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| Yelp reviews on this church |
On the surface, Pacific Crossroads Church is a friendly, Bible-believing church that meets on Sunday mornings in the big auditorium at Santa Monica High School. What’s not to like?
But if you check its website, you find that it’s part of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).
When you scroll down to look at the Pacific Crossroads leaders, you may notice that there are no women pastors or elders there–maybe even no deacons.
If you check out the PCA on Wikpedia, you find a complicated history on attitudes toward women. For many years PCA interpreted the Bible to forbid women in leadership (never mind the many women mentioned as leaders, including Junia “prominent among the apostles” – Romans 17:6).
But in 2016, the PCA voted to reconsider, and more recently they voted to allow women to be ordained; they also allowed any member churches who disagreed to continue refusing to ordain as a matter of conscience. Then the PCA voted to rescind the “conscience clauses,” so some churches that objected to women pastors left the denomination.
Pacific Crossroads looks like a church that continues to refuse having women in leadership though it retains ties to the PCA, which has so recently changed.
There so many of these community churches founded as outreach from anti-female denominations (like the Southern Baptists) that never include “Presbyterian” or “Baptist” in the local name of the church.
The cost of having a policy of male rule is great. Women lose self-esteem and are held back from the call of the Holy Spirit. But also the whole church can be hurt.
For example, one man at Pacific Crossroads (Rankin Wilbourne) became the pastor in 2006 and gained too much power; he abused many people (spiritually and emotionally) and was finally forced to resign by the PCA in Feb. 2020.
Would a church with more male/female equality have tolerated coercive abuse by a male pastor for so long? Maybe–but I don’t think so.
For comparison, look at the Catholic church and how it has done in keeping nuns and other compassionate women out of the leadership.
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