Presbyterian government runs on a chain of graded councils rather than on individual authority, a structure the tradition traces to John Calvin's Geneva and to the Scottish Reformation that carried it to America. A local session of ruling elders governs each congregation; sessions answer to a regional presbytery of ministers and elder delegates; presbyteries answer to a synod; and a General Assembly, meeting annually and drawing commissioners from every presbytery, speaks for the denomination as a whole. No single bishop, and no single congregation acting alone, holds final authority.
Doctrine follows a similarly plural pattern. Rather than subscribing to one confession, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) holds a Book of Confessions gathering the ancient Nicene and Apostles' Creeds alongside the seventeenth century Westminster Confession and Catechisms and several twentieth century statements, including the 1967 Confession and A Brief Statement of Faith adopted at the 1983 reunion itself. Ministers vow to be instructed and led by this whole collection rather than bound to any one document within it.
Ordination has followed two separate timelines that only merged in 1983. The northern stream approved ordaining women to the ministry of Word and Sacrament in 1955, and in 1956 the Cayuga-Syracuse Presbytery ordained Margaret Towner, its first woman minister. The southern PCUS reached the same decision in 1964, ordaining Rachel Henderlite the following year. Both practices simply continued, unremarked, when the two churches reunited.