of the Problem
Stress is our body’s response to difficulty. These are often undesirable circumstances. And if you think about it for a minute, pastoral ministry has many of these types of situations. 
Any of the following would be considered normal or routine in a 6–12 month span of ministry:

Seeing a church member fall into sin leading him away from Christ.
Watching a marriage implode over sin.
Trying to bring healing after abuse.
Counseling a grieving family after the death of a loved one.
Having key families leave your church.
Enduring uncharitable and untrue characterizations of your motives.
Watching church members argue about peripheral matters.
Receiving the estimate for the repair project in the church.
Looking at the calendar and seeing Sunday getting closer.

This is the pastor’s life, week after week, month after month, year after year. Like waves bringing debris from the sea, the pastor’s life is a steady wave of the residue from the fall.  
Any one of these, by themselves, gets our attention. But what if you get them in pairs or triplets or more?
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