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Looking at the Numbers · WHS Elders Consultation Survey (Download the PDF version | Download the PDF Summary | Download the Committee Report and Survey Results)

Earlier, I wrote about the case for building the door — before we change the lock — and this rested on what we could learn from other churches and secular wisdom. The data from the consultation survey lets us stop guessing and look: it confirms the door has to exist. This is an argument about impact, not the theology of eldership. Make the change if it must be made — but Scripture, and our own tradition, ask us to build what it requires first.

Let me say at the outset what this is not. It is not a case for or against male-only eldership. Someone can be a convinced complementarian, sure the change is biblically right, and still owe an honest account of what it will actually do. Deciding whether to act and seeing clearly what acting will cost are different things, and the second doesn’t go away once the first is settled. The survey was never a referendum on the theology, and neither is this. It asks one question: if the change is made, what does the denomination’s own data say will happen to its churches — and is it ready for that?

The committee’s report opens with a reassurance: 91% feel safe always or most of the time, steady whether or not a congregation has women elders. That is good news, and we should want it to be true. It is also worth being clear about which question it answers. Nobody proposed this change expecting people to feel unsafe the next morning; how safe people feel on an ordinary Sunday was never really what was in dispute. The worry raised about the change was structural — what avenues exist, who gets heard, whether someone would speak up when something goes wrong. That kind of risk doesn’t show up in a question about present-day safety. It shows up in what people say they would do: whether they would report, whether they feel supported, what the churches that have actually lived this arrangement say about it. The safety headline is true and reassuring. The questions closer to the actual concern sit a row or two down in the same tables, and they read less reassuringly — which is why the rest of this looks there.

First, how big is this response?

Before reading the signal, it’s worth knowing whether 1,787 voices is a lot or a little — because both cheap dismissals are wrong, and naming the real base disarms them. NSW has roughly 153,000 people who tick “Presbyterian and Reformed” on the census. But census identity is a cultural ghost, not a churchgoer. The PCNSW is a community of about 35,000; of those, around 14,000 adults are in average attendance across 183 congregations. Those are the people a survey about church life can actually reach.

Census figure from ABS 2021; attendance and congregation counts are the denomination’s own current figures. Measured against the people who actually attend, this is a substantial, denomination-wide response — not a fringe, and not “barely 1%.”

So set both dismissals aside. This is not a vocal minority — one in eight regular attenders, across nearly two-thirds of congregations, is a serious response by any church-survey standard. Nor is it a census; at 13% of attenders it is exactly the size where who answered decides what the numbers mean. That is the hinge the rest of this turns on.

One caveat sits over everything below. Every figure here — the survey responses, and the denomination’s own counts of elders, attenders and vacancies — comes from partial returns. The survey heard from some attenders, not all. The denominational counts come from the congregations that reported, not every charge. And like every voluntary consultation, this one is subject to self-selection: those with strong views, either way, are likelier to answer. That doesn’t make the sample random. But two things make a small mobilised faction an unconvincing explanation for what it found. The first is sheer volume: around one in eight adult attenders responded, a high rate by any church-survey standard, and a fringe is rarely that large. The second is internal consistency — the same ordering across differently-worded questions, which a simple over-representation of the agitated on one side would not produce. Neither makes the result a population proportion, and I don’t read it as one; together they make it hard to dismiss as noise. So I’m reading what the respondents said, not pronouncing on settled populations — and the reading doesn’t need a precision the returns can’t give.

The survey’s own demographic chart shows roughly how the 1,787 split by role. Reading it off the page gives approximately:

Read off the survey’s demographic graph, so approximate. The lay cohort is the bulk of the response; the office-bearer columns are smaller, and two of them are small enough to need care.

How to read these numbers before we start

A percentage from a small group is not a precise point; it is a band, and the width of the band comes straight from how many people answered. When only about 27 people are in a column, each one is a twenty-seventh of the total — one person in twenty-seven is nearly four points — so if just a handful had answered differently, the figure would swing several points at once. That movement is what makes the band wide: around nineteen points either way. Put more people in the column and each one counts for less. One in 110 elders is under a point; one in the 1,500-plus lay respondents is barely a twentieth of a point. So those figures hardly move, and the band tightens — to roughly nine points for elders, and just two or three across the lay column. Same survey, same logic: the more people answered, the less any one of them can shift the number, and the steadier it is.

Statisticians call that band a 95% confidence range. Read the survey this way and the true figure should fall inside the band about nineteen times in twenty. So “47% of paid staff expect leadership to deteriorate” really means “somewhere in the region of 28% to 66%” — a wide band, and an honest one. That isn’t a flaw in the survey; it is just what small samples do, and once you read the figure as a band rather than a number, it behaves honestly.

Here is the part that matters. The useful question is not “what is the exact figure?” but “which side of the line does the whole band sit on?” Take that same paid-staff figure. Even at the very bottom of its band — 28% — it still outweighs the 17% who expected leadership to improve. The band is wide, but it sits on the same side of the line from end to end. That is what a small sample can honestly tell you: not the precise number, but the direction, when the direction holds right across the margin.

So read the small columns — paid staff and deacons, about 27 each — for which way they lean, not for their decimals. The precision lives in the big columns: over 1,500 lay respondents and around 110 elders, where the figures can be taken close to face value. Nothing below asks a 27-person column to carry a number on its own. It asks only whether each column leans the same way as the large ones — and for that, the small samples are entirely good enough.

One more thing worth reading off the survey’s charts before the questions: who answered, by gender. The response was not heavily distorted by either gender — overall it ran about 56% female to 42% male, and the columns that carry most of the concern are mixed, the lay respondents around 60/40 and the paid staff about 52/48. Both men and women cared enough about this to answer, which means the sample is a reasonably representative cross-section of the church rather than a single-gender bloc. That matters for how you read everything below: a negative result here is not simply one group, unhappy at losing something, speaking for itself. One limit to be honest about — there is no published breakdown of answers by gender, so we can’t see whether, on a given question, one gender in a particular role was markedly more concerned than another. That cut would be worth having. But even without it, the balance of who responded tells us this is not the voice of one gender alone.

The committee’s own summary of the results notes that the responses were not drastically different by gender, age or role, and that the sharpest variation was whether a congregation currently has female elders. That is fair, and worth holding alongside what follows. The point below is not that the roles split wildly from one another — on most questions they don’t. It is narrower: one cohort, the ministers, sits apart from all the others, who cluster together. Reading for that single break is not in tension with the committee’s summary; it is a closer look at the one place the otherwise broad agreement parts.

For orientation on the offices themselves: the denomination’s 2026 snapshot records around 700 elders (about 12% female), 178 ordained ministers and ministry workers plus 26 commissioned gospel workers, and 8 deaconesses. The office of deacon isn’t given a separate figure in the published data, which is why I read the deacons’-court column for direction rather than against any office total. So the ~50 ministers who answered are about a quarter of their office; the ~110 elders a useful slice of theirs; and the lay column simply enormous. Hold those rough sizes in mind — they shape what each survey column can and can’t tell us.

The pattern the pie charts wash out

Take Q8 — whether excluding women from eldership would affect the quality of leadership. Read by role, one cohort stands apart from all the others. Ministers expect deterioration at 25%; everyone else — paid staff, elders, deacons, members — sits between 47% and 57%. The elders are not the unconcerned ones here: a clear majority of them, 54%, expect the quality of leadership to fall. So do the deacons in their pastoral role, and the members in the pews. It is the ministers, and the ministers alone, who break away from the rest:

Ministers are the outlier on the low end; every other role clusters high. The gradient — not the average — is the finding.

This is the single most important shape in the data, and the aggregate pie chart erases it. The deacons’-court column sits at the top, and the four non-minister columns move together — a single ordering that the “All Respondents” pie cannot show.

And it isn’t one question. The same ordering recurs across the survey, which is what turns a curiosity into a finding:

Five differently-worded questions. The same role ordering each time: ministers lowest, deacons highest, everyone else stacked in between.

Why the pattern is the finding, not the noise
The same cohort ordering turns up across five differently-worded questions. A one-off result might be a quirk of a small sample; the same ordering recurring five times over is much harder to put down to isolated variation. When deacons, elders and members all point in the same direction on leadership, culture, relationships, wellbeing, conflict and reporting, while ministers sit lowest each time, that consistency is the evidence on its own — whatever the precision of any single percentage. One figure might sit anywhere within a margin. A pattern that holds across five differently-worded questions is not so easily explained away.

Reading honestly in both directions

First, a discipline worth holding to, since the argument only earns its weight by observing it: not every question is a warning. Some results are genuinely divided, and a divided result isn’t a negative one. Where about as many expect improvement as expect harm, the honest word is “split,” and it would be wrong to count the negative half while setting the positive half aside. So here is each question sorted by what it actually shows. Naming the split ones as split is what makes it fair to name the lopsided ones as lopsided.

Granting the washes doesn’t weaken the case; it clarifies it. Ministers’ own wellbeing answer (Q11) is close to even — said plainly, because it is true. The reporting and conflict questions are not even close.

That is the thing to hold onto. The argument doesn’t need every number to lean one way, and several don’t. It rests on the questions that bear on structure and safety — reporting, conflict, the loss of a safeguarding voice — and those are the ones that aren’t washes. A balanced question elsewhere doesn’t settle those, because the balanced questions are not the ones carrying the weight.

What each role’s numbers actually carry

Start with the ministers, because they sit at the low end of the gradient and it would be easy — and wrong — to wave them away. The survey’s ministry-workers column — about 178 ordained ministers and ministry workers in the denomination — drew around fifty responses, about a quarter of that office. That is a fair slice, not a thin or self-selected sliver. So the low minister concern is real, decently sampled, and sincerely held, and I am not going to explain it away. What makes the ministers worth pausing on isn’t that they are unrepresentative. It is that they are reading this change very differently from everyone else who answered — and they sit, with the elders, among those who will vote on it. That is the thread the next section picks up.

The elders sit on firmer ground than the small office columns, and for a simple reason: more of them answered. Around 110 elders responded — far more than the ministers, deacons or paid staff — and that larger sample tightens the band from the ±19 of a 27-person column to something nearer ±9. So where the small columns can be trusted only for direction, the elder figure can be read closer to its face value. Of the elders who answered, around 54% expect leadership quality to deteriorate. No special pleading is needed for that one. It is the most ordinary number in the whole exercise — a clear majority of a decent sample, read at something like its actual value rather than as a wide band — and it leans the same way as the rest.

Deacons need care for one straightforward reason: the size of the sample. About 27 people identifying with the deacons’ court answered — a small base, read as a band, not a figure. That is enough to read which way the column leans, not enough to trust its decimal. And of those who answered, the lean is the same as everyone else’s: around 57% expect things to get worse. Don’t take the 57% to the decimal, and don’t bin the column either. Read it for direction, and the direction puts it with the rest — in fact at the head of it.

Are we all answering the same question?

Here the data turns from broadly agreed to genuinely striking — though not in the way you might expect. The ministers who answered are the outlier, lowest concern on every question, while elders, deacons, members and paid staff all read it as carrying a real cost. That gap is remarkable precisely because it is so disjointed: the people who lead these churches and the people who fill and serve them are looking at the same proposed change and reporting very different things about what it will do.

It is worth asking why, and one possible explanation is worth offering — tentatively, because it concerns how people read a question rather than anything the survey directly measured. Some who support the move to male-only eldership see it as a matter of critical biblical obedience: not a question of cost and benefit at all, but of faithfulness to Scripture. Read that way, the impact question may land differently — a thing one believes is commanded is a thing the mind is less inclined to weigh a price against. Offered as a possibility, not a diagnosis, and not of any individual, it would explain the disjoint without anyone being foolish or self-serving: one group may be answering a question about obedience while the others answer a question about cost.

And obedience is good; you do not refuse to obey because obedience is expensive. If those who support the overture are right that this is commanded, proceeding despite the cost may be exactly faithfulness, and I am not claiming to have settled that. But counting the cost and obeying anyway is not the same as obeying and seeing no cost — and we may not all agree which of those faithfulness requires. The conviction that something is right and the observation that it will be costly are not rivals; a church can hold both, and most of the survey’s respondents do.

This matters for the decision, though not in the way it would if ministers simply outvoted everyone. They don’t. At Assembly the floor is, in principle, shared: each charge is represented by a minister and an elder, two voices of equal standing in the vote. So the room that decides is not the low-concern reading writ large. It is split down the middle — and the elder half of it is among the most concerned in the whole survey, with a clear majority expecting the quality of leadership to fall. The disjoint the data found across the church runs straight through the body that will vote on it.

That is the thing worth sitting with. The elders who see a cost are not petitioners outside the room; they are full voters inside it, with every right to carry what they have seen into the decision. And the ministers, who are half that voice, have reason to listen hard to the other half — because the people who would absorb this change are telling them, in the church’s own consultation, that they expect it to be felt. The survey gave everyone an equal say; the floor gives ministers and elders an equal vote. On the evidence here, both halves of that floor have cause to take the concern seriously, and the elders in particular have the standing to act on it.

Paid staff: the people no one disputes are covered

It is worth pulling paid workers out and looking at them alone, and not out of sentiment. The Work Health and Safety duty reaches further than paid staff: in law a “worker” includes volunteers, so a great many more people in the life of a church are covered than the payroll alone. Some will argue the church shouldn’t have to count volunteers — but that is an argument with the legislation, not with this piece, and I don’t need to win it. Set the whole question of volunteers aside. Even a reader who thinks the survey cast too broad a net by asking the entire church still has to reckon with the paid staff, because about them there is no dispute at all: they are employees, and there are a lot of them — 311 paid through central payroll in 2026, up from 292 the year before and 262 the year before that. Whatever your theology of eldership, they sit inside the WHS framework this consultation was convened to address. An elder’s discomfort is a governance matter. A paid worker’s psychosocial hazard is a duty owed by a person conducting a business or undertaking. The survey gives them their own column, and it repays reading.

Paid staff also reported the highest “always feel safe” figure (72%) — safety and support are not the same thing, a distinction many respondents drew explicitly.

And paid staff are not the cohort with the governance vote, nor mostly the female-elder congregations the report flags as over-represented. They are the people who turn up to work in these churches. Their column is small — about 27 answered — so read its figures as bands, not points, and let the legal principle carry the weight rather than any single percentage. The principle doesn’t need a large sample: paid staff are employees, and the duty is owed whether 27 of them answered or 270. When a column like theirs leans, as it does here, toward expecting people to be less likely to report conflict, bullying or harassment, that lean matters. The national model code of practice on managing psychosocial hazards — the more recent of the two, even if NSW hasn’t yet adopted its wording — recognises that this kind of conduct is routinely under-reported, out of fear of blame, escalation or reprisal, and that an absence of reports doesn’t mean nothing is wrong. It treats under-reporting as a marker of poor culture and a barrier to seeing hazards at all. The survey contained responses consistent with exactly that concern, from people the framework plainly covers — and they sit below the headline rather than beside it.

The finding that deserves the headline
A consultation conducted under the banner of work health and safety — convened because of a safety concern — produced data in which, of those who answered, a plurality of several cohorts (around 53% of deacon respondents, 41% of members, 33% of elders, 31% of paid staff) expect people to become less willing to report conflict, bullying or harassment if the change is made, and that all-male sessions would be worse at seeing and handling it. In a church on the other side of a Royal Commission that examined exactly how unchallengeable authority and barriers to disclosure let harm continue, that is not a detail. Every safe-ministry structure the denomination has built assumes people will report. The summary leads with “91% feel safe,” which is true; but the reporting result is the one a safety process most needs to see, and it is worth bringing up to the light beside it.

Where the summary and the sharper reading part

The committee’s summary is accurate, and nothing in it is false. But a summary makes choices about what to foreground, and these choices lean a consistent direction — toward the reassuring reading, with the sharper edges set a little further back. Five places show it.

• The hardest comments are summarised, not shown. The trauma and abuse responses at Q9 are withheld “to ensure such responses are not identified” — a fair privacy rationale, but the effect is that the most serious material is the least auditable. The same is true of the “don’t trust current male leadership” subset at Q8 and the female elders who said they would feel ruled “unbiblical/evil.” We are told these exist; we cannot weigh them.
• Safe is quietly substituted for supported. The committee notes “in passing” that a large number of respondents marked themselves safe but not supported. That distinction is buried under the 91% headline, when it is arguably the more important of the two for a WHS frame.
• The sample skew is acknowledged, and it is worth testing rather than waving past. The report notes that female-elder congregations are over-represented (20% of churches, 31% of responses) and that the strongest predictor of perceived risk is whether a church currently has women elders. That is a fair caution against reading the raw negatives at face value, and it deserves a real answer rather than a rhetorical one. So here is the test — illustrative rather than a formal weighted analysis, but enough to show which way the correction cuts. The over-representation is an excess of about 11 percentage points (31% against an expected 20%). Take the least favourable assumption: that the entire 11-point excess would vanish from a properly weighted sample, and that it fell uniformly on the negative side — the worst case for reading the data as concerning. Strip that weight out of the pooled figures and the leans still hold: a 54% or 57% drops toward the mid-to-high 40s — still a plurality, still elevated, still pointing the same way. The finding was never a bare majority clinging to the 50% line; it was a wide and consistent lean, and an 11-point adjustment on the most-exposed slice doesn’t erase it. And the correction touches only the pooled aggregate. The role gradient is computed within each office column — it is a property of which office a respondent holds, not which church-type they attend — so the over-representation doesn’t enter it at all. The skew affects the “All Respondents” pie charts; it leaves the gradient, where the real signal lives, untouched. Run the test the caution invites, and the reading holds.
• The same skew cuts the other way, too. The female-elder churches answered at about one and a half times their share, and it is worth asking what that over-representation contains. These are the only respondents speaking from current experience of the arrangement the change would remove. Others write from past experience, or from watching other churches; these congregations have women in session today, and would feel the loss directly. So their responses may reasonably be read as particularly informative — not because they should carry extra statistical weight, but because they reflect lived experience of the very arrangement under discussion. The correction above already shows the leans survive even if their excess is stripped out entirely. What this adds is only that, set alongside the correction, their testimony is the survey’s closest thing to first-hand evidence about what removal would mean — and that is worth noticing, not discounting.
• The aggregate is foregrounded; the role split is “texture.” Every flagship chart is “All Respondents.” The role tables are present but never assembled into the cross-question comparison that reveals the gradient. The structure of the document makes the finding hard to see.

What the change closes has a size, and it’s 12% today

Until now the place women hold in the courts of the church — the standing by which they presently sit in session as of right, rather than by an elder’s invitation — has been an abstraction for many of us in this debate. Not because the figure was unknowable; the numbers were there for anyone who went looking. It is that, like much else here, few had gone looking, and fewer still had put it in front of the people arguing the question. The official figures let us put a size on it. The denomination’s 2026 snapshot records about 12% of elders as female; against an estimated 700 elders that is on the order of eighty women — roughly one in eight — though the firmly-counted figure, from the congregations that actually returned their forms, is a little lower, around sixty-six. Call it somewhere between seventy and eighty-five, denomination-wide. Whatever the exact number within that band, it is small, and the proposed change grandfathers those women while closing the door to any more.

And the narrowing is not only a future event waiting on the vote. It has, in places, already begun. Female-elder churches are a minority to start with — about one congregation in five — and even among those, some will not appoint new women in anticipation of the change, while in some churches women who would serve as elders already cannot. None of that is necessarily wrong: if the theological frame is male-only eldership, this is simply that conviction being lived out ahead of the formal decision, and the people doing it are acting in good conscience. The point is only that we cannot discuss this standing as though it were intact and waiting. It is contracting now, by retirement and by choice, and every female elder lost — to relocation, to age, to a session that won’t replace her — is, under the proposed rule, unreplaceable. The number is small, and it has already started to fall.

That reframes what the female-elder churches are telling us. When those congregations say they would lose something real, we can now put a rough number on the something: somewhere around eighty women, about one in eight elders, with no way to replace them under the proposed rule and only one direction to travel. These are also the only respondents speaking from current experience of what is at stake — women in session now, not a memory of them — which is about as close to evidence as a survey of anticipated effects can get.

“Not enough men” was not hypothetical

Several respondents — ministers and members both — raised that in some congregations, particularly regional ones, the people suitable for eldership are sometimes women, and removing them would leave those churches short of leadership altogether. That concern is not idle. The denomination already carries real leadership-supply stress: of 183 pastoral charges, around 19% are genuinely vacant once session and CGW appointments are counted, and three-quarters of the un-appointed vacancies are regional. Whether those are the same churches the eldership change would touch is not something the figures tell us, and this piece does not claim it. But a denomination already short of available leaders, regionally, has less margin to absorb the loss of any eligible candidate — which is enough to make the “not enough men” concern a live structural risk rather than a hypothetical.

The church reading, kept honestly

None of the above settles the theological question, and it isn’t trying to. A great many respondents who expect a negative impact say so while affirming that the change may still be the right and biblical one — the elder who writes that obedience to Scripture and leadership quality are simply different axes is making a coherent point, not dodging. The survey was explicitly not a referendum on whether the change is correct, and this piece isn’t one either. A complementarian can hold that male-only eldership is commanded and that the data here describes real costs that fall hardest on women, on paid staff, and on the churches that will have to absorb the change. Those two things are not in tension; the survey is full of people holding both at once.

What the data does ask of the church is narrower and harder to refuse. If the change is made, the survey is close to unanimous on one point across every role and every theological camp: it cannot be made well without deliberate structures — protected avenues for women’s voices in the courts of the church, strengthened diaconal roles, clear reporting pathways that don’t depend on an all-male session, and genuine support (not merely assurances of safety) for the people most affected. Respondents who support the change and respondents who oppose it converged here. That convergence, like the role gradient, is a real finding — and it is the one the church can act on regardless of where it lands on the eldership question itself.

The three questions, answered

Strip away the framing and there are three plain questions a reader actually wants answered. Here is what the data supports — and, as carefully, what it doesn’t.

1. Are people concerned in ways that actually matter?

Yes — though not “statistically significant” in the p-value sense, because without published response counts nobody can compute that, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The significance that matters here is whether the concern is real and structured rather than noise, and it is. Among respondents it is the majority view in every non-minister column on the core question, around 47 to 57%. It holds across five differently-worded questions, which makes it hard to dismiss as isolated variation. It is shared right across the church — elders, deacons, members and paid staff all clustered high together — and only the ministers who answered sit apart from it. And it attaches to mechanisms rather than moods: reluctance to report, expected conflict, the loss of a safeguarding voice. Those are operational risks a board would minute, not feelings to be soothed.

The floor matters as much as the ceiling. Set the highest figures aside entirely; the argument survives on the lowest. Across every cohort but ministers, somewhere between a quarter and three-fifths expect negative consequences — and even a quarter is too many to wave off. A church that takes safe ministry seriously doesn’t need a majority to warn it. It needs a credible minority, and it has one in every room. That holds whatever you make of the sampling, because it doesn’t lean on the big numbers being precise.

2. Does the summary show what the data shows?

The conclusions are sound — and worth saying so plainly, because the committee’s report does good work: it sets out real options and calls for structures to be built. The question here is narrower, and it is about the summary of the data rather than the committee’s judgement. The safety headline is fairly reported and stable across church types. But a reader meets the reassuring number first and has to go looking for the harder one. The summary leads with safe and gives less room to the distinction respondents kept drawing between safe and supported. It foregrounds the aggregate, where the role gradient that carries the signal does not appear. And the Q14 reporting result — a plurality across several roles expecting people to become less likely to report conflict, bullying or harassment — sits below the headline rather than beside it, though it is just the kind of finding a work-health-and-safety process exists to surface. None of this is to fault the people who wrote it; summarising contested data under real pressure is hard, and a reassuring frame is an understandable place to land. It is only to say that the frame and the finding point in different directions, and the finding is the one a safety process most needs to see.

3. Are the concerns founded?

As to cost and risk, yes. The committee notes that the strongest predictor of concern is whether a congregation currently has female elders, and that those churches are over-represented in the responses. That is the reason to read the raw aggregate with caution — and earlier I set out how a reader can correct for it, on the most hostile assumptions, and find the lean still holds. What remains after that test is the most telling thing in the data: the churches most worried about losing women from session are the ones that have women in session now. They are not reacting to an abstraction or a memory; they are living the arrangement the change would remove, and they feel its loss most sharply. That makes sense, and it is about as close to evidence as a survey of anticipated effects can get. What the data does not establish is that harm is inevitable: this measures expectation, not outcome, and the committee is right that good transition structures could mitigate much of it. But respondents on both sides agreed those structures would be needed. The concern is evidenced; the harm is contingent; and what it is contingent on is whether the structure gets built.

What would sharpen this — and what only the committee holds
The survey’s own charts give us a good deal: the split of respondents by role, and by gender within each role, both of which I’ve used above. Two things would let a reader go further. First, exact respondent counts — I’ve read the bases off the demographic graph, so they are approximate, and the committee holds the precise figures. Second, and more useful, a cross-tabulation of answers by gender: not just how many men and women responded, but how each answered each question. That is the one cut that would show whether, on any given question, a particular gender in a particular role was markedly more concerned — and it is not in anything released. Both sit with the committee. Releasing them would let anyone replace my approximations with the real numbers and test every claim here. That would serve the whole church, and it would be welcomed.

From what the data shows, to what we must do

Everything to here has been analysis, and analysis only goes so far. It can tell us what the people who answered expect, how consistently they expect it, and where the weight falls. It cannot tell us what to do about it. For that a church doesn’t turn to a survey, or to the Work Health and Safety Act, or to a committee’s framing. It turns to Scripture. So the rest of this changes its footing on purpose. We have read the data carefully and held it loosely where it was thin. Now comes the harder question — what faithfulness asks of us — and the church has to answer that as the church.

Make the change to eldership if that is what the church, under God’s Word, discerns it must do. I have never contested that, and I do not contest it now. But the data — broad, consistent, leaning one way across every cohort but the ministers who answered — describes a cost that respondents across the church expect, and one they expect to fall hardest on women, on paid staff, and on the congregations that have actually lived the arrangement now being removed. Deciding in obedience is one thing. Doing it well is another, and that depends on whether we build what the change requires. Building it is obedience too.

For we are not first a workplace discharging a statutory duty. We are a people under a Lord who commands the protection of the vulnerable and the restraint of those who shepherd. “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,” says Proverbs; “defend the rights of the poor and needy.” Ezekiel’s indictment falls on shepherds who ruled the flock with force and did not bind up the injured. Peter charges the elders to shepherd the flock “not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples.” The Westminster divines, reading the sixth commandment, named among its plain duties the “comforting and succouring the distressed, and protecting and defending the innocent.” None of this is borrowed from the culture. It is older than the WHS Act by millennia, and it asks more of us than the Act ever could. Where the best secular standard now says a workplace must make it safe to speak up, it is, belatedly, agreeing with our own book.

And it is easy to miss that Presbyterian government is itself a piece of safeguarding. The plurality of elders, the graded courts that hold one another to account — we have these because the tradition recognised long ago that fallen leaders need accountability, and that no one should hold unchecked power over another soul. Narrow who sits in those courts without strengthening the ways the vulnerable reach them, and you weaken the very protection the system was built to give. The answer isn’t to reopen the question of the courts. It is to stay consistent with the logic that gave us courts at all.

What faithfulness asks for here is concrete, and it is worth being precise about, because some will rightly say the denomination already has external mechanisms — the Conduct Protocol Unit, Breaking the Silence, channels that reach past the local session. That is true, and to the church’s credit. But three things must be said about them. The first is that the survey is not measuring whether a pathway exists; it is measuring whether people believe they would be heard — whether someone who is hurt trusts they will be listened to, believed, and not made to pay for having spoken. The second is that these external channels are a backstop, and a backstop that, in practice, often routes a matter back to the session to be dealt with. So they do not let the session off the hook; they lean on it. The third is that, for much of what actually wounds people, the formal machinery is the wrong size and the wrong shape. It is built for the serious and the broken-down. Most of what hurts people in a church is smaller and more ordinary than that — the concern brushed aside, the decision made without them, the sense of not being heard — and reaching for a denominational protocol unit over it can feel too heavy, or simply too alien, especially in smaller or more informal congregations. So it goes unused, and the hurt goes unspoken.

Which means the real ask is not a better way around the session. It is a session people do not need to go around. What we should want — what Scripture asks of elders directly — is that the men who sit in session be loving, kind, patient, and like Christ: shepherds who do not lord it over those in their charge, who bind up the injured rather than rule with force. We should want local congregations to be places where someone who has been hurt is listened to and cared for by their own church, where the ordinary wound is tended before it festers, and where the external supports can sit there, available and trusted, precisely because they are rarely needed. That is a far harder thing to build than a reporting form. It is the work of character, not procedure — and it is exactly the work the office of elder is for. The safeguarding the survey asks for and the eldership Scripture describes turn out to be the same thing: elders people are not afraid to come to.

Around that sit the supports that make it real. Access for women, as of right rather than at an elder’s discretion, to the bodies that handle pastoral care, conflict and discipline. Newer diaconal roles encouraged, taken up, and given time to establish, rather than left as a provision on paper. Genuine support for those most affected, not just the reassurance that most people already feel safe. None of this touches the theology of eldership. All of it is what the data says is needed, and what Scripture says is right — and for a church those are one thing, not two.

And none of this is a fringe demand. The committee running the consultation, setting out the paths open to the Assembly, names exactly this one: to link any change to formal ways of including women’s voices, so that the current standard of safety is maintained or improved. They observe it is the option that would best fit what respondents asked for, were a change to be made — while rightly noting that asking for structure alongside a change is not the same as asking for the change. That is the path this reading points to as well. Build the structure into the change, not after it. The body closest to the data has put the same option on the table.

None of this is new. When the results of this survey did not yet exist — when all we had were the questions it asked and the evidence that bore on them — I set out what I thought would need to be true before this change could responsibly be made: that a real mechanism for women’s voices in the courts of the church be built and tested before the door closes, not promised afterward; that our safeguarding be shown to work rather than merely assumed to; that there be a way to raise a concern that does not depend on the goodwill of the very people it might be about; that the church know which path a given hurt is meant to travel; and that the commitments we have already made to honour men and women alike be carried out, not left on paper. I made that case from governance research, from public inquiries into institutional harm, from the experience of churches that had already walked this road — and I was careful to call such evidence suggestive rather than proof, because perhaps we were different. That was the honest caveat. The survey has now answered it. What we know now is that the external evidence was never only external. The pattern the research described, our own people have described back to us — in their own pews, in their own words. We are not the exception the caveat left room for. The outside was a picture of the inside all along.

And I must say plainly that more has been done than I knew when I first wrote, and that it is good. At presbytery level there is now a compulsory female representative for safe-ministry, and a compulsory female support person for anyone who makes a complaint; presbyteries have been urged to keep a list of women able to support complainants, and there is provision for female presbytery affiliates. At Assembly, deaconesses and key women have been given rights described as equivalent to an associate member, a 2025 overture would extend that to women serving on committees, a committee is examining bullying at the local-church level, and the women’s engagement committee has brought overtures to widen women’s standing further still. At the session level, churches are being encouraged to establish deacons’ courts, to invite women to attend session, and to appoint both men and women as safe-ministry representatives. None of this is nothing. The denomination is not standing still, and the direction is right. I’m glad of it, and I won’t take any of it back.

And it is not only the formal measures. In many churches, ministers and sessions have taken this conversation seriously and handled it well — listening carefully, leading their congregations through hard ground with patience, making space for women’s voices long before any rule required it. Their congregations and communities have noticed, and have thanked them for it. That work is real, and good, and I don’t want a word of what follows to be heard as discounting it. If anything, it is the proof of the point: these are the churches showing what it looks like done well. The question the survey raises is not whether it can be done well — plainly it can, and is — but whether the people most affected can count on it being done well everywhere, by whoever happens to be in the chair, rather than where the right person happens to be sitting in it.

Because hold it up to the light and two things show through. The first is that almost none of it is yet finished, and much of what exists grants a voice without a vote. Some is encouragement a church may take or leave. Much of the rest gives rights “equivalent to an associate member” — and that phrasing is worth understanding, not as a slight but as a mechanism. An associate member is someone who already holds a full vote in another court of the church and is recognised, and seated, when visiting this one. The status is dignified precisely because the vote lives at home. To grant women rights equivalent to that is to extend the recognition — a real and good thing — but there is no home court underneath it, no vote anywhere for the equivalence to rest on. It copies what an associate looks like in the room, not what an associate is. The opportunity to speak is a genuine gift. The opportunity to have a say is a greater one, and these measures, real as they are, stop at the first. A good deal more, too, is still proposed rather than enacted — real intent that has not yet reached the Code where it would become something a person could rely on as of right. Being in motion to a destination is not yet having arrived. The committee itself, weighing the options open to the Assembly, makes a kindred observation: that across twenty years or more of this debate, only a very small change has so far been adopted — the granting of associate-equivalent rights to deaconesses and committee members. That is a candid measure of the distance between motion and arrival, set down by the body running the consultation.

The second is less obvious, but perhaps more telling. I showed an earlier draft of this piece to a friend, and they were able to gather these efforts together for me. Echoes of them had surfaced in earlier conversations — but this was the first time anyone had put a concrete list in front of me. And it is not that I hadn’t looked, or hadn’t asked. I am not standing at a distance from this process. If it takes someone assembling a bespoke list before an engaged member can see the progress whole, then the question is no longer only whether these things exist. It is how known they are, and how trusted, by the people they are meant to protect. A safeguard that the committee that built it understands, and the person in the pew has never heard of, is not yet doing the work of making anyone feel safe to speak. That is the same gap the survey found, one court higher: the distance between a thing that exists and a thing that is known, trusted, and reached for when it is needed. The progress is real. It is also, so far, strongest where the hurt is most distant, and least settled exactly at the session, where the survey says the hurt is closest.

I want to be honest about the limits of my own judgement. I don’t know whether what has been done is enough — whether it truly meets the concerns the survey surfaced, or only gestures toward them. It may be that the work is sound and only its visibility is lacking; if so, that is good news, and I will gladly be wrong. But I don’t think we are there yet, and I’ll say why, because the reason is one anyone can weigh. A church is being asked to trust that its courts, and the culture around them, are healthy enough to hear the vulnerable and treat them well. The clearest evidence we have about that culture is the way this very debate is being conducted — its tone, and the calibre of the discourse around it, in our courts and online. And that conduct does not yet read like a culture that has arrived. A conversation about caring for the vulnerable that is not always carried on with care is itself the answer to whether the structures can simply be trusted to work. I hold that as a sense, not a proof. But it is a sense with public evidence behind it, and it tells me there is still work to do.

I don’t have a vote in this. A good many of us don’t. But a vote and a voice aren’t the same thing. A church that remembers the difference, and makes room for the voice of those who have no vote, is only being what Presbyterians have always said the church is — a body where the weakest members are indispensable, and where no one is heard only when someone else allows it. Make the change, if it must be made. But build the structure first. The survey has told us, in the church’s own words, what its people expect it to cost if we don’t. Scripture told us long before the survey did.

Notes on method and sources. (1) All figures here are partial returns, not absolute totals — the survey sampled attenders, and the denominational counts are built only from congregations that reported. Percentages should be read as “of those who answered,” not as population proportions. Approximate respondent bases, read off the survey’s demographic chart: lay (member/attender/volunteer) ~1,570; elders ~110; ministers/PW/CGW ~50; paid staff ~27; deacons ~27. Gender split, read off the same chart and cross-checked against the ~56% female headline: overall ~56% F / ~42% M; lay ~60/40; paid staff ~52/48; deacon ~64% F; elder ~20% F; minister ~9% F. No published cross-tabulation of answers by gender exists, so no claim is made about how either gender answered any individual question. At a base of ~27 the 95% margin on a single proportion is roughly ±19 points (so a 47% reads as a 28–66% band); at ~110 it is about ±9 points, and at ~1,570 about ±2–3 points. That is why the paid-staff and deacon columns are read for direction (which side of the line the band falls) rather than for their point value, while the elder and lay columns can be taken close to face value. Survey percentages are from the WHS consultation data document, Q8–Q15; the denomination’s own current counts, from the PCNSW 2026 Snapshot to the General Assembly, run to roughly 700 elders (~12% female), 178 ordained ministers/ministry workers, 26 CGWs, 8 deaconesses, 311 central-payroll staff (2026, up from 292 and 262 in the two prior years), ~13,500 adult attenders within a total average attendance of 18,088, 183 pastoral charges, and a real vacancy of about 19% (three-quarters of un-appointed vacancies regional). The estimate of around eighty female elders is 12% of the ~700 total; the firmly-counted figure within the 144 reporting congregations is about 66. (2) The minister low-concern reading is offered as a divergence in how the cohorts read the question — some ministers framing the change as a matter of obedience rather than cost — not as a claim of minister under-representation, nor as an imputation of motive. (3) Elder figures rest on ordinary sample strength (a large office, an unremarkable sample), not on any finite-population or census claim. (4) The deacons’-court column rests on about 27 self-identified respondents — a small base, read for direction and consistency with the gradient only; no precise-value, size, or representativeness claim is made for it. (5) Net-negative figures for Q9/Q11 sum the “some” and “significant” negative bands; these additions have been checked against the survey tables (e.g. paid-staff Q9 = 28% + 28% = 56%; minister Q11 positive 25% / negative 20%). (6) The 1,787 / 117-charge figures are from the survey results document itself. (7) The reporting claim is framed to the Safe Work Australia national model code of practice on managing psychosocial hazards (2022), which treats under-reporting of bullying/harassment as a marker of poor culture and a barrier to hazard identification; the approved NSW code (2021) does not yet use this wording, and the text says so. The claim is deliberately not pinned to the NSW Regulation, which does not name reporting behaviour. (8) The central conclusion — a consistent, directional, cross-question gradient with ministers lowest and every other cohort elevated — is a property of the responses and does not depend on any population denominator; the partial-returns caveat does not weaken it. (9) The committee’s summary of the results, its four risk-management paths (including the option of linking any change to formal structures for women’s voices), and its observation that twenty-plus years have produced only associate-equivalent rights reflect the Elders Consultation Special Committee’s reporting to the Assembly (Ben Greig, Convener). Where the committee’s earlier report and the final survey results differ, the final results are treated as authoritative. The committee’s note that responses were not drastically different by gender, age or role is consistent with the reading here: most roles cluster together, and the analysis isolates the single cohort — ministers — that sits apart.

Some of this analysis was prepared with the assistance of AI tools, used for research, data-checking, and drafting. The argument, the judgements, and the position it reaches are mine, and I take responsibility for them.

That’s the right question. And it’s a question the Assembly has asked through a Consultative Committee specifically established for this purpose. But outside the survey itself, I haven’t seen much public analysis of the evidence that bears on exactly these questions — the governance research, the Royal Commission findings, the experience of sister denominations, the state of our own safeguarding training. The survey asks whether the change could influence conflict, bullying, or harassment. It asks whether it could affect willingness to report. It asks what additional support would be needed. These are serious questions. They deserve serious answers grounded in evidence, not just feelings.

This post is my attempt to fill that gap — to lay out the evidence that bears on the questions the survey is asking — not to claim the answer is settled, but to argue the risks are serious enough that the Assembly should not proceed on trust alone. Not because the theological arguments don’t matter — they do — but because a church that changes its governance structure without counting the cost isn’t being faithful. It’s being reckless.

I should say plainly: I sit on the status quo side of this debate. I think the current arrangement — male ministers, male and female ruling elders — has served the PCNSW well, and I’m not persuaded that the case for change has been made. But this post isn’t primarily about which side is right on the exegesis. It’s about something I think both sides should care about: the consultation is asking people to assess impacts on safety, wellbeing, and culture, but it provides no evidence, no framework, and no guidance for thinking about those questions. People are being asked to answer a governance and safeguarding question armed with nothing but instinct. That’s not good enough for a decision this consequential.

I’m not an elder. I don’t have standing in the Assembly. I’m a member and lay leader in the PCNSW — someone who sits in the pew, serves where I can, and cares about what happens to the people around me. I’ve spent time working on child safety policy in community organisations, and that work has shaped how I think about governance, authority, and what happens when institutions get the structures wrong.

This post is long. The issue deserves it. I’ll try to lay out both sides of the argument fairly before explaining why I think the proposed change — even if you accept its theological premises — is being pursued in the wrong order and without the safeguards our people need.

Not all the evidence below carries the same weight. Royal Commission findings and Assembly documents are primary sources. Peer-reviewed research is stronger than commentary. I use overseas denominational examples and advocacy material to illustrate implementation risks, not to predict NSW outcomes.

What’s actually being proposed

The overture from the Special Committee on Elders and Deacons would insert a single word — “man” — into the PCNSW Code §4.02(c), so that the qualification for eldership reads: “be a mature Christian man, who demonstrates exemplary Christ-like character as defined by the Scriptures (1 Tim. 3:1–7; Tit. 1:5–9).”

Women currently serving as elders would be grandfathered. No new women could be ordained. Every church court in the denomination — session, presbytery, and Assembly — would become exclusively male. NSW is the last Australian state that permits women ruling elders. The other states moved to male-only eldership between the late 1990s and early 2000s, so the question isn’t hypothetical. We can look at what happened elsewhere.

This is not a debate about biblical authority

Both sides need to hear this, because both sides sometimes talk past it.

Craig Tucker’s paper, endorsed for wide distribution and discussion by more than thirty ministers and elders, puts it plainly: “The current debate in NSW is not a debate between those who believe in the authority of the Bible and those who do not.” Both sides affirm biblical authority. Both affirm complementarianism. Both agree that pastoral ministry should be restricted to men. Both agree that women may speak, argue from Scripture, and persuade at every level of church government.

The entire practical disagreement comes down to whether a woman may cast a vote in a session meeting.

That’s it. One vote in a committee. And yet this question has consumed years of denominational energy, generated thousands of pages of argument, and is now heading for a vote that will permanently reshape how the church governs itself.

The question everyone should be asking

The exegetical arguments on both sides are well-developed, and I’ll summarise them. But the question that determines everything is one of Presbyterian polity, not Greek vocabulary: which biblical texts define the ruling elder’s office?

The Smith/EDC position

Dr Murray Smith’s case for male-only eldership argues that PCNSW elders are biblical elders, defined by the overseer passages in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. The PCNSW Code already cites those passages. The Code already describes elders using the specific language of those passages — “shepherds” under “the Chief Shepherd,” exercising “oversight and government,” “competent to teach.” If those texts define the office, and those texts require the officeholder to be male, then the conclusion follows.

This is the overture’s most effective argument, because it turns the Code against the status quo. Code §4.02(c) says elders must demonstrate character “as defined by the Scriptures (1 Tim. 3:1–7; Tit. 1:5–9).” If you’ve already legislated that those texts define your elders, you’ve already accepted the premises. The overture just draws the conclusion.

Smith also argues that 1 Timothy 2:12 — Paul’s prohibition on women “teaching or exercising authority over men” — anticipates the elder qualifications in chapter 3, tying the two passages together. The prohibition is grounded in creation order (1 Tim. 2:13–14), not cultural circumstances, and therefore applies permanently. The complementarian scholarly consensus behind this reading is strong — Andreas Köstenberger’s syntactical analysis of the Greek, Thomas Schreiner’s work on the creation-order grounding, Wayne Grudem’s systematic case, Douglas Moo’s definitive statement that the restrictions are “permanent, authoritative for the church in all times and places.” These aren’t fringe voices. They represent the mainstream of evangelical complementarian scholarship.

The “husband of one wife” requirement (1 Tim. 3:2; Tit. 1:6) adds weight. Paul uses the ordinary Greek words for “man” and “woman,” and applies the female equivalent — “wife of one husband” — to enrolled widows in 1 Timothy 5:9, confirming that the male phrasing is gender-specific rather than generic.

The Tucker position

Tucker’s response isn’t egalitarian. It’s a polity argument. He contends that the Westminster Assembly in 1645, when it wrote the Form of Presbyterial Church Government, deliberately grounded its “Other Church-Governors” (ruling elders) in different texts from its pastors — specifically Romans 12:8 and 1 Corinthians 12:28, which describe a gift of governance, not the overseer passages of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1.

George Gillespie, whose work shaped the Westminster Assembly’s thinking on this point, cited Titus 1:6–8 for the ruling elder’s character but deliberately left out verse 9 — the verse about teaching. He wasn’t being careless. He was making a distinction. The vote at the Assembly passed with only two dissenters, neither of whom wanted the overseer texts applied to governors.

Tucker documents that when the 1967 GAA opened eldership to women, the resolution explicitly cited this Westminster distinction: it “holds the doctrine of the Eldership as set forth in the Westminster Form of Presbyterian Church Government, under the heading ‘Other Church Governors'” and on that basis proposed that women could serve. The 1997 GAA confirmed this was a matter of government, not doctrine.

So when the overture is framed as “returning to our roots,” Tucker’s counter is that the roots being invoked aren’t Westminster’s 1645 settlement but Robert Dabney’s 1860 reinterpretation. Iain Murray, the respected Banner of Truth editor, acknowledged this: “My personal opinion is that the [Dabney Model] has often found acceptance among us because we assumed it was the position biblically established by the Westminster Assembly. The truth is that the assumption is wrong.”

There’s also a separate biblical case — not Tucker’s primary argument, but present in the “no change” paper circulating among members. It points to women exercising authority throughout Scripture: Deborah governing as prophet and judge (Judges 4–5), Huldah speaking God’s word to kings (2 Kings 22–23), Phoebe called diakonos — the same word Paul uses for himself (Romans 16:1), Junia called “outstanding among the apostles” (Romans 16:7), women as the first witnesses and proclaimers of the resurrection. The “husband of one wife” language, on this reading, is an idiom about marital fidelity, not gender exclusivity — just as “you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife” (Exodus 20:17) doesn’t condone women coveting their neighbour’s husband. I find some of these arguments more persuasive than others, but they’re made by people who take Scripture seriously, and dismissing them as liberal is lazy.

The Code catches both sides

Here’s what makes this genuinely hard. The Smith side has a strong textual argument from the Code as currently written. The Tucker side has a strong historical argument about legislative intent — what the Assembly meant when it wrote those words. The eight-year process (2015–2023) that produced the current Code language considered this question and chose not to insert “man.” That’s not an accident.

Both arguments have integrity. The question is what you weigh more: what the text says, or what the people who wrote it intended.

Even if Smith is right, the order is wrong

This is where I part company with the overture. Not on the exegesis — reasonable people disagree on that, and I respect the scholarship on both sides. But on the sequencing.

There’s a distinction worth naming first: most PCNSW congregations don’t currently have women elders. For many churches, the practical effect of the overture would be small. But there is a difference between a church that has chosen not to elect women elders and a church that is prohibited from doing so. The current Code preserves the freedom of each session to discern, under Scripture and the Spirit, whether women should serve. The proposed change removes that freedom permanently — not just for churches that have women elders now, but for every future congregation that might discern that call differently.

The overture proposes to make all church courts exclusively male without first establishing any concrete mechanism for women’s participation in governance. No alternative has been designed, consulted on, voted on, or tested. The Assembly is being asked to remove an existing structure and trust that something will replace it.

The experience of every other state that’s done this, and every comparable denomination overseas, says the replacement doesn’t come. Or it comes as what Lauren Riske called “shadow elders” in AP Magazine — women invited to attend but not vote, burdened with responsibility but stripped of standing. A two-tier system that satisfies nobody.

In 2020, the Women’s Ministry Committee of the Presbyterian Church of Australia — our own denomination — surveyed 484 people (324 women, 162 men) across the PCA and presented its findings to the 2023 General Assembly of Australia. More than 50% of all respondents — men and women — could not affirm that women trust the elders with issues specifically related to women such as domestic violence and sexism. Less than 50% of women believed they were consulted by elders regarding church direction. More than 30% of women felt limited in what they could do. On multiple questions, the gap between how female congregation members and male ministers perceived the same reality was statistically significant. This is not overseas data. It comes from our own churches, and it paints a picture of a communication gap that ministers and elders need to take seriously — the report’s own words.

Murray Capill, Dean of Ministry Development at the Reformed Theological College in Melbourne, acknowledged that “from my experience and observation, lots of us don’t do that well” at consulting women.

Overseas examples are suggestive, not dispositive. But the patterns are consistent enough to take seriously. The Save the PCA “Functional Female Officer Report” (2025) — published by a conservative advocacy group within the American Presbyterian Church in America, but documenting observable practices — found that numerous PCA (America) churches have created quasi-official workarounds: women leading worship elements, sitting in session meetings as “elder advisors,” going through officer training, being commissioned with public vows — all without formal office. Male-only eldership, in practice, generates constant pressure toward informal arrangements that satisfy nobody. The rules say one thing; the practice says another.

The Christian Reformed Church’s experience tells a different story. The CRC opened all offices to women on a local-option basis in 1995, and 36 complementarian churches with approximately 7,500 members left to form the United Reformed Churches in North America. The denomination never recovered those numbers. The lesson cuts both ways: this question is deeply divisive in either direction. But the PCNSW already has 35 years of settled practice. The disruption flows from changing that practice, not from maintaining it.

The Royal Commission said this, specifically

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017) examined over 4,000 survivors’ accounts from religious institutions. Volume 16, devoted entirely to religious organisations, found — as a matter of evidence — that the absence or insufficient involvement of women in leadership and governance negatively affected decision-making, accountability, and may have contributed to inadequate institutional responses to child sexual abuse.

That’s not a recommendation. It’s a finding. Based on evidence. From the most significant institutional abuse inquiry in Australian history.

The Commission identified clericalism — the elevation of ordained or ministerial status above laity — as a significant contributing factor in some religious institutions. It found that insufficient involvement of women in leadership and governance negatively affected decision-making and accountability. Recommendation 16.37 called for child-safety advisory mechanisms that include lay men and women with relevant expertise. The Commission received allegations relating to 106 cases in Presbyterian Church institutions across Australia. We are not exempt.

A church that votes to make all its governance bodies exclusively male in 2026 — nine years after that Final Report — cannot claim it didn’t know.

The governance research raises a serious caution

Tucker’s paper notes that “it is acknowledged on all sides of the debate that governance bodies comprising men and women working together make better decisions and achieve better outcomes.” The Elders and Deacons Committee’s own 2021 report cited the same evidence. The academic literature is more cautious than either side acknowledges — an ANU review found that most studies do not convincingly isolate a causal effect of board diversity on overall organisational performance. But the evidence for narrower effects — improved monitoring, better attendance, stronger scrutiny, and greater sensitivity to ethical risk — is robust. The most that can responsibly be said is that removing women from governance may carry governance costs, especially around challenge and accountability. The research raises a serious caution. It does not settle the polity question by itself.

Adams and Ferreira’s 2009 study in the Journal of Financial Economics found that female directors have better attendance records, that male directors attend more reliably when boards are gender-diverse, that women are more likely to join monitoring committees, and that CEO accountability increases measurably. An important nuance: they also found that the effect depends on existing governance quality. In well-governed organisations with strong accountability already in place, adding diversity provides diminishing returns. But in poorly-governed organisations — where scrutiny is weak and challenge is absent — gender diversity adds significant value. The question for the PCNSW is whether all our sessions are in the well-governed category. The denomination has never measured this.

Irving Janis’s foundational work on groupthink identified homogeneity of membership as a key antecedent condition — the very thing that makes groups stop questioning themselves. Session meetings are governance meetings. They make decisions about people’s lives — pastoral care, discipline, complaints, child safety.

The proponents of male-only eldership would argue, fairly, that if Scripture requires it, then pragmatic research can’t override a clear biblical command. I agree with the principle. But it loops back to the polity question: if the Westminster model is correct and ruling elders are grounded in different texts, then there is no clear biblical command to override the research. The governance evidence becomes a relevant consideration in an area where Scripture gives the church freedom to order its government wisely.

Compliance is not comprehension

Someone will point out that we have Breaking the Silence. They’re right. BTS has been in place since 1997 — one of the earliest church safeguarding programs in Australia. It’s mandatory for elders, ministers, and anyone working with children or vulnerable people. It covers child protection, domestic violence, abuse of authority, mandatory reporting. It’s been updated regularly, expanded to cover DFV in 2020, and mapped to the Royal Commission’s Child Safe Standards. The Conduct Protocol Unit is professionally staffed. This is real work done by serious people.

BTS is more developed than many people realise. Foundations training runs on a three-year cycle with annual Read and Review refreshers for those working directly with children and young people. The CPU conducts compliance audits across churches. The online training requires an 80% quiz score for satisfactory completion, and reattempts are permitted. An independent contact person option exists for reporting abuse via the CPU, providing a pathway that does not run through the local session. This is a real and serious safeguarding architecture.

The harder question is not whether BTS exists, but what public evidence is available that it changes reporting behaviour and outcomes over time. The quiz tests knowledge — whether you know the right answer — but not competency: whether you can handle an actual disclosure, manage a conflict of interest, or respond appropriately to a vulnerable person in distress. After 28 years of operation, I have not found a public independent evaluation of BTS effectiveness or published outcome data that would let anyone assess whether the training changes behaviour. The system may well work. But we can’t currently demonstrate that it does, and that gap matters more if we’re about to remove another layer of structural accountability.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study in Child Abuse & Neglect (Hunt, Higgins & Willis, Australian Catholic University) interviewed 20 Christian leaders across denominations about safeguarding training and titled their findings “Just tick the box and move on.” It’s a small qualitative study — not a definitive evaluation of any one program, and not specific to BTS — but the patterns it identified are worth taking seriously: compliance-focused mentality rather than genuine culture change, cultural resistance from leaders who see safeguarding as unnecessary external regulation, and outright hostility from some volunteers. Those patterns describe a risk that any church safeguarding program needs to guard against.

The Anglican Diocese of Sydney enforces a hard rule: if your safeguarding training lapses and isn’t renewed within 30 days, you step down from ministry entirely. The Catholic Church runs formal external audits against national safeguarding standards with registered auditors. We have neither enforcement mechanism.

The WHS survey asks directly: “Do you believe that this could impact the willingness of staff or volunteers to report issues such as conflict, bullying, or harassment?” There is a reasonable concern, supported by governance and institutional abuse research, that when the people receiving complaints share the demographic profile of the people being complained about, reporting confidence is affected. Our own denomination’s 2020 WMPCA survey is consistent with this concern — even men in the PCA couldn’t affirm that women trust elders with issues like domestic violence. That wasn’t just a women’s perception. It was a denomination-wide finding. We don’t need to guess what the risks might be. We have data from our own churches.

Genesis 3:16 — the text complementarians should take most seriously

This argument doesn’t require an egalitarian theology. It requires taking Genesis 3 seriously within the complementarian framework.

“Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Both sides agree this describes a distortion — what sin does to the relationship between men and women, not what God designed.

John Piper, co-founder of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, calls this a description of the curse. He identifies what he calls “the essence of corrupted maleness” as the self-aggrandising effort to subdue and control and exploit women. Calvin read it as introducing a harsher subjection than existed before the Fall. Susan Foh, whose 1975 interpretation in the Westminster Theological Journal most complementarians follow, concluded that the rule of love founded in paradise is replaced by struggle, tyranny, and domination.

Even CBMW’s Jonathan Leeman conceded that views of male headship can contribute to partner violence. Al Mohler said complementarian theology “can be, and it sometimes is” used to abuse women.

So here’s the question we need to sit with: if you believe Genesis 3:16 predicts that male authority, post-Fall, will tend toward sinful domination — and you do believe that, it’s in your own literature — then what governance structures guard against that predictable distortion? The answer can’t be “godly men will lead like Christ.” That’s the aspiration. The question is what happens when they don’t. Because sometimes they don’t. The SBC’s 700-name database of accused abusers says they don’t. The Presbyterian Church in America’s 2023 General Assembly, where an all-male body voted down all four abuse-prevention proposals, says they don’t.

Removing women from governance concentrates authority in exactly the group most susceptible to the corruption Genesis 3 describes, while eliminating the structural accountability that diverse governance provides. That should bother every complementarian in the room.

What would need to be true before this change could responsibly be made

I’m not saying “never.” I’m saying “not yet.” And I’m saying the burden of proof is on those proposing the change to show that these conditions are met:

An alternative mechanism for women’s participation in governance has been designed, consulted on, and voted on by the Assembly — and published before the vote on the overture, not promised afterward. Not promised. Not recommended. Voted on, with specifics. What is it? How does it work? What standing do women have? Can they merely advise, or do they have constitutive power? These aren’t details to work out later. They’re the whole question.

Breaking the Silence has been independently evaluated for effectiveness. BTS has an 80% knowledge quiz, compliance audits, and a contact-person pathway — but after 28 years, the denomination should also be able to demonstrate publicly that its training changes behaviour and outcomes. Competency-based assessment, independent external evaluation, and published outcome data would allow the denomination to know — in a measurable sense — whether its safeguarding system works. If it does, prove it. If it doesn’t, fix it before you remove the structural safeguard that partly compensates for the gap.

An independent complaints mechanism, accessible to women and not solely administered by male office-bearers, has been established and resourced. The CPU and contact-person pathway already provide some independence from the local session. The live question is whether that pathway is sufficiently independent from the denomination itself, sufficiently visible to women and volunteers, and sufficiently trusted — particularly for complaints about male leaders heard by all-male bodies. Dealing with complaints by women against male leaders is, as Tucker’s paper notes, “particularly problematic when the case is heard by a group in which only men get a vote.”

The church has mapped which pathway handles which class of concern. The WHS survey asks about conflict, bullying, harassment, and willingness to report. BTS is designed for abuse, abuse of authority, and child safety — and it does that work seriously. But not every concern the survey names is a BTS matter. If the Assembly is asking members to assess broader risks, it should be able to show where a complaint about session conflict goes, where a bullying concern about a ministry leader is heard, and what independent options exist in each case. These pathways need to exist, be published, and be known — not assumed.

The Healthy Complementarianism resolutions adopted by the GAA have been implemented at session level across PCNSW presbyteries, with measurable outcomes reported annually to the Assembly. Dr Smith’s own framing: if we say ‘no’ to women in eldership without also saying ‘yes’ to all the ways men and women complement each other, we’ve only done half the job. The Other Cheek observed that the Healthy Complementarianism paper “is clear on how to change the church code to bring about male elders, but there are no worked-out solutions for the ideas to support women.” The ‘yes’ doesn’t exist yet. Build it before you legislate the ‘no.’

The deeper irony

Presbyterian governance was designed, from its inception, to prevent the concentration of power. Calvin insisted on lay participation alongside clergy. Knox built Scottish polity around elder parity and appeals to higher courts. The whole system exists because the Reformers understood — on the basis of total depravity — that unchecked authority corrupts.

The ruling elder exists as a representative of the congregation. Not an extension of the minister’s authority. A representative. If ruling elders represent the congregation, and the congregation includes women, then a governance body that systematically excludes women has a representational deficit built into its foundation.

Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 12 insists that the body cannot say to any member, “I have no need of you.” The ear cannot be told it has no place because it is not an eye.

The proposed change tells more than half the body of Christ that their voice has no formal standing in the governance of their own church. Not because they lack character, competence, or calling. Because of their sex. That should trouble us — not because complementarianism is wrong, but because this particular expression of it contradicts the very logic of the governance system we claim to value.

The evidence in this post has limits. Some of it is institutional and direct; some is comparative and indirect; some comes from advocacy sources I’ve used only as illustration. I’m not claiming the future can be read off a single dataset. I’m arguing that the risks are credible enough, and the safeguards underdeveloped enough, that the Assembly should not make this change on trust.

Where I land

I don’t think the exegetical question is as settled as either side claims. The meaning of authentein in 1 Timothy 2:12 is genuinely contested among serious scholars. The relationship between the overseer passages and the ruling elder’s office has been debated within Presbyterianism for centuries. Whether 1 Timothy 5:17’s malista identifies a subgroup of teaching elders or refers to all elders is unresolved. These are hard questions with honest disagreement on all sides.

But even if I’m wrong about the exegesis, I’m not wrong about the sequencing. You don’t remove a structural safeguard before you’ve built the replacement. You don’t tell women they’ll be looked after by the same system that, in denomination after denomination, has demonstrably failed to look after them. You don’t vote to concentrate authority in the hands of one sex while knowing what the Royal Commission found about what that does.

If we must change the lock, let’s first build the door. The people who will bear the cost of getting this wrong are the ones with the least power to do anything about it.

I’ve talked to women in our churches who accept complementarianism and still feel afraid of this change. Not because they think it’s theologically wrong — they’re genuinely uncertain about that — but because they’ve seen what happens when institutions consolidate male authority without structural accountability. Some of them have experienced it personally. When they hear “godly men will lead like Christ,” they hear a promise that has been broken before. Not by bad theology, but by bad men operating within good theology. And they wonder who will notice, and who will act, when the governance table has no one who shares their experience sitting at it.

That’s not an argument against complementarianism. It’s an argument for taking it seriously enough to do it carefully.