The Office of Deacon (Presbyterianism, Pt. 8)

The office in its New Testament form was recovered to the church at the Reformation but has had a spotty history since. The church has sometimes valued the office and profited greatly from its ministry. At other times, the office has once again virtually disappeared.

Editor's Note: This article is part eight of a series adapted from talks given to Faith Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, a congregation of our denomination (PCA) and presbytery (Pacific Northwest Presbytery). We have retained specific references to that congregation to keep intact the flow of thought. 

The deacon is the third office of Presbyterian church government and the one that has, through the ages, had to struggle the hardest to retain its rights. In early Christianity, it was not long before the diaconate, together with the office of elder or lay ruler, had been absorbed by the ministry. By the middle of the patristic period and through the Middle Ages, the deacon was the lowest order of the ministry. The office in its New Testament form was recovered to the church at the Reformation but has had a spotty history since. The church has sometimes valued the office and profited greatly from its ministry. At other times, the office has once again virtually disappeared. 

It is perhaps fair to say that, while the Reformation restored the office of deacon, this office still waits to take its rightful place in the organization and ministry of the Christian church. It has certainly never taken its place alongside the offices of minister and elder as equally vital to the life and work of the church. Examples of this tendency to forget or to diminish the office of deacon abound. In Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology, a late 17th-century standard of Reformed theology and one of the most influential summaries of the Reformed faith ever written, the church and its government are treated at length, but the office of deacon is not even mentioned. Among the Puritans, it was common to think that when Paul says that deacons “who have served well gain an excellent standing” (1 Tim. 3:13), he meant that they would be promoted to the eldership. Once again, the diaconate was regarded as a lower order of church office—a kind of apprenticeship. When I came to Faith Presbyterian in 1978, in a fashion very typical of our churches then, the deacons were doing the janitor’s work and some of the deacons’ work was being done by the elders, but no one was doing the diaconate’s principal work. I am very happy to report that this has changed.

Though this has been often denied, it seems certain that the origin of the office of deacon is found in Acts 6:1–6. While the word deacon does not appear in this text, the related noun (diaconia) and verb (diaconein) do. What is more, if this text does not describe the institution of the diaconate, then there is no such description anywhere in the New Testament and an office of obvious importance in the early church (e.g., Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:8–13) remains completely unaccounted for. Further, the earliest materials of sub-apostolic Christianity indicate that the office of deacon was charged with the oversight of just the sort of charitable ministry that is described as the purpose of the new office being created in Acts 6. According to that text, this office originated in the need to ensure that the ministry of compassion and care was as diligently conducted as it must be in a Christian church whose founder not only commanded his followers to wash one another’s feet but who made it a principle of his eternal judgment of human beings that they care for orphans and widows, feed the hungry, and provide for the poor (Matt. 25:31–46). Such provision for the needy had always been the obligation of God’s people, and elaborate directions to ensure it were found in the Law of Moses. In the circumstances of the new epoch, however, other arrangements had to be made, and the establishment of the diaconate was the apostles’ way of ensuring that they would be made, in their own and every succeeding generation of the church. Understanding and believing the truth of the gospel, living in obedience to the commandments of God, and loving and serving the Lord by loving others are all often in the Bible said to be necessary for salvation (though, to be sure the second and third are the consequence of the first). It should not surprise us, then, that there are in the church offices of preaching, ruling, and exercising compassion. 

The apostles of Christ thought it right to appoint officers in the church to ensure that Christ’s people should forever be a community of the merciful, the compassionate, and the generous—and in this way bear eloquent witness to the gospel of grace

Another measure of the office’s dignity and importance is the fact that the qualifications for it are indistinguishable from the qualifications of either the eldership or the ministry (except an aptness to teach). In Acts 6, the first deacons were to be men “who were known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom.” It would be hard to pay any higher compliment to the character of a Christian man than to say that he was full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom. Surely, we want that to be true of our ministers and elders! Again, in 1 Timothy 3, it is not clear there is any distinction between the qualifications of character and Christian experience that pertain to the offices of elder and deacon. However, in 1 Corinthians 12:28 (“those able to help others”) and Romans 12:7 (“serving” is the word diaconia), there may be explicit mention of a spiritual gift that sets a man apart to the work of the deacon. If so, then there is in the New Testament a distinction between the fitness of a man for one office or the other. The same character is required for both, but the gifts differ.

Insofar as one of the rationales provided by the apostles in Acts 6 for the creation of this new office was that they should remain free to pursue their proper work of preaching and superintending the worship of the church, other responsibilities have been added to the diaconate for the same reason. Besides overseeing the church’s ministry of compassion, in most Reformed churches, the diaconate is responsible for the church’s finances and property. These assignments have been added precisely to prevent the church’s other officers from being distracted from their proper work. That makes it only the more necessary that deacons themselves never lose sight of their first and principal calling. It is only recently that the church has begun to think hard about the ways in which deacons might expand and make more effective the church’s charity. In a day of government welfare, the need to take a decisively Christian approach is all the greater. In the diaconate of Faith Presbyterian Church, this is a subject of ongoing discussion and investigation. 

That the apostles of Christ thought it right to appoint officers in the church to ensure that Christ’s people should forever be a community of the merciful, the compassionate, and the generous—and in this way bear eloquent witness to the gospel of grace—leaves us in no doubt how serious our Lord and Master was when he said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35) and “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27).

*It is an accident of history that, in English, the office and officer are spelled deacon while the council of deacons is spelled diaconate. In Greek, both words are spelled with an “i.”