run for office. Some members yet continue the historic dissenting positions, but the majority of members participate like members of most other conservative Christian denominations, and Reformed Presbyterian Bob Lyon served in the Kansas Senate from 2001 to 2005. Another long-held belief distinguishing the RPCNA from other churches was its prohibition of occasional hearing, the practice of attending worship services or preaching by ministers of other denominations. Although the practice is permitted today, it was long prohibited. For example, records from an eastern Pennsylvania congregation note that two women were "severely admonished" for attending a weekday Methodist camp-meeting in 1821. The grounds for this prohibition were historical: the Church of Scotland, of which the Reformed Presbyterian Church considered itself a continuation, had been established as the state church throughout Great Britain. As the Reformed Presbyterian Church believed that that state church had never officially been disestablished in a legal manner, it considered other churches to have no legal right to exist. Therefore, attending a worship service of any other church amounted to participation in an illegal organization. In common with other churches in the Reformed Presbyterian lineage, the RPCNA holds to the Regulative Principle of Worship and construes it to require a cappella singing of the Psalms only in worship, as they believe it to be the only form of congregational singing evidenced in and thus permitted by the Bible. While this practice was not unusual in past centuries, many other denominations have permitted hymns and instrumental music over the years. As a result, the RPCNA's manner of worship is quite distinctive today, and with the change in the official position on political action, the manner of worship is the chief distinction of the RPCNA today. Although alcohol use was prohibited for all members for many decades, in recent years both ordinary members and ordained officers have been permitted to use it. Chapter 26 of the RPCNA Testimony states that abstinence from alcohol is still a fitting choice for Christians. Along with many other conservative denominations, the RPCNA interprets the Bible as requiring all elders to be male. Unlike most related denominations, however, deacons in the RPCNA may be either male or female; the first women deacons were ordained in 1888 (with attempts to limit the diaconate to men having failed as recently as 2002). In 1939, a committee of the Synod brought in a unanimous recommendation that women may