Though the presbyteries perceived different problems leading to presbytery dysfunction, Bruce O’Neil believes the underlying issue is a lack of trust.

Accardy is blunt about the fact that his congregation doesn’t mirror much of the denomination: “We are not an upper middle-class professional church.”

“We need to listen and learn from them about abuse and what is needed for healing,” Diane Langberg said. “It is incarnational work.”

Townsend spent 13 years on the National Christian Foundation executive team before becoming the newly elected president of the PCA Foundation.

An experienced mentor who asks good questions, offers encouragement, and helps an individual apply the gospel to every area of his or her life can be the difference between someone who perseveres in or walks away from ministry.

“In seeing what was going on in the lives of people serving the church, we decided we could no longer just write checks.”

We need a culture — informed and shaped by God’s people — that celebrates what it means to provide

Trauma is extraordinary, she says, “not because it rarely happens, but because it swallows up and destroys normal human ways of living.” We have a choice. “We can flit from one cause to another or, like Jesus, we can leave our place of comfort and enter into the suffering.”

Abuse is a pattern of behavior, not a one-time event. The behavior is always intended to preserve the abuser’s power by controlling others. Typically, abuse falls into one of five categories: psychological, physical, economic, spiritual, and sexual.

A total of 1,616 commissioners registered, representing 827 churches from all 88 presbyteries.