“Isn’t it good that egalitarian or less confessional ministers leave?” We would answer in the affirmative, but we’d also note that the precipitating change in convictions probably didn’t arrive with lightning-bolt speed. The number leaving left suggests that men with egalitarian convictions operated in the PCA for a number of years before departing. 

When PCA ministers leave for other denominations, where do they go? Our friend Zack Groff has tracked this and takes a slightly different approach in his analysis than do we. He uses more peaceful/less peaceful to describe the receiving denominations. We will use the flawed left/right descriptor.

For our purposes left will basically mean less doctrinally precise and/or more egalitarian than the PCA. Right indicates denominations more doctrinally precise or socially conservative than the PCA. Far fewer congregations leave for other denominations than do ministers, thus the ministerial numbers are more significant than the congregational data. Here is the section of the General Assembly minutes from 2023 that reflects ministerial moves in 2022:¹

The data suggests that when PCA ministers leave, they go left. More than half of the leavers went to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC – 9)) and ECO (A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians – 2) are less concerned² with confessional Reformed doctrine and both allow women elders and pastors. The same is true for the hard-to-categorize Anglican Church in North America (ACNA – 1). And the Episcopal Church (1) is simply a liberal mainline church. It should be noted that all of these “left” denominations (Except the Episcopal) were late 20th/early 21st-century institutions meant primarily to serve as landing zones for “conservative” refugees from the mainline.

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