There are officially only five questions in the Book of Church Order. I’m thinking that probably the first question matches your first question, and your session breaks down the other four questions into eight. (Not an unreasonable thing to do, since the questions take the form of “do you believe in ham AND eggs and do you promise to abstain from brussels sprouts AND broccoli” all in the same question. Not that they’re unrelated matters in any sense, but it’s not unsensible to break them down further for clarity and didactic purposes.

There are NO paedocommunionist congregations in the PCA. The PCA doesn’t allow it. What there are, is some paedocommunionist pastors, but they are not allowed to practice it. There are also congregations who set the “bar” of what’s required for a child to profess faith before communion at varying levels. This is allowed by the Gates of Troy-like passage on the subject in the Book of Church Order. Some make it almost bar mitzvah-like — you have to be well into the years of the “age of reason” and have to establish that you can parrot back some fairly minute aspects of soteriology with the appearance of understanding. (Excuse me while I struggle to restrain the gagging noises.) Others make it far lower — if a three year old can articulate “Jesus loved me and He died for my sins” so that the elders can understand it, you’re good to go. Most fall somewhere in the middle, and my sense is that most will accept a profession from a child around ten or more who demonstrates that he has some clue what he’s talking about.

You’re spot on about not having to a paedobaptist — theoretically, you don’t even have to be a Calvinist. You just have to have a credible profession of faith. But here’s the kicker — Presbyterian ecclesiology assumes you’re going to listen to your teachers and treat their words as having (not infallible or unchallengeable) authority, and one of the membership vows is to support the peace of the church, so if you can’t sit through a sermon without your arms grimly folded or without constantly picking fights over everything, you’re not really going to be able to take the vows in good conscience.

But who needs a BOCO, in its ugly blue binder and the oddly numbered replaceable pages? This is 2006! http://www.pcanet.org/BCO/

I never knew the Presbyterians had so many theological variations among them until meeting so many Presbyterians of different kinds through Seminary. It’s very interesting stuff.

But seriously, here’s how it works: some elders (one Ruling Elder and our one Teaching Elder, in our case) ask you to give your testimony in the privacy of your home. You make pleasant conversation about other things. Satisfied that you’re actually a believer, they administer the membership vows. These are (if I recall correctly) eight questions which in sum establish three things:

• The new member believes the Bible is the Word of God (one question)
• The new member believes the Gospel (six questions, IIRC)
• The new member will attend, participate in, give to, pray for, and submit to the church (one question)

After you take those vows, you’re a communicant member. Some days or weeks later you repeat these vows in front of the congregation, and probably give your testimony too. If you haven’t yet received baptism, you’d probably get baptized then too; you can’t be an unbaptized member of the church over the long term, since that makes no sense.

If you’re a credobaptist converting to paedobaptism at the same time (this seems to happen a lot), then your children would also receive baptism. If they are old enough to be considered for communicant membership (and it is not a padeocommunionist congregation, which I understand is not unheard of in the PCA, but is by no means common), then the session would examine them at the same time as it receives your testimony. This “examination” consists of making sure that the kid has adequate understanding of sin, the work of Christ, the Lord’s Supper, etc. The session would administer the membership vows to whichever of your children are received as communicant members.

There is absolutely no requirement to be a paedobaptist in order to receive membership. Children must be baptized before taking communion—which merely meets a minimum standard for sanity, if you ask me—but this should pose no problem for the credobaptist, who shouldn’t want his kids taking communion before they are “qualified,” by his own standards, for baptism.

The order of the membership vows and the baptisms I wrote about above is really a minor detail that nobody would get upset about either way, but we discussed it and decided that it was the more paedobaptist-y formula to adopt. The children are baptized by virtue of being the covenant children of new members, not on the basis of their profession. However, since they have a profession, they make it, swear membership, and can take communion thereafter.

Mind you, this is all from memory and all a bit of “how we do it at my church,” so there may be some variation in the PCA from congregation to congregation. The Book of Church Order surely lays out the framework which we would consider to be “required,” but I don’t yet own a copy. However, I really dig the fact that there is a written procedure. They actually take this stuff seriously here, to the point of thinking through the possibilities and writing things down.

I’m curious about the membership procedure you mention… this is how the PCA does it? Is this peculiar to the PCA? Can you unpack that a little more?