I challenge you to consider the BCO in light of what the Bible says about the church. Read it carefully and deliberately. If you disagree with a statement made in its pages, ask why, and investigate further. Ask your pastor and elders about it. Order pleases the Lord, and he desires for his people to be built up and edified, by all the teachings of the Bible about the church. The BCO helps the local church accomplish this vital task.

Like many in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) who come from baptistic backgrounds, I found my church’s inquirers’ class to be a welcome & intriguing experience. Most Baptist churches in the United States can fall anywhere along a wide spectrum of educational practices and confessional commitments, so it was a refreshing drink of mature biblical doctrine to walk week-by-week through the Westminster Confession. My wife and I came to our church already presbycurious, but emerged from the inquirers’ class as full-fledged Westminsterians. We couldn’t get enough of the glorious teaching contained within our Standards. We craved more.
As I spoke with my pastor and elders throughout this class, I came to learn there was more.
You see, Presbyterians love books. They love order even more. They even have a whole book devoted to the establishing & keeping of order in the church. Reading the PCA’s Book of Church Order (BCO) has helped me to learn about my denomination and to love it even more. Laity in our church would find much benefit from the troves of wisdom in its pages. Many a pastor labors in its pages, and perhaps even many elders & deacons, but I believe it can be of great use to the everyday believer in forming their thoughts about the church in its operation.
Giving Shape to the Church
Oftentimes as we read popular works of theology, we gain many insights into what Scripture teaches about God, the Christian, salvation, repentance, and living out life as Christ’s redeemed. The doctrine of the Church, however, can sometimes be unfortunately neglected or even wholly ignored. The BCO provides the reader with the standards by which a Presbyterian church is constituted and maintained. It outlines the scriptural doctrine of church government and defines both the visible church and the powers of that church. It details a governing structure for the local church, its initial organization, its officers, and the rights and duties of its members. The courts of the session, the presbytery, and the general assembly are all defined, as well as the relation of elders to the courts.
For laypersons, the Form of Government (Part 1) of the BCO teaches us about the church, properly governed. We are taught that the visible church’s government reaches its perfection in the presbytery, but that the absence of presbytery doesn’t deny the existence of the church. This comforts many of us who have loved ones and relations outside of Presbyterian churches. This also teaches us what to expect of and for our pastor, how to relate to him in his ministry, and how a church can call a pastor if it does not have one. For any who have spent time in the Wild West of nondenominational churches, such guidance is like water from a spring. No church and no church order is perfect in its execution, but the procedures that the BCO lay out for a church to live by provide a firm foundation of unity & practice for a covenant body of believers.
Spare the Rod and Spoil the Church
Church discipline is a dirty word in many circles of the evangelical world, and not without good reason. Some Christians may have felt the overzealous hand of a church or officers who thought that excessive discipline was the best way to separate the chaff from the wheat. Others may have been exposed to church environments where practical discipline was entirely absent and unrepentant flagrant sin abounded in the body of believers. Neither of these are healthy, nor are they faithful biblical expressions of Christ’s command to care for His sheep. For these tender matters, the BCO is singularly useful as well. In its second part, The Rules of Discipline, standards are laid down for the church to know what church discipline is and how it is to be exercised. BCO 27-3 guides us to the Bible’s described ends for church discipline: the glory of God, the purity of His church, and the keeping and reclaiming of disobedient sinners. Discipline has godliness for its principal end in the life of a Christian; not the stoking of egos, but the salvation of sinners.
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Where to find the BCO?1. The PCA website2. The Apple App Store3. Consult with your elders about one of those legendary blue binders.
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“Some religions, like Judaism have made many contributions to the civilised world. Others have been much less involved in Western progress. As [historian Rodney] Stark and others have demonstrated, only those religions that have had a place for reason and logic have had a real impact on science, progress and technology. The Judeo-Christian worldview certainly gives reason a good run. Thus important thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead and Robert Oppenheimer – neither of them Christian – have argued that modern science could not have developed were it not for the Christian worldview that provided the soil from which it arose. The greatest achievements of Western civilisation are mainly, but not completely, the results of the Judeo-Christian mindset.” 

To speak of Western civilisation is to speak about Christian civilisation to a very large degree. Without Christianity (and the Judaism that preceded it), the West as we know it today would simply not exist. One of the most recent commentators to make this case is Tucker Carlson. A few weeks ago he gave a speech on how Western civilisation is under attack.
He emphasised how the secular left is really at war with Christianity itself. As he said in part: “Why are they doing this? The goal is to overthrow Western civilization. What is Western civilization? It’s Christian civilization. That’s what it is.”
Entire libraries are filled with the volumes documenting how so much of the West is the product of Christianity. Some months ago, I listed twenty top books on how Christianity made our world. It included titles such as How Christianity Changed the World and What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? That piece is found here.
Christianity and Science
Simply looking at the arena of science is enough to show any unbiased observer what a remarkable contribution Christians have made here. Even non-Christians have acknowledged all this. For example, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, in America’s Real War (Multnomah, 1999) put it this way:
“Well over 90 percent of all the scientific discoveries of the past thousand years have been made in nations where Christianity is the prevailing religion. Virtually every major discovery in physics, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, electricity, nuclear physics, mechanics and just about everything else has taken place in Christian countries.”
And consider this stunning remark by the atheist blogger Tim O’Neill from a decade ago:
It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked up these strange ideas from websites and popular books. The assertions collapse as soon as you hit them with hard evidence. I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one – just one – scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents usually scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong. http://www.strangenotions.com/gods-philosophers/
Of interest, this excerpt was taken from a book review he had penned. I happen to have the book, and it could easily have been included in my top 20 listing (along with many others). I refer to the very important volume God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam, (Icon Books, 2010). It was released in America as The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Regnery, 2011).
There is so much that can be said about this crucial volume. Perhaps the best I can do here is simply quote from it, hoping that will encourage you to get a copy. In his introduction he says this:
Popular opinion, journalistic cliché, and misinformed historians notwithstanding, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages was a period of enormous advances in science, technology and culture. The compass, paper, printing, stirrups, and gunpowder all appeared in western Europe between 500 and 1500 AD. True, these inventions originated in the Far East, but Europeans developed them to a far higher degree than had been the case elsewhere….
Meanwhile, the people of medieval Europe invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace by themselves.
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When Elisabeth Elliott returned to the jungle in 1958, after subsequent missionaries had made successful contact with the Huaorani, the tribe told her they’d speared the five men because they thought they were cannibals. Reading back through the men’s journals after this revelation is like going back to the beginning of the movie and noticing all the signs you can’t believe you missed. 

Sixty-eight years ago this month, missionary Jim Elliot and four others were speared to death by Huaorani Indians in the Ecuadorian jungle.
However we understand this story now 70 years on—(was this a martyr’s epic adventure or an object lesson in cultural ignorance?)—I think it’s important to say that should anyone claim to know that God did not, in fact, call those men to that work and to their death, they are lying. Elliot and the others loved Jesus and were doing what they thought He wanted, at great personal cost. Let no cynicism invalidate that.
In my recent reading of Through Gates of Splendor, the book in which Elisabeth Elliot retells the story through the men’s journal entries, what struck me most was not the cultural awkwardness or even the great drama. It was the missionaries’ total confidence in their own intelligence gathering. For weeks leading up to their ground approach of the Huaorani, the men flew their prop plane over the tribe’s settlement, dropping gifts and yelling phrases they believed translated to “friend.”
They then painstakingly analyzed every tiny movement the tribe made in response. Jim wrote one day that he “saw a thing that thrilled me—
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