ROBERT S. PAUL

THE DEACON

IN PROTESTANTISM

 

 

 

 

 

I .  THE PRIMACY OF THE CHURCH

In the year 1571 a Separatist congregation in London petitioned against the ill-treatment they had received at the hands of the English episcopal authorities. They complained that the queen’s officers had imprisoned and killed “the Lord’s servants, as our minister, Richard Fitz, Thomas Bowland, deacon, one [named] Partridge and Gyles Fowler.” We know little enough about Thomas Bowland, the deacon, except that some years earlier he had been the leader of a Separatist congregation meeting at the Plumbers’ Hall, and that together with Randall Partridge and some others he had been examined by Archbishop Grindall in June, 1567. He then re-appears as the deacon of Richard Fitz’s gathered church, and seems to have died as a result of his imprisonment for nonconformity.1

            Perhaps in this instance his career as a Separatist is of less importance to us than the fact that he was specifically designated “deacon,” for it illustrates the carefully defined church order by which Separatists and Puritans sought to re-constitute the Church according to the New Testament. It is sometimes too easily assumed that the dispute between the Elizabethan bishops and the Puritan wing of the Church concentrated upon minor matters of liturgical practice, whereas a study of such documents as the petition cited above reveals that its true center was the nature of the Church. As the authors of the Puritans’ First Admonition to Parliament declared, “Neither is the controversy betwixt them [the bishops] and us (as they would bear the world in hand) for a cap, a tippet or a surplice, but for great matters concerning a true ministry and regiment [i.e., ruling] of the church according to the word. . . .”2 As far as this wing of Protestantism is concerned, any discussion of particular “orders” within the Church must start from the doctrine of the Church itself.

            Herein lies our problem for, although there appears to be agreement among Protestants generally about the nature of the Church, there is less agreement about its form, and we cannot assume that there is a uniform approach to ecclesiology. In several Protestant denominations the pattern of parochial church life, and even the duties and titles of the officers appointed, do not differ very widely, but could it be said that Baptists, Congregationalists, Disciples, and Presbyterians hold identical doctrines of the Church, or that their view of “deacons,” for example, is the same?

            Obviously not, and yet when we look at these denominations together, or with the Methodists and Lutherans, among whom the pattern of church life may be somewhat different, we recognize that there is a root which is common to the whole of Protestantism, and which is bound to affect all its variant ecclesiologies.

            This common ground is, I suggest, the principle that we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, and that our authority for this claim is to be found primarily in the Bible. Both the principle of justification by faith and the biblical authority on which it is based are equally important for Protestant doctrines of the Church, for in the scriptural record justification is related at every point to the community of faith. If we take the doctrine seriously, we must take the Church seriously. What is the pattern that should be taken by a Church founded on faith in Jesus Christ? Is it laid down in the Scriptures or in the Church’s own tradition? Or is it to be decided according to the needs of each generation?

            Differences of interpretation were almost bound to enter. At first the Reformers seem to have expected Christian rulers to answer the basic question for them, but as the relationship between Church and State became increasingly suspect, it became more and more clear that the churches could not so easily get rid of the question. Protestantism was forced to address itself to a definition of the Church, but within that question it discovered others: what is the will of Christ regarding the structure of the Church; what is the relation of the congregation to its ministers and to the sacraments; who are the Church’s proper officers; what is the nature of its authority under the Holy Spirit?

            Beneath the many answers that have been given to these questions, and which have contributed to the complexity of Protestantism, we can, perhaps, discern two main approaches to the doctrine of the Church. There have been those who, in emphasizing the primacy of justification by faith, have tended to regard the doctrine of the Church as secondary. They have not been particularly concerned to discover or defend a form of polity for the Church from Scripture, but have regarded such questions as essentially pragmatic. Insofar as the Church’s structure does not deny any Gospel principle, the Church may adapt its form to suit the needs of its mission in any age.

            Denominations such as Lutheranism and Methodism have shared this basic attitude, but it is also an attitude that cuts across the denominational lines, for there have been those like the Anglican Archbishop, Richard Bancroft, or the Congregationalist, Robert Dale, who, while holding a preference for one or another polity, have believed that there is no one form of church order that has been laid down as of divine right.3 At its best, those who represent this position emphasize that the Church is to be the servant of the Gospel it proclaims, and that it must be subject to the rule of the Spirit. At its worst, this view of the Church can degenerate into a mundane kind of pragmatism that denies the presence of the Holy Spirit, and reduces the Church to a wholly human society.

            On the other hand, there are those who have insisted that a God-given form of the Church is to be found in Scripture. Whether they are Anabaptists arguing with Luther and Zwingli in the sixteenth century, Presbyterians and Congregationalists arguing with each other in the Westminster Assembly, or Disciples arguing with everyone else on the American frontier, they all have insisted that God has set down the form of the Church in the New Testament. If one relieves the term “high church” of its purely liturgical connotations, these are the high churchmen of Protestantism. Against the claims of pope or bishops for a form of the Church ex jure divino based on historical continuity, they have claimed a form that is ex jure divino based on Scripture. At their best, they have uncompromisingly maintained the God-given nature of the Church as essential to the divine plan of salvation, but at their worst they have been guilty of stifling the Holy Spirit in the most rigid forms of literalism. In seeking to restore a New Testament pattern of the Church it is possible to deny the Spirit that gave life to the Church of the New Testament.

            All this is prolegomena to our subject, but it is necessary prolegomena. It is not the purpose of this essay to pass judgment on the relative merits of these basic attitudes to the doctrine of the Church, but simply to indicate the context within which any discussion of orders within Protestantism must take place. The office of deacon in the church structure of any Protestant denomination must be seen as part of the whole debate on the nature of the Church, for it is only as an aspect of that doctrine that Protestants would regard it as relevant.

 

 

II. THE OFFICE OF DEACON

It is generally true that Protestantism knows no order of deacons as a distinct grade in a clerical hierarchy. In those denominations that have not been dominated by the desire to restore the New Testament Church, the office of deacon may not appear at all, or its appearance will be governed by geographical, national, or cultural considerations – the desire to maintain continuity with the past, political necessity, or practical efficiency. Accordingly, although there may be some pressure in the Swedish context for Lutheranism to revert to the threefold conception of the ministry, the office of deacon is not known in Lutheranism generally. The same would be true of Methodism. The office of deacon is not used in the Methodist Church of Britain where Methodism was born, for John Wesley appears to have reached the conclusion that in the early Church the presbyter and the bishop were of essentially the same order,4 and the system he established included the elements of several forms of polity.

            But it must be remembered that Wesley did not intend to break from the Church of England, and perhaps the system he bequeathed to British Methodism is to be seen less as his blueprint for a new denomination than as supplementing the orders of the established Church. If this is so, then we may reasonably argue that American Methodism was true to the spirit of Wesley when it introduced the threefold structure of orders into its own system. Within the situation as it was in America at the end of the eighteenth century, Methodism could not rely on the ministrations of Anglican clergy.

            But precisely for this reason Methodism does not contribute directly to our understanding of what Protestants mean by deacons. In its American form, Methodist orders seem to be but a pale imitation of the Anglican model – imitation because deacons occupy relatively the same place as Anglican deacons in the scale of clerical authority, and pale because Methodists would insist that they do not represent a distinct order of ministry. For all practical purposes, a deacon in the Methodist Church in America is an ordained person on his way to becoming a fully qualified and recognized minister, and he is, to that extent, on probation. He is able to perform some of the duties of the eldership, but he had no distinct duties or authority which are not also possessed by the Elder.

            A discussion of the office of deacon in Lutheranism and Methodism is likely to be somewhat thin, but I would submit that a discussion of the diaconate, in its wider sense, would not be. If our basic concern is with diakonia – ministry and service within the Church – then one would have to look to the many forms of lay service in the history of Methodism, to the leaders of its class meetings, and to the circuit stewards who, without the actual name deacon, have expressed the actual calling and service of the New Testament deacon.

            This is the kind of diaconate that Luther recognized. He declared that:

 

. . . the diaconate is a ministry, not for reading the Gospel or the Epistle, as the practice is nowadays, but for distributing the wealth of the Church among the poor, that the priests may be relieved of the burden of temporal things, and may give themselves more freely to prayer and to the word. It was for this purpose, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, that deacons were appointed.5

 

This life of practical service is maintained in the Lutheran deacons and deaconesses of the Inner Mission in Europe,6 or in the nursing deaconesses known in America. The work of deacons may be unknown in large parts of Protestantism, but the work of diakonia is not, for it is of the essential nature of the Church itself.

            The application of this concept of service to the work of deacons in the Church will be seen as we turn to those churches that have sought to restore a New Testament pattern of churchmanship. Indeed, the place of the deacon in any Protestant denomination depends very largely on the extent to which the denomination has held, and in practice continues to hold, a “restorationist” view of the Church.

            In the churches that have tried to restore the New Testament Church in form as well as in faith, we are at once presented with a clearer and yet more complex picture of the deacon. Historically, the aim in each case was to restore the New Testament office with its New Testament functions, but in the course of history other factors have entered to modify and change this original intention, so that denominations that began by asserting very similar things may now find themselves far apart.

            In the fourth book of Calvin’s Institutes the Reformer shows that a very clearly articulated doctrine of the Church is integral to his system, and he makes clear also that his authority is the pattern of the Church in the New Testament. This scriptural appeal may be illustrated among Calvin’s modern followers by citing the recent report on The Nature of the Ministry presented to the 176th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. It states that “The scriptures clearly point out Deacons as distinct officers in the church, whose business it is to take care of the poor, and to distribute among them the collections which may be raised for their use.” It then adds a note which may come from more modern times: “To them also may be properly committed the management of the temporal affairs of the church.”7

            Luther appeals to the same Scripture in almost exactly similar terms, but he did not seek to set up a church structure on this basis.8 It is this reliance on the Bible for the form of the Church, and to justify the place and function of its officers in the modern world, that distinguishes the Church of Calvin from that of the Lutheran reformation which had preceded it; and, insofar as those who reacted to Calvin did so on the basis of the New Testament, there was bound to be more in common in the actual pattern of church polity between Calvin and the radicals who opposed him than there was between Calvin’s form of the Church and Luther’s. Since all restorationist views of the Church were ultimately based upon the same scriptural references, there were bound to be many features of church life and practice that were common to them all. In seventeenth-century England it was not difficult for Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists to agree that the proper officers for a Christian congregation were the pastor (whom they regarded as the presiding elder or bishop of New Testament times), the teaching elder, the ruling elder, and the deacon.

            The scriptural functions of the deacon (as described in the Presbyterian statement above) were regarded as so clear and obvious that some of the early statements are extremely reticent about his duties;9 they were all to be found delineated in the Book of the Acts. All these early statements, however, seem to have drawn a clear line between the various forms of eldership and the deacons. They represented distinct and separate orders. Presbyterian Puritans and Congregational Puritans might argue whether elders who had been ordained to a particular congregation could exercise jurisdiction in other congregations, but they were agreed on the officers that the local church must appoint, and that there was a distinction to be made between elders and deacons. There is a passage in An Apologeticall Narration of 1644 where the Congregational authors insist that they owned a polity that was in all essentials the same as that of other Reformed Churches, and they declared: “For officers and public rulers in the church, we set up no other but the very same which the reformed Churches judge necessary, and as instituted by Christ and his apostles, that is, Pastors, Teachers, Ruling Elders (with us not lay but ecclesiastic persons separated to that service), and Deacons.”10 The distinction is between the various forms of eldership and deacons.

            In Congregationalism this distinction seems to have lessened during the seventeenth century as the structure became simplified and possibly as the hold on synodical authority became weaker among the Churches. Comparatively early, the office of the teaching elder became vested in the work of the pastor, and the special functions of the ruling elder disappeared, so that deacons were drawn into a more prominent position in the congregation. Although the Savoy Declaration of 1658 still mentions teachers and elders with the pastor as ordained officers of the congregation, it goes on to say: “And of a Deacon, that he be chosen by the like suffrage [of church members], and set apart by prayer, and the like Imposition of Hands.”11 It is clear from the emphasis in the rest of the document that deacons are not regarded as of the same order as pastors, teachers and elders, but it is equally obvious that in stressing that they were chosen and commissioned by a “like” method, they were in some sense regarded as sharing in the ministry of the Church.

            In the local congregation today Presbyterians and Reformed Congregationalists, Baptists, and Disciples share very similar church organization that reflects their historic appeal to the New Testament norm, namely, an ordained ministry (which, in the case of Presbyterian and Reformed churches, continues to include elders as well as pastors) and a lay diaconate elected by the congregation.

            In practice this sometimes means that the board of deacons is little more than a committee elected to administer the material affairs of the parish, and although Congregationalist and Baptist deacons are open to the same criticism, perhaps the danger of the office losing its spiritual basis is more obvious where the eldership retains control of the spiritual life of the congregation.

            To the extent that Congregationalists and Baptists have been concerned to maintain the spiritual and ecclesial character of the diaconate, they have tried to achieve it by frankly uniting within it the duties formerly undertaken by ruling elders. The British Baptist, the late H. Wheeler Robinson, describes the local deacons as usually “an Executive Committee, with a good deal of variety in the powers assigned to them, so that in practice they often become a sort of ‘Kirk-Session’. . . . The deacons combine, however, the spiritual functions of the ‘eldership’ with the financial functions of the diaconate in the Presbyterian Church.”12 Similarly, a recent Congregational statement from America says that “Deacons are men who are elected to assist the pastor in helping the church to envision and achieve its spiritual possibilities,”13 and, although their traditional functions are not omitted, it is significant that the writer directs the deaconesses to the specific task of administering the congregation’s charitable concern: they are “women who are elected by the church to render spiritual and social service to the homes of the parish members in cooperation with the deacons.”14 The same concern to stress a pastoral role for deacons is seen in a parallel statement from England. “The task to which a deacon is called,” declares the author, “is to manage and direct the affairs of the Church, both temporal and spiritual,” but he continues:

 

a deacon’s task is not primarily administrative, the stewardship of Church funds, the care of the buildings, the material side of the Church’s organization. In a practical age there is a danger that this side of the work is over-emphasized and even regarded as the first and only task of a deacon. . . . The first concern of a deacon is the spiritual life of the Church.15

 

            Among Disciples we can see the same concern. W. B. Blakemore, the Disciples’ scholar, writing of his own church tradition, has said, “Both the Stoneites and the Campbellites, within their congregationalist polity, had a tradition of a three-fold order of the ministry. The orders comprised deacons, elders, and evangelists or pastors. Originally these were understood as the three ministerial offices of the local congregation,” but he goes on to comment:

 

. . . later generations have fallen away from this understanding, and now, despite their insistence on the priesthood of all believers which should disallow any distinctions between “clergy and laity,” they think of their deacons and elders as “lay” officers, and only the pastorate is thought of as a “ministerial” office. To all intents and purposes, the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) stand for a single order of the ministry. . . . What has happened is that a former ministerial work of the eldership has been virtually lost to memory. This ministerial work of the eldership was originally a responsible participation in a spiritual concern for the spiritual welfare of the congregation. All of this concern has now devolved onto “the minister,” and it is a rare elder who understands himself as sharing a general ministry of spiritual oversight.16

 

Doubtless there are differences between the Disciples’ position and the views of the churches that

came out of the seventeenth-century Puritan struggle, but the same pattern of churchmanship is there. However, what is significant in this passage is not only the trend which Dr. Blakemore discerns, but also his own criticism of it. What Congregationalists and Baptists have been trying to recover by combining some of the pastoral functions of eldership in the diaconate, Dr. Blakemore is trying to recover by the more healthy method of recalling Disciples’ elders to their own proper function in the Church.

            It is clear that the role of lay officers, and particularly of the deacon, has been changing in the Free Churches. What has been happening to Congregational and Baptist deacons is normative, and is becoming very clear. In some ways the New Testament responsibility for administering the Church’s compassion has become secondary, and the deacon’s principal duties seem to be far nearer to positions which we know in the business world – financial advisor, executive committeeman, member of the board and the like. Perhaps as a kind of compensation we have found it necessary to stress his spiritual responsibility and even to invest him with pastoral functions that he formerly did not have.

            One can understand the reasons that have prompted this, but I question whether it is sound theologically to confuse the deacon’s office with those of the pastoral eldership. To put it bluntly, it may be just as erroneous and inadequate to turn the deacon into a deputy-assistant-minister as it is to reduce him to the position of financial advisor or member of the governing board, and I fear this is the risk we run when we speak of him being elected “to assist the minister in helping the church to envision and achieve its spiritual possibilities.”

            Let me approach the point in another way. In Puritan thought the diaconate represented a distinct office in the Church, separated from the pastoral offices and to be held by laymen. Of course, we can find plenty of evidence that the Puritans were not modern democrats, and yet we can adduce far more evidence that they did not intend to set up a hierarchy in the Church. The offices of the Church were not to be thought of as ascending grades in a scale of ecclesiastical status and authority, but distinct offices because they had been ordained as such by our Lord. We may question their interpretation of the New Testament, but that was their understanding of it. Often the pastoral office was extolled and honored far beyond its deserving, but essentially the various offices in the Church were distinct, and owned specific functions that had been God-given. In this sense, a deacon was not to be thought of as an ecclesiastical non-commissioned officer midway between the officers and the ranks. He, too, had his commission which was just as solemn and imperative for him as it was for any minister. The high regard that the Puritans had for all churchly orders is illustrated in the words of Jeremiah Burroughes, one of the Dissenting Brethren in the Westminster Assembly, when he declared that “once a man be chosen as an officer in the Church, all that power that ever any in that office had since Christ’s time, in any Church in all the christian world, or ever can have to the coming of Christ againe, falls upon him.”17 This would be as true for the deacon as it would be for any elder.

            I suggest that the Puritans had a valuable theological insight when they insisted that the deacon represented a distinct order in the Church, and that he should be a layman. For he was to be a layman, chosen and commissioned with a care equal to that exercised in the recognition and ordination of a minister; the deacon would both serve the Church and work within the world. Moreover, he was a man through whose leadership in the congregation the Church’s diakonia was to be expressed, her ministry of compassion to the world. Perhaps the most significant way forward eccesiologically in the Free Churches would be to recognize the implications of that basic insight today.

 

III. DEACONS AND DIAKONIA

Several factors combine to make a reappraisal of orders in the Church an urgent priority. The new ecumenical possibilities that have arisen since Vatican Council II, the interest in the laity as the People of God, biblical theology, and the sociological critique of the Church, all invite us to undertake a deeper and more searching examination of the Church’s ministry.18 Within such a study the role and purpose of the diaconate not only have a proper place, but could very well become the point on which the whole meaning of ministry turns.

            The time is favorable for such a re-study. The course of biblical and historical studies over the past half-century has proved that the ways in which we debated the nature of the Church in the past are unsatisfactory. They may bolster up our prejudices, but they do nothing to solve the ecumenical dilemma the Church faces. Whether we base our authority on literal appeals to the Church’s tradition or to literal appeals to the text of Scripture, we have converted few and solved nothing, and one feels on the basis of the biblical evidence that Canon B. H. Streeter’s oft-quoted but generally ignored comment is the only acceptable one: “in the words of Alice in Wonderland, ‘Everyone has won, and all shall have prizes.’”19 Or in the words of W. B. Blakemore, “what is needed is a conception that transcends all three of these historic doctrines of church polity, and points toward another kind of understanding which may serve a more ecumenical purpose.”20

            Perhaps the new basis, not for debate about church polities but for ecumenical dialogue about the doctrine of the Church, is to be found in biblical theology – an appeal, not to the letter of Scripture, nor to the letter of the Church’s canons, but to the nature of God’s redemptive work revealed in the Bible, and given to the Church as its ministry in the world. We are beginning to understand that what all wish to see in the Church is not the reproduction of a particular form of government, Catholic or Protestant, nor even to see established, in our own century, the Church structure of the first century, but rather a form and a ministry that can express the presence of the living Christ. We recognize that institutional forms, polity, ministry, cannot be ignored if we are to take the redemptive incarnation of our Lord seriously, but we insist that these must reflect and express the same Holy Spirit which directed the apostles and helped them to establish in the world of the first century the kind of worshipping and witnessing Church that they did. And therefore we are not concerned any longer with proving to ourselves, or to others, that this or that office has New Testament warrant, but with asking what particular need produced that office in the Church and caused it to take the form it did. To use the example of the diaconate, certainly deacons were appointed in New Testament times, but what were the particular needs that brought the office into being? What were the special duties that they undertook with regard to the Church’s worship, its social concern, and its evangelical outreach? Are we primarily concerned with maintaining an order of Christians called deacons, or are we concerned that the Church of the twentieth century should have within it those who can express these aspects of her life and mission?

            Of course, we are concerned here with a reappraisal of the whole doctrine of the Church, and not simply with any one order within it. But I suggest that at the heart of this reappraisal there must be a serious attempt to explore, for our own day, the meaning of diakonia (ministry, service) as that which defines the nature of the Church’s distinctive ministry. Indeed, it may be of some significance to note that at least one recent Anglican writer traces the beginning of the Church’s settled ministry, not to the apostles, but to the appointment of the first deacons.21 What is the relationship of diakonia in the New Testament to the New Testament deacons?

            The New Testament scholars must help us; but in our understanding of diakonia, for our own day, I suggest that the history of deacons and the diaconate in Protestant churches presents us with several important insights.

1.       The heart of the deacon’s work for the Church is in diakonia, and to the extent that this represents

the ministry of service, it is of the essence of all ministry in the Church. For this reason, if for no other, the ministry of deacons cannot be essentially different from other ministries in the Church. I have suggested elsewhere that Protestants must regard all ministries in the Church as dependent upon the ministry of the Church, i.e., all the forms of particular ministry are dependent upon that corporate ministry of reconciliation which the Church, as a ministering community, receives from its Lord, and which reflects his redemptive ministry among men.22 If diakonia is the expression of this, then the ministry of deacons cannot be fundamentally different from any other form of ministry in the Church, because all ministry must reflect the essential character of the Church’s corporate ministry to the world. In this sense I believe that what Dr. W. B. Blakemore said of the early Disciples in America was equally true of all Protestants who have approached the doctrine of the Church via restorationism – they have held to a threefold concept of the ministry in which the deacon has his proper place.

2.       On the other hand, I am less happy with the suggestion that a line should not be drawn between

clergy and laity, because I think it reflects a misunderstanding of the proper place that each has within the life of the Church. I would hold that, in making a distinction between an ordained eldership and lay deacons, Puritans reached a basic insight about the nature of the Church, and we entirely miss the point if we think of their distinction in terms of a higher or lower status. The important point to consider is that, although deacons were chosen with as much care as elders, and given a similar kind of ecclesiastical recognition, they were not ordained. Their leadership in the Church was fully acknowledged, but it was acknowledged as being exercised in a deliberately lay capacity, not, I suggest, as a concession, nor yet as an inferior grade in a clerical hierarchy, but as a deliberate matter of church order.

            This point is of particular importance if diakonia, ministry, is a calling in which the whole Church is involved, and not merely the function of the few, for what could point more significantly to that corporate vocation than a distinct order of lay representatives incorporated into the Church’s official ministry and called by that name? Therefore, I would maintain that the distinction between ordained elders and lay deacons, far from indicating clericalism, ought to be an expression of the dignity of the lay vocation, and should point directly to the ministry of the whole People of God.

3.       Taking their stand firmly on the duties given to the deacon in the New Testament, the Puritans

emphasized two functions as belonging distinctively to the diaconate. Deacons were required to serve tables, i.e., to distribute the elements to the people at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and they were responsible also for dispensing the charitable contributions of the Church.

            This latter duty deserves some comment, because this is the point where we may very well wish to think of new forms in which the concern might be expressed. Robert Browne, the sixteenth-century Separatist, called the deacons “Relievers,” “a person having office of God to provide, gather and bestow the gifts and liberality of the Church, as there is need.”23 We might set a more modern passage beside this, as we see the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. translating this concern into contemporary terms:

 

The board of deacons shall minister to those in need, to the sick, to the friendless, and to any who may be in distress, in accordance with the Scriptural duties of the office. There may be delegated to the board of deacons, under the direction of the session, certain specifically designated responsibilities relating to the development of the grace of liberality in the members of the church, to the devising of effective methods of collecting gifts of the people, to the finances and properties of the church, and to its evangelistic, missionary, and educational program.24

 

            This is a good statement, for it reflects the New Testament’s concern that the Church should share its material benefits and provide modern forms in which it can be expressed. Indeed, it illustrates the fact that, in our modern understanding of the deacon’s task, we must think of the Church’s compassion reaching out to the whole world. If we are to think in terms of a modern diaconate, we shall have to take into account the work of the deacons and deaconesses of European Protestantism, the Fraternal Workers, and those in Christian relief organizations, the members of the new Protestant religious orders that are springing up, and the medical, educational, and agricultural missionaries. The whole social and compassionate outreach of the Church is the expression of the Church’s diakonia. This is certainly not to rule out the work of local diaconates or to regard them as unnecessary, but simply to suggest that we need to supplement their work and witness at a time when we are increasingly forced to recognize that the work of the Church is one throughout the world.

             The local diaconate emphasizes one thing which more scattered forms might find more difficult to express. This is the unity between service and sacrament. There is certainly some significance in the fact that, in the person of its deacons, a Protestant church recognizes the ministry of its laity by giving them special duties at its central sacrament. But far beyond this, in taking the Bread and Wine and distributing them to the people, the deacon gives visible testimony to the fact that the diakonia of the whole Church draws its strength and takes its character from the sacrament of Broken Bread and Poured-out Wine. The ministry of service is our calling. This is the place where the Church corporately prepares itself for its ministry to the world, and this is the place where leadership can be shown only in service.

4.       There is one insight from the figure of the deacon in the New Testament which has not been

emphasized by the Church, Protestant or Catholic, except by a few evangelicals. If the deacons of the New Testament trace their origin to the appointment of the Seven in Acts 6,25 it is clear that beyond the formal duties connected with their appointment, they gave leadership to the Church in witness and evangelism. Stephen and Philip in some ways deserve to be regarded as the men who initiated the Church’s missionary expansion.

It is sometimes forgotten, however, that until Protestantism came under the influence of the great

evangelical revivals, it was not seriously interested in evangelizing outside its own borders,26 and by that time the arguments about scriptural polities had become fixed into a very definite mold. It is surprising, nonetheless, that when the Disciples revived concern about church polity as an expression of evangelism in the nineteenth century, the connection between the New Testament deacons and Church’s missionary outreach was missed. Perhaps it was because the deacon was, to them, so obviously an officer of the local church, or because they had already drawn such clear lines between their own preachers (pastors) and the evangelical mission of the apostles.

            In the modern period of church history, possibly the best example of the primitive diaconate at work in evangelism is the work of the Baptist lay preachers and churches as they traveled westward to the American frontier. Historian William Warren Sweet wrote:

 

The typical Baptist preacher on the frontier was a settler who worked on his land five or six days each week, except when called upon to hold week-day meetings or funerals. . . . There were two types of frontier Baptist preachers, licensed and ordained, and sometimes there were several ministers in a congregation, though generally one was designated as pastor of the flock. Licensing a preacher was the first step in the making of a minister after he had been permitted to “exercise his gifts” by vote of the church. When chosen to take charge of a regular congregation he was then ordained.27

 

What we call the office of such lay preachers is immaterial. In their evangelical zeal, in their practical concern to keep work on the farm and work in the Church together, they were truly representative of the Church’s diakonia. They remind us that one of the most certain duties of the deacon in the New Testament was his call to witness to the faith. This should remain in the forefront of any deacon’s call to serve, whether he exercises his ministry in the comparatively restricted society of his own home town, or in some wider sphere of action, for he is representative of the Church’s ministry in the world, a representative of the mission of the whole people of God in the society within which God has placed him.

            Implicitly, we have already raised the question whether the traditional forms in which the order of deacons appears in our churches are adequate to meet the needs of our contemporary world. Boards of deacons connected with local congregations can fulfill a vital role in the life and witness of that local church, but if we are concerned with Christian service in its widest application, is not the way open to develop many forms, and is not there scope for the exercise of many differing gifts? The United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. seems to be breaking from the traditional Protestant idea of a deacon when it suggests that “a deacon is a minister who serves the Church with the permission of the presbytery beyond the bounds of a local congregation. He is assigned to duties that are primarily evangelistic or administrative. The presbytery may authorize him to bear rule in the presbytery.”28 This, and another lengthy passage in The Nature of the Ministry, is an indication of the way in which one Protestant denomination is prepared to think about an old question – the diaconate – in a new way.29 But the accent is upon a form of the diaconate in which it will be an order of ordained ministry.

            I would have to place a question mark at this point, not because the issue has been decided otherwise – indeed, we have to recognize that, in all the Catholic branches of the Church, the office is always an order of the ordained clergy – but because I question whether the ordination of deacons best expresses the ecumenical doctrine of the Church that seems to be emerging from our understanding of biblical theology. I suggest it was insight and not stupidity that caused the Puritans to make the deacon’s office an essentially lay office in the Church, because in that office they were emphasizing at one and the same time the call of the layman to exercise a true churchly ministry, and also his responsibility to exercise that call specifically in the ministry of compassion and service.

            Today we are searching for new ways in which the corporate mission of the People of God can be made real to the Church’s membership; we want to discover new forms by which the leadership, which exists among us in many forms of endeavor, could be recognized by the Church and dedicated to its service; we wish to recognize the true vocation of those men and women who know themselves called to be lay, and who at the same time know themselves called also by God to carry out a very real ministry of compassion in the name of Christ, in the Church and in the world.

            Perhaps a new order of deacons could be such a vehicle. If we could strip from out traditional ideas the prejudices born of literalism or convention, and concentrate upon that essential ministry of the living Christ which the New Testament deacon expressed to the Church in his own generation, then we might recapture an idea of the diaconate that would be relevant to our world. Such deacons might be able to speak that contemporary word which the Church needs to speak, for their ministry would be cast in the mold of the one and only essential ministry, the ministry of the Incarnate Servant who went regularly to the synagogue to worship, and in the strength of that faith gave himself to the service of man in the highways and byways of the secular world.

 

NOTE

                Since this chapter was written in the Spring of 1965 a good deal has happened to reinforce some of the views which I then put forward. In particular, I have been intrigued to see how far those views coincided with the suggestions made in the Consultation on Church Union’s Principles of Church Union [Forward Movement Publications (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1966)]. Having admitted that “much further study is required for a clear delineation of this office,” the compilers go on to say: “Deacons should be given a share in the conduct of public worship and thus be enabled to exemplify, by their activity within the congregation as in the world, the interdependence of worship and service, and the encounter between the word of the Gospel and the needs of the world” (p. 53). I believe it is this relationship that the Protestant Churches have tried historically to maintain within this office.