PCUS Assembly Actions on the Deacon

E. C. Scott’s Digest gathers, under the headings of the Form of Government, the deacon-related deliverances of the Southern Presbyterian General Assembly from 1861 to 1944. The assemblies repeatedly located the deacons under the session: they collect and appropriate all the church’s funds under its direction, may not change a pastor’s salary or sell church property without the congregation, and hold the care but not the title of church property.

On the deacon’s wider place, the assemblies allowed deacons to serve on the committees of the higher courts yet declined, more than once, to seat them in presbytery and synod alongside ministers and elders, suggesting instead that sessions call them into conference on local affairs.

The longest strand concerns women: across many years the assembly refused to establish an office of deaconess, held that women may not preach or be ordained, and pointed sessions instead to the Form of Government’s provision for appointing godly women to assist the deacons, even as its own 1916 report observed that Scripture seems to admit women to the deacon’s ministry. The compilation is a compact record of how one Presbyterian body worked out the deacon’s authority, sphere, and relation to women’s service across more than eighty years.