There have been two important updates to the DASA report since it was first released. For those who are not aware, the report can be updated until it is delivered at the General Assembly. Major updates are not advisable, and these updates usually amount to grammatical corrections and typos, but there are two significant updates that I would like to make the public aware of.

First, it was completely coincidental that the SBC report and ours were released within a day of each other. I attribute this to the fact that both denominations have their assemblies in June and it just happened to fall out that way. One result of this timing is that we as a committee felt that that an additional item of advice should be added to our list of advice on page 2303. It reads:

“That the 50th General Assembly of the PCA receive overtures from the lower courts to perform a denomination-wide assessment of the state of abuse in the PCA. One aspect of the overtures might be to create a committee tasked with overseeing the work.”

One of the major differences between the SBC report and ours is that ours was not an investigation. We were not given the authority to investigate or perform an assessment of the denomination, and neither were we given the funds to do so. We did receive stories from actual PCA abuse survivors (more on that below) but we did not perform a quantitative study that enabled us to make any definitive statements about the state of abuse in the PCA. However, I can say that our sense of things is that there is a great need in the PCA to study and implement our report. We were inundated with communications from PCA abuse survivors, and there are many more instances than the ones who were brave enough to reach out to us. As those who believe in the doctrine of radical depravity, we should not be surprised that there are sinners in our denomination – profound sinners who deceive, wound, and destroy fellow image bearers. Thus, while we are convinced that abuse is present in the PCA we do not have an evidentiary basis for making any broad conclusions.

For this reason, our committee has added this statement of advice. We do think that a denominational assessment would be helpful so that we can come to a better understanding of the state of things in the PCA with regard to abuse. We hope that the 50th GA will receive overtures to that end.

Secondly, committee members have been listening to the various streams of feedback that we have access to, both private and public. One item that we would like to clarify regards the case studies included in the report. There were questions about whether the case studies were real stories of PCA abuse survivors. They are real stories of real PCA abuse survivors. To this end we added a short section to the introduction on page 2307:

“The case studies in this report are based on actual circumstances that have occurred in the PCA. However, names, dates, participants, and details have been rearranged and/or changed in order to protect the people associated. To the best of our ability, we have sought to honor the privacy and dignity of the victims and survivors. The integrity of this report and its ministry to people in crisis is of utmost concern to the contributors. Resemblance in these stories to actual persons and/or events should be considered coincidental.”

Our report will be given at nine AM on Wednesday, June 22. The latest version of the report can always be found here: https://pcaga.org/aic-report-abuse/.

Tim LeCroy is chair of the Chair of the PCA DASA Committee. This statement was first published at semperref.org.