The Verdict
I’ve reflected on my first words after being shot and not being able to talk for 2 months. These words seem very appropriate now, “Hallelujah! Thank you, Jesus, sweet sweet Jesus.” While the road to recovery continues, today’s verdict gives us a sense of peace. We have found solace in God’s faithfulness and His mercies which are new every morning.
As many of our followers on Gentle Reformation will know, two years ago this month our son-in-law, Tommy, was shot in the line of duty in his third week on the job as an officer for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD). We have chronicled the journey the Lord has taken Tommy and Emory on with the following posts.
Abiding in the Almighty’s Shadow | Emory recounting the night of the shooting
Continuing to Abide in the Almighty’s Shadow | A six-month update that includes local Indy newscasts. This link is of Emory reading Psalm 91 on air.
Shattered | Emory’s article on the first anniversary after the shooting
WRTV Article | This article gives details of the trial this month with a video news report
3GT Interview | An episode where you hear Tommy & Emory explain their journey
Last week on February 13-15, the trial was held for the man who shot Tommy. The courtroom scene was intense, especially because this man chose to represent himself, took no responsibility for his actions, made terrible lies and accusations against those involved in this case, and was able to directly examine Tommy.
Yet, after a relatively brief time of deliberation, the jurors brought back guilty verdicts for all nine counts against him, including two counts of attempted murder against Tommy and the officer credited with saving Tommy’s life. We rejoice over this display of justice.
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The Plague of Morally Toxic Public Schools
What happens in public schools really matters, to each student, to each family and to our nation. Because, as Abraham Lincoln said: “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of the government in the next.”
What would happen if a child were to spend most of his waking hours, during most of his formative years, in an institution bent on persuading him to adopt certain fundamental beliefs?
There is no mystery here. Children are easy to manipulate. They are eager to please, especially in a school setting where their grades and future careers depend on it. The child would eventually yield to the days and years of pressure and embrace the beliefs thrust upon him.
But what if those fundamental beliefs were at war with his family’s?
We should be speaking in the present tense, for this is what happens today—every day—to Christian children in America. While their parents sleep.
Many of America’s public school systems have become morally toxic, especially for the hearts and minds of children from religious families. So say authors Mary Hasson and Theresa Farnan in their bracing and deeply researched new book, “Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It’s Too Late.” The threat does not come from the dedicated teachers who are just trying to do their jobs but from progressive ideologues who have become our nation’s education elites.
If you wonder why your fourth grader comes home sounding like a “social justice warrior,” you can thank the National Network of State Teachers of the Year for pushing a book list for elementary students with the themes of classism, racism, xenophobia, sexism and transgenderism.
Even while schools are becoming successful instruments for leftist social reform, they are failing at their core mission to educate children in basic academic subjects. The latest national assessment is “devastating,” says Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Two-thirds of American students can’t read at grade level, and reading scores have worsened in 31 states. “This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students,” DeVos says.
Sex education is the most obvious area for indoctrination. Well-funded international pressure groups have been extraordinarily successful at pushing “Comprehensive Sexuality Education” into American public schools, both in politically liberal and conservative regions. CSE promotes risky sexual behavior to vulnerable teens disguised as sexual “rights” and focuses on LGBTQ sexuality (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) as a victim class.
Lessons are carefully designed to encourage children to approve homosexual behavior and to reject the beliefs and the authority of their parents.
Examples are almost too graphic to print. Elementary children are taught that some people are born in the wrong body. Young teens are encouraged to experiment with anal and oral sex. High schoolers learn how to get secret abortions.
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Called to be a Blessing
This is a call for reflection. I know the places my heart has gone since March 2020. I also know how I ought to treat others. Those two things haven’t always meshed. As we stumble through the backside of 2021 together, let us consider how we can bless others. The world needs Jesus much more than it needs anything else.
It’s been a tough 18 months. The world has been wrecked by a pandemic that has taken the lives of 4.5 million people. Many others have been without work and have had significant changes to their daily lives and their “normal.” We’ve been asked to do things none of us have ever had to do. We’ve been asked to wear face masks in public. We’ve been asked to social distance. We’ve been asked to forego important things like graduations, weddings, and even funerals. The world has been turned on its head. To make matters worse, mistrust and division are at all-time highs. A divisive presidential election has divided the country and has even threatened to divide the Church. Two normal men were given messiah status, and we were told that if either one wins, we are all doomed.
When I look at the past 18 months, I can think of many ways I have repaid evil for evil. I can think of many times I’ve insulted those who have insulted me. I’ve become defensive when I heard of the difficulties churches in this country have faced due to COVID. Rather than seek reason and understanding, I’ve sought justice in the form of winning arguments and vilifying the people on the television. In the first few months of the pandemic, I was angry and just knew that this was all a major conspiracy.
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Deaconesses in the Presbyterian Church in America
We really don’t have generalizable data on how widespread (or not) the practice [of unordained women serving as deaconesses] is in the PCA. How many churches have deaconesses? How many deaconesses are there in the PCA? The purpose of this project is not to pick a fight, but to shed light, in the hopes that it will lead to more productive debate at PCA General Assembly.
Overture 26 from Northwest Georgia presbytery proposes a change to chapter 7 of the Book of Church Order that would disallow unordained people from being “referred to as, or given the titles connected to, the ecclesial offices of pastor, elder, or deacon.” RE Brad Isbell wrote that the overture effectively addresses “a big ecclesial deal” and helps the PCA “get ahead of things for once,” since there seems to be some lack of clarity (or at least consistency) on the issue. More recently, Isbell provided some examples of the practice in the PCA. On the other side of the debate, TE Tim LeCroy warned of the coming fight with the “far right of our denomination”: “Watch out! Do you have unordained women serving as deaconesses?” But we really don’t have generalizable data on how widespread (or not) the practice is in the PCA.
How many churches have deaconesses? How many deaconesses are there in the PCA? The purpose of this project is not to pick a fight, but to shed light, in the hopes that it will lead to more productive debate at PCA General Assembly.
Method
We drew a random sample of presbyteries in the PCA, stratifying by US Census region. We stratified by region so that at least two presbyteries were chosen from each region to ensure geographic representation. We sampled more presbyteries in the South region, a region densely populated with PCA churches and presbyteries. Random sampling is important because it allows for generalizable inference. Randomization is important because, since each presbytery had an equally likely chance of being chosen, it allows us to say that our findings are generalizable within a certain margin of error. This method is similar to what pollsters using during election season to claim that a candidate is polling at some level, plus or minus some margin of error.
We also drew a random sample of presbyteries from two sister denominations in the North America Presbyterian and Reformed Council (NAPARC): the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (RPCNA). Since these denominations are smaller, we did not do a stratified randomization. In total, we sampled 14 presbyteries from the PCA, 4 presbyteries from the OPC, and 2 presbyteries from the RPCNA (see Table 1). These sister denominations are good comparisons for this analysis for a few reasons: (1) the PCA has fraternal relations with both of them; (2) they share doctrinal standards (Westminster); (3) the PCA and OPC do not allow for deaconesses as an ordained office, while the RPCNA does.Table 1. Presbyteries sampled for analysis
US Census Region
Presbyteries
DenominationSouth
James River
PCASouth
Central Florida
PCASouth
Tidewater
PCASouth
South Florida
PCASouth
Central Carolina
PCASouth
Georgia Foothills
PCASouth
Metro Atlanta
PCAWest
Canada West
PCAWest
Pacific
PCAWest
Pacific Northwest
PCANortheast
Westminster
PCANortheast
Ascension
PCAMidwest
Ohio Valley
PCAMidwest
Great Lakes
PCANortheast
New York and New England
OPCWest
Southern California
OPCNortheast
New Jersey
OPCMidwest
Ohio
OPCMidwest
Midwest
RPCNANortheast/South
Alleghenies
RPCNATogether, these 20 presbyteries have 465 congregations. We excluded 36 churches from our analysis if no functioning website could be found or if the website was predominantly in a language other than English. We retained over 90% of all churches sampled in each of the three denominations.
Table 2. Descriptive statistics of church websites
PCA
OPC
RPCNAPresbyteries sampled
14
4
2Congregations in sample
319
101
45Congregations excluded
25
10
1Total churches in analysis
294
91
44% churches in analysis
92.2%
90.1%
97.8%Website information
% TE only
17.0%
20.9%
20.5%% TE/RE only
21.1%
46.2%
40.9%% TE and Staff only
16.3%
1.1%
0.0%% Deaconesses
4.1%
0.0%
13.6%% No deacons, no deaconesses
50.0%
51.6%
59.1%The purpose was to capture what is clearly portrayed on each church’s website, rather than to conduct a deep investigation into each church’s website. As such, we typically spent no more than 30 seconds per website to count the number of Teaching Elders (TEs), Ruling Elders (REs), deacons, and deaconesses, typically summarized on a “Leadership” or “Officers and Staff” page.
To be counted as a deaconess, a website had to explicitly identify the woman as a deaconess. Ours is therefore a very conservative estimate because if there were ever any reason not to count a woman as a deaconess, we did not count her. Deaconess with parenthetical note? Nope. Mercy team? Nope. Women to pastors? Nope.
Limitations
Before we proceed to share what we found, the reader should keep in mind that this kind of research is subject to several limitations.
Because the practice of having ordained deaconesses is de jure not allowed in the PCA and the practice of having unordained deaconesses is contested (see this year’s Overture 26, for example), PCA churches may be pressured not to report deaconesses, even if the practice is de facto in place. Indeed, many of the websites we found mentioned “deaconesses” or “women on the diaconate” without listing the number or names. These churches were coded as having zero deaconesses for the purpose of our analysis. As such, we suspect that our findings are a lower bound estimate, underreporting the practice in the PCA.Our method does not allow us to account for churches that forgo ordination of deacons and commission “mercy ministry teams” in lieu of a diaconate (e.g., Evergreen Church). or in addition to a diaconate (e.g., Christ Presbyterian in Santa Barbara, CA). These were not counted in our data. Others list deaconesses with a clarifying note that these are not considered ordained officers (e.g., University Reformed Church).
Different readers will come to different conclusions about our assessment of titles and practices, so we expect there will be competing views about the inferences that can be drawn from the data. Nonetheless, we believe it will be helpful to both sides of the debate to have some data on the issue.
FindingsPCA churches have nearly as many publicly listed deaconesses on average as the RPCNA, a denomination that allows for women to hold the office, but the practice is less widespread in the PCA.
In our website searches, we found that PCA churches have 0.19 deaconesses listed on their websites on average while RPCNA churches have 0.27 deaconesses listed on their websites on average. However, only one in twenty-five PCA churches listed deaconesses and six presbyteries did not have any deaconesses (Ascension, Canada West, Georgia Foothills, Ohio Valley, Tidewater, and Westminster), while the practice was almost three times as common in the RPCNA. The PCA churches listing deaconesses had 4.3 deaconesses on average and RPCNA churches doing the same had 2.0 deaconesses on average. The 101 OPC churches in total listed zero deaconesses on their websites.
2. PCA churches are more likely to give the impression of being “staff led” and OPC and RPCNA churches are more likely to give the impression of being “officer led.”
This is not to say that PCA churches are not in practice “officer led,” but as far as what is reported on their websites, they are more likely to give the impression of being “staff led.” A smaller proportion of PCA churches list only a TE on their websites (17%) than either OPC churches (21%) or RPCNA churches (21%). Similarly, a smaller proportion of PCA churches list only elders (ruling or teaching) on their websites (21%) than either OPC churches (46%) or RPCNA churches (41%). In contrast, PCA churches are more likely to list only TEs and staff (16%) than either OPC churches (one church) or RPCNA churches (zero churches).3. The practice of having deaconesses appears to be common in some presbyteries, less prevalent in others.
On average, most churches in our analytic sample list between one and two TEs, two and four REs, and two and four deacons. There are, of course, some exceptions to that rule. Churches in Central Carolina and Tidewater had over five ruling elders on average and, in the latter presbytery, over six deacons on average. Much of this variation is explained by church size and membership.
There is more variation when it comes to having deaconesses. It should come as no surprise that not all presbyteries are the same with respect to this practice. Six presbyteries in our sample did not have a single deaconess listed on their churches’ websites (Ascension, Canada West, Georgia Foothills, Ohio Valley, Tidewater, and Westminster). Metro Atlanta had the most, with 0.79, followed by Central Florida (0.34), Pacific Northwest (0.28), and Great Lakes (0.19).
Matthew Lee is a ruling elder at Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Fayetteville, AR, where Liam Carr serves as a deacon.
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