Part Two: The Offices and the Practices

Part One asked what God is doing when God calls, and what an office in Christ’s church is. Part Two takes each of our offices and each of the practices attached to them and asks the same question of it. Every section is in three movements. The Principle states what I believe the church should be able to say. The Background gives the reasons, from Scripture, from Wesley, from our own history, and from what we pray. The Practice says what would follow.

One rule governs the Principles. None of them may be satisfied by pointing at what the Discipline currently authorizes. A principle that reads “an elder or a person authorized under the provisions of the Book of Discipline” has not stated a principle; it has pointed at a rule and called it a doctrine. Every Principle below is meant to be answerable to God rather than to our own legislation, which means that any of them could turn out to convict our legislation. Several do.

The Deacon

Principle

The deacon shares in Christ’s own ministry of service, and is ordained to embody and to focus, in the church’s life, the servanthood to which every baptized Christian is called.

Background

Start where our own ordination prayer starts. The bishop, with hands extended over those to be ordained deacon, thanks God “that in your great love you sent Jesus Christ to take the form of a servant, becoming obedient even to death on the cross,” and prays, “Give them a share in the ministry of Jesus Christ, who came not to be served but to serve.”

That prayer assumes something the church rarely says outright. Service is not a lesser activity that the church assigns to people who will not be doing the important things. Service is what God does. The Son takes the form of a servant, and the church’s diaconate exists because that form of divine action continues among us and God gives the church people through whom it continues. A deacon is not a person who has been given the humbler tasks. A deacon is a person through whom Christ goes on washing feet.

Scripture gives the office both its shape and its name. When the Greek-speaking widows were being overlooked, the twelve told the community to “select from among you… seven men of good report, full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business,” and the community chose them and set them before the apostles, “and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them” (Acts 6:3–6). The need was material and the remedy was an office, chosen by the congregation and sealed with prayer and hands. Paul greets a church “with the overseers and servants,” episkopoi kai diakonoi, as two recognized groups in a single line (Philippians 1:1). And he commends “Phoebe, our sister, who is a servant of the assembly that is at Cenchreae,” asking that she be received and assisted, “for she herself also has been a helper of many, and of my own self” (Romans 16:1–2). The word behind “servant” there is the same word. Our own historic rite for consecrating deaconesses knew it, and prayed to the God “who didst call Phoebe and Dorcas into the service of thy Church.”

That settles the first question and raises the second. If servanthood belongs to the whole baptized people, and it plainly does, then what makes the deacon’s servanthood an office rather than an intensity? The layperson who has run this congregation’s food ministry for twenty years is not doing something less than diaconal.

Our Discipline has the right word for the answer, and then does not do much with it. It says the church “instituted an order of ordained ministers to personify or focus the servanthood to which all Christians are called” (¶ 305). The Lima text says the same thing about ordained ministry generally: the ordained fulfill these functions “in a representative way, providing the focus for the unity of the life and witness of the community,” and it is explicit that the tasks “are not exercised by the ordained ministry in an exclusive way.”

Representative, not exclusive. That is the category we have been missing, and it does the work. The deacon does not perform the church’s servanthood on the church’s behalf, the way a delegate votes so that you do not have to. The deacon’s ordination makes visible, and holds before the congregation, something that is already true of all of them and is easily forgotten by all of them. A congregation with a deacon has a standing reminder in its own leadership that the gospel sends people outward, and it has someone whose particular charge is to make sure the reminder is obeyed. That is why the ministry is described as standing at the intersection of church and world, interpreting each to the other. The deacon is where the congregation’s attention is deliberately turned outward and kept there.

This also explains why a diaconate confined to the sanctuary has gone wrong. The Lima text names the failure precisely and says it happens in many churches: “the function of deacons has been reduced to an assistant role in the celebration of the liturgy: they have ceased to fulfill any function with regard to the diaconal witness of the Church.” A deacon whose whole ministry is inside the building is not a deacon who is being modest. Something the church intended has stopped happening.

Two honest difficulties belong here rather than in a footnote.

The first is that the questions I have just answered have not been settled ecumenically, and the churches know it. The Lima text lists them without pretending: “there is today considerable uncertainty about the need, the rationale, the status and the functions of deacons. In what sense can the diaconate be considered part of the ordained ministry? What is it that distinguishes it from other ministries in the Church? Why should deacons be ordained while these other ministries do not receive ordination?” Anyone who tells you the theology of the diaconate is obvious has not read the ecumenical literature. What I have offered is an answer, and it is our own church’s answer developed, but it is offered into a genuinely open conversation.

The second is closer to home. In 2020 the church authorized deacons to preside at the sacraments when it is contextually appropriate, and in 2024 that authorization stands (¶ 328). I am not arguing against it here. I am pointing out that we made a significant sacramental change without publicly revisiting the theology that had previously reserved presidency to elders, and that our own teaching document on Holy Communion, adopted in 2004 and still in force, describes deacons as “assisting the elders in the administration of the sacraments” and nothing more. Our practice moved and our teaching did not follow. This is exactly the pattern this document exists to name, and it should be uncomfortable that one of the clearest instances of it is a change many of us welcomed.

The order of deacons in its present form is younger than most United Methodists assume, and the history is worth having, because the church made real gains in it and paid a price nobody costed.

Before 1996 there was no permanent order of deacons among us. There was a transitional diaconate, a step people passed through on the way to elder’s orders. There was the diaconal minister, a lay office created in the 1970s, consecrated rather than ordained, which by 1992 the Discipline mentions well over a hundred times. And there were deaconesses, whose office is older than either.

In 1996 the General Conference created the deacon in full connection, and gave the diaconate what it had never had in American Methodism: a permanent order of its own, entered by ordination, to a lifetime ministry of Word and Service. That was a genuine achievement, and the diaconal minister office began to wind down as it took hold; the references thin from one hundred sixty-nine in the 1992 Discipline to eighty-two in 1996 and fifty-six by 2004.

The price is visible only if you know what the diaconate had been doing for two centuries. It had been the door through which ministers who were not going to itinerate could be ordained. Local preachers were ordained local deacons from 1789, and local deacons could become local elders from 1813, until 1976 closed that road. Associate members could still be ordained as deacons after 1976; the 1992 Discipline provides that “associate members are eligible for ordination as deacons but may not be ordained elders unless they qualify through probationary membership.” That provision is simply absent from the Discipline of 1996 and every one since.

So two routes to ordination for ministers rooted in a place were closed twenty years apart, in 1976 and in 1996, and each closing was a side effect of a reform aimed at something else. The reform that finally gave deacons an order of their own removed the last way a non-itinerant minister could be ordained among us. Nobody appears to have intended that, and no theological account of it survives.

Practice

Every congregation served by a deacon should be able to say, without consulting the Discipline, what their deacon is for. If the only available answer is a list of things the deacon helps with, the congregation has a staff member rather than an order.

Deacons should be deployed where the church meets the world, and appointed with that in view. When a deacon’s work drifts entirely inside the congregation’s own life, the annual conference and the cabinet should treat that as a matter to be examined, not as a convenience.

The church should give a public theological account of diaconal presidency at the sacraments, and it should begin by reading its own paragraph. ¶ 328 authorizes it twice, in two different registers. The first is qualified: deacons give leadership “in assisting the elders in administering the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion, or in presiding at the celebration of the sacraments when contextually appropriate.” The second is not qualified at all: “For the sake of extending the mission and ministry of the church and offering the means of grace to the world, the deacon is authorized to preside at the celebration of the sacraments. Presiding at the celebration of the sacraments involves taking responsibility to lead the gathered community in celebrating baptism and Holy Communion.”

Three things in that paragraph deserve the church’s attention.

The rationale given is missional. Sacramental authority is extended “for the sake of extending the mission and ministry of the church and offering the means of grace to the world.” That is need-based reasoning, and it is the same reasoning that has always justified licensing. The church has now used it to extend presidency to an order of ministry, which means the argument from missional need is no longer something we apply only to provisional arrangements. If it is a good enough reason here, the church should say what work it can and cannot do elsewhere.

The authorization carries no boundary. A licensed local pastor may preside “within and while appointed to a particular charge” (¶ 317.1). A deacon’s authorization in ¶ 328 has no such limit; the only softening is the phrase “when contextually appropriate,” which is a matter of judgment rather than jurisdiction. So the church now permits an ordained deacon, who does not pastor the congregation, to preside more freely than a licensed pastor who does. That may be right. It has not been explained, and the two paragraphs have never been read against each other in public.

And the Discipline still says something else, in the paragraph that defines the office. ¶ 303.2 names those who are ordained deacon as persons who “respond to God’s call to lead in service, word, compassion, and justice and equip others for this ministry through teaching, proclamation, and worship and who assist elders in the administration of the sacraments.” That clause is essentially unchanged from 1996 and 2004, when assisting was the whole of it. The change was written into ¶ 328 and the defining paragraph was never conformed, so the 2024 Discipline defines a deacon as one who assists elders with the sacraments and, twenty-five paragraphs later, authorizes the same person to preside at them.

And our teaching still says something else. This Holy Mystery, adopted in 2004 and never withdrawn, describes the deacon’s sacramental role as “assisting the elder in serving the Communion elements” and setting the table, and its principle for presidency names elders and those authorized under the Discipline. Our practice has moved and our teaching has not followed. Whatever the church decides, the present arrangement, in which the paragraph authorizes one thing and the teaching document describes another, is the least defensible of the available positions.

There is a further question the church should be willing to face rather than route around. The ecumenical tradition ties presidency at the table to oversight of the community: the one who presides is the one who gathers, teaches, and watches over this people. If that link holds, then extending presidency to deacons is a claim about the deacon’s relation to the gathered community, and the church should make it. If the link does not hold, then the church has changed its doctrine of presidency, and should say so plainly rather than by implication in a paragraph about diaconal leadership.

And in every service of Word and Table, the deacon’s liturgical role should be what our own Ordinal and Book of Worship describe: receiving the gifts, setting the table, and dismissing the people to serve. Those actions are a sermon about what the congregation is for, and they are wasted when they are treated as choreography.