A functional female officer, for the purposes of the report, is a named role where a woman participates in one or more functions typically reserved for the elders and/or deacons, and undergo some form of a “commissioning” or ordaining process. This term is used to point out that if a non-ordained role (only in the sense that the people doing it don’t call it ordination, because many of these roles are examined, voted on, and installed) is performing the tasks of an officer, and is initiated in a way an officer would be in all but name, that’s functionally a female officer. Granted, functional female officer is a batching term, referring to both functional female elders and functional female deacons. For the purposes of the report, we refer to both, but the data partitions them. This is part of why in the bucketed data, “deaconess” is so much larger than any other group.

No, but we tried. Not only were the websites not standard in their layout, not only was the location of leadership data not standard, but there were also far too many unique titles (many of which we discovered during our review) that we would have had to inevitably review the data manually anyway. The tools—if they exist—to automate this task were not available to us.

Our research was based off of the PCA Administrative Committee’s Church Directory. If a church was on a separate row on the text-based version of the directory, it was reviewed as its own church. In this sense, it makes the churches more individual congregations if you want to be technical. But most people consider an individual congregation its own church, (because this is true for most churches) which is why we’ve referred to them as churches. We did not review a church if it had a website in a non-English language, if it had no website, or their website in the directory was broken.

Once we had reviewed every website we could in the church directory, the raw data had 205 unique titles. These are the titles as-is when pulled from the website. This is why there are so many variants. We wanted to make sure you could see every stage of the process. The vast majority of these titles were being used to describe functional female elders, and there was far less variance in the titles being used for functional female deacons. In our “bucketed” data, We were able to get it down to 72 unique titles. Our “bucketing” was done by finding the titles that were most common, finding similar titles to the most common variant of that title, and “bucketing” it in with that title. This is why “Women’s Leadership Team/Council” is so large, because many of the flagged functional female elders were being described as either part of a “Women’s Leadership Team” or a “Women’s Leadership Council.”

For functional female deacons, it was actually quite easy. Nearly all functional female deacons were referred to as “deaconesses” or included in the “diaconate team.” There were many “deacon assistants” but if something was labeled as an assistant to the diaconate in some way, they were omitted from the data, as this role is explicitly permitted in the BCO. There were also several instances where churches had no deacons listed on their leadership page, and instead had a team with a new name, such as a “care team” that included both men and women. “Care teams” were not included if deacons were mentioned within the website as leadership.

Functional female elders were trickier, mainly because of the sheer variety of titles. Firstly, if something was referred to as some variant of “shepherd” or “elder advisor” it got flagged immediately. For other titles, during our data-collection efforts, other names started popping up for these functional female elders. They were often separate from women’s ministry (Women’s ministry coordinators were explicitly omitted from the data) and often partitioned from other staff and/or designated as some type of leadership. Language denoting an “alongside” status with the elders and deacons was frequently employed, in addition to language communicating that the team was consulted by the session.

No. The determination for whether or not a church has functional female officers is determined separately from the data. The data was included because previous attempts at highlighting this practice in the PCA were dismissed, so having the data publicly available allows people to determine the scope of the issue for themselves. You can find the data here. To reiterate, an entry in the datasheet does not necessarily mean the entry in question is designated as an FFO for statistical purposes. The obvious follow up question to this is “Well if they aren’t an FFO, why are they in the data?”

Since The Functional Female Officer Report is a subjective evaluation of named church roles, we wanted people to be able to look at instances we found that weren’t definitive but worth looking at anyway. It may be the case that many “mercy teams” are harmless, and we didn’t include several, but there were some cases where enough ambiguity existed to warrant inclusion, with or without designating them as functional female officers. These were typically cases where their respective church had no visible diaconate and instead a “mercy team” comprised of males and females fulfilling the functions of the diaconate, which would make the women involved functional female deacons. I think one can understand why abuses of a title bring all other iterations of that title under scrutiny.

Our team is comprised only of english speakers. Most of the foreign language websites were in Korean, and we didn’t want to mislabel a position as a functional female officer due to a mistranslation. Google Translate can be helpful, but there’s a non-negligible degree of inaccuracy that is inherent to the program, so we didn’t feel comfortable using it. If there is a fluent Korean speaker who would be willing to help evaluate the congregations in the Korean presbyteries, please reach out via our contact page. The same offer is extended to any fluent Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or Spanish speakers.

Apologies. Please notify us via our contact page, and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Please note, someone may have already notified us of the issue. Whenever one or more changes need to be made, an updated sheet will be made available the following Saturday.