According to the Book of Church Order, a PCA church without ordained deacons is deemed to be in crisis, and the duties of the ordained office fall on the session/ruling elders. Such a situation is assumed to be undesirable and temporary.

Presbyterian polity was never meant to be a postmodern pastiche or a contextualized, local construct that undermines the commonality of an agreed order. It is not improper imposition to require and expect presbyterians (of all ecclesial people) to do what they have vowed to do according to rules with which they have professed to agree. Adherence to the agreed order is one of the glues that hold a denomination together.

What we have in mind is the reasonably rare but very real fact of churches in the Presbyterian Church in America that have elected (pun intended) to become one-office presbyterians. We say one-office because ordination is essential to the office—no ordination, no office. We say this is a fact because churches have admitted (on their websites and on the floor of General Assembly) that they only ordain elders, not deacons. And we believe them.

Eclectic use and giving of titles is one thing (and is addressed in the Book of Church Order); dispensing with one of the two offices of the church is another. While the extent of dispensing with deacons may not be wide enough to constitute a denominational crisis, the BCO considers the lack of ordained deacons to be a local emergency of the most serious type.

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