Deaconesses, Home Missioners, and a Word Toward a Theology of Laity

Principle

The church has long had ministries that are permanent, consecrated, publicly accountable, and lay. They are not lesser ordinations, and they are not waiting rooms. They stand within the ministry of all the baptized, which is the church’s foundational ministry and not a reservoir from which clergy are drawn.

Background

A document about orders can give the impression that recognized ministry and ordination are the same thing. Our own church is the standing refutation.

“There shall be in The United Methodist Church the Office of Deaconess and Home Missioner” (¶ 1913.1). Not a program, not a certification: an office. Its purpose is “to express representatively the love and concern of the believing community for the needs in the world,” which is the same category, representation, that the previous sections used to say what an order is. And the people who hold it are “professionally trained laypersons who have been led by the Holy Spirit to devote their lives to Christlike service under the authority of the Church,” who are “consecrated and commissioned by a bishop.”

The details of how the office is constituted matter for everything that follows. Full-time service is the norm, meaning the person’s “entire vocational time” is given to the work. The appointment is fixed by the bishop and printed in the list of appointments in the annual conference journal, exactly as clergy appointments are. The conference secretary keeps a permanent record of everyone consecrated to the office. Deaconesses and home missioners are seated at annual conference with voice and vote as lay members. They enroll in a pension plan. They may take a leave of absence. Involuntary termination follows the church’s judicial procedures under ¶ 2702, the same chapter that governs chargeable offenses. And ¶ 1918 describes the relationship in the plainest possible terms: it “acknowledges a covenant of mutual commitment, accountability and support” between the church and the deaconess or home missioner.

A covenant. Mutual accountability. A permanent record. An appointment fixed by a bishop. A pension. A judicial process. Every one of those is a mark of a ministry the church takes with full seriousness, and all of it belongs to an office the church calls lay.

The history is long and mostly unknown to us. The office was created in the nineteenth century in connection with the women’s home missionary work, and the older Disciplines show how carefully it was constructed. A candidate had to be at least twenty-three, “a single woman or a widow,” a member in good standing who had “shown a fitness for this work by active service in some line of Christian work,” with a good education and a physician’s certificate. Her certificate was renewed annually. She was to relinquish “all other pursuits” and devote herself to the work. And, in a provision worth remembering, “No vows shall be required of any Deaconess.” This was to be a life given without being a life vowed.

The consecration rite is the part our church should know and does not. In the 1920 Discipline the service begins with a prayer to “O eternal God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who didst call Phœbe and Dorcas into the service of thy Church,” asking God to “look upon these thy servants who are now to be set apart to the office of Deaconess, and grant them thy Holy Spirit, that they may worthily discharge the work committed to them.” The candidates are told that “a door of usefulness has been opened for you,” that “released from other cares, you are to give yourselves without reservation to the service of the Lord of the vineyard,” and that “the Church now solemnly sets you apart for this special service.” Their charge is concrete and unglamorous: “to minister to the poor, visit the sick, pray with the dying, care for the orphan, seek the wandering, comfort the sorrowing, and save the sinning.”

Then the questions, and the first of them will sound familiar: “Do you believe that you have been led by the providence of God to engage in this work, and to assume the duties of this office?” Then a prayer that “the Spirit of the Living God descend upon you and abide with you evermore.” And then the moment itself. The consecrator takes the right hand of each candidate and says: “I admit thee to the office of a Deaconess in the Church of God, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

That rite does two things at once. It invokes the Holy Spirit. It sets a person apart. It admits her to an office, in the triune name, with a formula as solemn as anything in our books. And it marks the difference from ordination in the gesture: the right hand taken, not hands laid on the head. The church knew exactly what it was doing and said so with its body rather than by withholding the theology. That is a liturgical precision our licensing rite does not manage.

Two harder things belong here, and leaving them out would be dishonest.

The first is why this office existed in the form it did. For most of its history, the church that consecrated these women to give their whole lives to ministry would not ordain them. The requirement that a deaconess be a single woman or a widow meant that the price of a recognized full-time vocation was, for most of them, not marrying. It is not possible to tell the story of this office as simply a noble lay tradition. It is also the story of what the church built for women instead of ordaining them, and of the women who filled it with a ministry far larger than the box they were given.

The second is that we owe the diaconate to them. ¶ 328 says the distinctive ministry of the deacon “has evolved in United Methodism over many years,” and names the sources: “the continuing work of the deaconess, the home missionary, and the diaconal minister.” Our order of deacons stands on a lay foundation, and the church continues the office of deaconess alongside it.

The church already knows how to constitute a lifelong, consecrated, accountable, covenanted lay ministry. It does it for deaconesses and home missioners. And the comparison with our licensed ministry is not comfortable. A deaconess holds an office, is consecrated by a bishop, is appointed by a bishop and listed in the journal, has a permanent record kept, holds a covenant of mutual accountability, has a pension, is subject to the church’s judicial process, and sits in annual conference with voice and vote. A licensed local pastor holds a license renewed annually, void without an appointment, in a fellowship that offers support and is not charged to hold anyone accountable, whose credentials are surrendered when the appointment ends and whose retirement is classed with discontinuance.

The lay office is more securely and more honorably constituted than the licensed one. Whatever the church decides about ordaining those in local pastoral ministry, that comparison is a judgment on our arrangements, and it opens a possibility the debate rarely names: that a ministry might be recognized permanently, consecrated, covenanted, and held accountable, without being ordained, because we already do this and have done it for well over a century.

A word toward a theology of laity

This is a gesture, like the one toward a theology of conference, and for the same reason. The document this church most needs on ministry may not be about orders at all.

Everything in these pages rests on a claim made early and then mostly assumed: that baptism is a commissioning, and that the ministry of the baptized is real ministry rather than preparation for it. By Water and the Spirit says it outright. “Through baptism, God calls and commissions persons to the general ministry of all Christian believers,” and ordination “is grounded in the same baptism that commissions the general priesthood of all believers.” Our Discipline opens its account of ministry the same way, with the ministry of all Christians before any office is named.

If that is true, a theology of laity would have to say at least three things this document has not.

It would have to take seriously that Scripture gives the whole church the language our tradition reserves for its ministers. “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, that you may proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). Chosen, priestly, and commissioned to proclaim, said to a congregation of ordinary people. Any theology of laity that does not start there will end up describing volunteers.

It would have to give an account of vocation in the world which does not treat the workplace as a mission field and nothing more. The deaconess rite’s charge is instructive precisely because it is so ordinary: visit the sick, care for the orphan, comfort the sorrowing. A theology of lay vocation would have to say how such work is Christ’s work when it is done by an accountant or a nurse who was never consecrated to anything.

It would have to recover mutual oversight as a lay practice. The Methodist answer to how ordinary Christians grow was never a program. It was a company of people who met to watch over one another in love, and the class meeting was a lay institution led by laypeople. The section on the elder argued that the order of elders should recover that practice. The laity had it first, and lost it more completely.

And it would have to say what the church owes the layperson who will never hold any office. That person is not a resource, not a volunteer base, and not a candidate who did not proceed. If baptism commissions, they were commissioned, and the church owes them formation, accountability, and honor of the same seriousness it gives the ordained. We have not begun to arrange our life as though that were true.

Practice

Teach the office of deaconess and home missioner. Most United Methodists do not know it exists, which is a considerable achievement given that it has existed for well over a century and that our order of deacons descends from it.

When the church asks what to do about licensed local pastors, put the deaconess model on the table beside ordination and licensing. It may not be the answer. It is a real third option, it is ours, and it has a track record.

And stop describing lay ministry as the pipeline. A congregation that speaks of its laity chiefly as the source of future clergy has told its people that the ministry they are doing now is a stage. Baptism does not commission anyone to a stage.