Women thought the PCA, with its robust system of governance, might provide some accountability. They found that was not the case.
With a robust governing structure and a 400-page Book of Church Order (BCO) that requires strict standards for those in church leadership, the Presbyterian Church in America should be a denomination that’s good at handling abuse.
“I told friends I picked the PCA because I know I have somewhere to go if something goes wrong,” Kristen Hann, a former director of women’s ministry at Surfside Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, told CT.
She and other women in the denomination have found that was not the case.
The denomination meets for its annual general assembly this week and is marking its 50th anniversary. Over those decades, it has not experienced the reckoning with abuse that has occurred in the Southern Baptist Convention or the Catholic Church.
But survivors within the PCA say the denomination’s problems with abuse are just unaddressed. The denomination has not commissioned an investigative report like the SBC on its response to abuse cases.
At its denominational meeting in Memphis this week, PCA elders will consider a significant number of overtures (church legislation) related to abuse. Among them are two different proposals allowing anyone to be a witness in church courts for abuse cases—currently only those who believe in God, heaven, and hell are allowed to be witnesses. Another overture would require criminal background checks for new ministers and ministers transferring presbyteries or denominations.
Ordained male elders vote at the PCA meeting, while SBC messengers can be men and women.
The PCA, with its ostensible system of leadership accountability, may demonstrate how every denomination needs to have a reckoning with abuse from the outside. The denomination has the structure for abuse accountability in theory, PCA elders say, but not in practice.
The BCO is a thick document for governing a church, but “it doesn’t have anything in it to help us adjudicate any abuse cases or reports,” said Ann Maree Goudzwaard, who leads a church-based ministry in the PCA called Help[H]er for women in crisis. She has become a point person for women reporting abuse in the denomination, which is not a role she sought out. She receives daily calls from abuse survivors.
“People are still saying there’s not as much as we think there is,” Goudzwaard said. “It’s an avalanche.”
Last year, a denominational committee made up mostly of PCA elders as well as outside experts like Goudzwaard and Rachael Denhollander released a 220-page report with recommendations for how churches should handle domestic abuse and sexual assault (known as the DASA report). It was designed to be a resource for the PCA’s local church leaders. In the absence of a denominational reporting mechanism for abuse, victims have contacted the committee, which was not designed for that purpose.
The denomination made the committee’s report nonbinding, and committee members know of few presbyteries that have begun training based on the report. The abuse committee members have recommended that churches need third-party help when abuse cases come before them.
“The DASA report had phenomenally rich theology on abuse,” Denhollander told CT. The report has informed work on abuse in the SBC, she said. But the PCA’s court systems, which handle church discipline, are the denomination’s only mechanism for addressing abuse. Without change there, “in the PCA it’s ultimately the same question as in the SBC: Will they allow the rich theology of justice and holiness that Scripture calls us to to impact their actions and systems?”
The PCA is not a denomination with top-down governance but rather a collection of local churches that form regional presbyteries that govern those churches under the BCO laws. How well an abuse case is handled depends on the presbytery.
Many presbyteries have put survivors through a procedural grinder that survivors say was worse than the abuse itself. Multiple cases CT reviewed that went through the church court process had thousands of pages of documentation, and sometimes stretched out for years. Laypeople were bewildered trying to file formal charges based on the BCO.
Male elders who make up presbytery leadership are adjudicating these cases, so victims often are cross-examined by a group of men who all know each other and may have no experience handling abuse cases. Some abuse advocates say that a presbytery can be an “old boys network” if elders are protecting their friends instead of listening to allegations.
In April, the PCA’s Standing Judicial Commission (SJC)—essentially the supreme court of the PCA courts—unanimously exonerated PCA pastor Daniel Herron, who had sued for defamation two former members of his church who accused him of sexual harassment. The SJC declared him not guilty on the charges of harassment, his use of lawsuits against accusers, and his overall character as a minister. On Herron suing his accusers, the SJC ruling argued that church teaching in 1 Corinthians 6 and the Westminster Confession of Faith allows Christians to file civil lawsuits in certain cases.