The Words They Struck to Overrule the Word
For a generation they called it conscience, forbearance, a wider table. Then they opened the Book of Order and took out the words. A redline does not interpret; it only shows what was removed.
The Church and the Christian Church • Part Two: Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board
The Big Three
- A redline shows only what was removed. We lay the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s own Book of Order beside the plumb line and mark, in red, exactly what was struck.
- Twice — in 2011 and again in 2014–15 — the church cut words from its own constitution: first the ordination standard, then the definition of marriage itself. Both cuts were legal, ratified, and public.
- That the process was clean is not the defense. It is the indictment. A church can keep every rule of its own order and still break the one canon above them all — the Word of God.
A redline is the plainest instrument in editing. Lay the old text beside the new, and mark in red every word that was removed. It requires no theory and grants no benefit of the doubt. It does not ask what a church meant. It shows what a church did.
We have run that instrument over the PCUSA Book of Order — the church’s own constitution — and what it reveals is a marriage change no one can call an accident. Two cuts matter. Both are dated. Both are public. Neither is in dispute.
The First Cut (2011)
For years the church’s standard for ordination required of its officers “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.” Those were the words. An officer was to be faithful in marriage as God defined marriage, or continent outside it. The standard named no person; it named a pattern — and the pattern was the one Scripture gives.
In 2011, a majority of the church’s presbyteries ratified an amendment that struck those words. In their place the standard now reads that ordination reflects “the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life,” and directs the ordaining body to “examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for the responsibilities of office.”
Read the new words beside the old, and the diagnosis is plain. The new words are not false; a church should desire joyful submission to Christ. But the one clause that had said what that submission concretely required — fidelity in marriage as God defined it, or chastity in singleness — is the clause that was removed. The standard was not raised to something higher. A definite requirement was traded for a general aspiration, and the specific thing Scripture asked was quietly deleted. The wall was not repainted. A load-bearing stone was pulled out.
The Second Cut: Marriage in the Book of Order (2014–2015)
The second cut came three years later, and it went to the definition itself.
In 2014 the 221st General Assembly amended the Directory for Worship. A majority of presbyteries ratified it, and it took effect in June 2015. The marriage passage of the Book of Order now reads that marriage is “a unique commitment between two people, traditionally a man and a woman.”
Read that clause once more, slowly, because it is the redline in a single sentence. The words “a man and a woman” are still there — but demoted, reduced to the adverb “traditionally,” a note about the past rather than a definition of the thing. The old wall is still faintly visible on the blueprint. It has simply been marked optional. What the church now calls marriage it has opened to any two persons; what God calls marriage it has relabeled a tradition. From here forward we will name the thing plainly: a same-sex union, whatever the Book of Order has chosen to call it.
Their Best Case
Here the church’s defenders make their strongest argument, and honesty requires that we state it at full strength.
They did nothing in secret, they will say, and nothing outside the rules. Every change went through the church’s own constitution — General Assembly approval, then ratification by a majority of the presbyteries, the same process by which any Presbyterian doctrine stands or falls. No one was coerced. Conscience was protected on both sides; ministers who dissent are not compelled to officiate. This was not a coup. It was the church deliberating and deciding, exactly as Presbyterians are meant to decide. To call it apostasy, they will say, is to call the church’s own order apostate.
That case deserves to be heard, and on its own terms it is true. The process was clean. The votes were real. The presbyteries were counted.
The Answer: A Lesser Book Against the Greater
And that is the indictment, not the defense.
A church does not sin only by breaking its rules. It can sin most gravely by keeping them — by using a lawful process to do an unlawful thing, and then holding up the process as proof of innocence. The question was never whether the Presbyterian Church followed the Book of Order. It plainly did. The question is what the Book of Order was measured against when it was changed.
For there is a book above the Book of Order. The word “canon” means a rule, a measuring reed, a standard — and the true canon, the one every Presbyterian officer vows to receive, is the Scripture given by God. A denomination’s constitution is a lesser book, answerable to the greater. And the greater book had already spoken on the matter the lesser book amended:
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female… and the two shall become one flesh? What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” — Matthew 19:4–6 (ESV)
Christ did not offer marriage as one arrangement among several. He grounded it in creation and closed the matter: what God joined, no man is to separate — and no man is to redefine. What the Presbyterian Church did in 2011 and 2015 was edit its lesser book to overrule the greater one: to take a requirement Scripture had set, and vote it down by its own hand, decently and in order. The order was kept. The canon was broken.
We have seen this exact act before, one house down the street. The Episcopal Church had no Book of Order; it had canons. The word was different; the deed was identical — a marriage rite redefined, a standard struck, the lesser book amended to silence the greater. The adversary did not need a new lie for the Presbyterians. He carried the same one next door.
The Pen Did Not Go Back in the Drawer
And the hand that made these cuts did not stop.
In 2018 the church created a task force to study whether it needed a permanent committee for the cause. In 2022 it approved one. In November 2023 that committee first met. It is a standing body now, seated and funded, whose assigned work includes advising the General Assembly on measures touching its concern.
It did not stop at advising. This year, the measure that lets a congregation advertise its openness to calling a pastor of the very kind the 2011 standard once excluded did not arise from the floor. It came from the committee. The Assembly’s own record names the Advocacy Committee for LGBTQIA+ Equity as the sponsor of that item, and the recommendation is written in the committee’s own voice: the committee, it reads, “recommends” that the Assembly direct the change. The committee drafted it. The Assembly approved it, 339 to 138.
That is what sets this redline apart from a single bad vote. The church did not merely strike the words once. It built a standing office, seated it, funded it, and gave it the pen — and the pen is still moving.
The Words Were Struck. The Word Was Not.
We take no pleasure in laying this out. These are people’s churches; the buildings still fill; and there are believers inside them who never voted for any of this and do not know how far the wall has leaned. There is no gladness in a redline. Only grief, and the duty to show it plainly.
But the plumb line is not cruel, and it is not finished. What a church has amended, a church can repent of. The same presbyteries that ratified these cuts could, by the same order, restore what they struck — and stranger works of grace have been done in the history of the church than the turning of a General Assembly. That is not our work to accomplish, and not our judgment to pronounce. Ours is only to lay the old words beside the new, and to say what the red ink shows.
The words were struck. The Word was not.
No amendment has ever amended the truth, and no vote of any assembly has ever repealed the Word of God. But the God who set the plumb line still stands over His house — and the wall His people marked crooked, He is able to make straight.
Next in the series — Part Three: The Verdict of Scripture. They believed it was love. We will let that case make its strongest argument, in its own words — and then hold it to the Word that made marriage in the first place.
For Further Study
- The Church and the Christian Church — the introduction to the series, where the plumb line is first hung.
- Part One: The Receipts — the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s 2026 General Assembly, in its own record.
- The Episcopal Church: The Receipts — where this series began, one house down the street.
— The Editorial Board, Virginia Christian Alliance
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
