Women Deacons: What the Bible Teaches

The priesthood and the eldership of the Old Testament and the ministry and eldership of the New Testament are unmistakably male offices. If the diaconate in the New Testament broke with this pattern, the change would have represented a dramatic revolution in biblical polity.

In our church, following the virtually universal practice of Christendom through the ages, the office of deacon has been reserved for men. It is not surprising, perhaps, that in our feminist age, there should appear sentiment in favor of opening the office to women. Even in the Presbyterian Church in America and among men who remain convinced that the Bible teaches that the ministry and the eldership are offices for men only, one finds seminary professors, ministers, and elders who favor the ordination of women as deacons.

Their argument, of course, is that the Bible itself does not reserve the office to men and, among other things, they point out such facts as these: Phoebe is called a deacon in Romans 16:1 (the word the NIV translates as “servant” is indeed the same word translated “deacon” in other places). In 1 Tim. 3:11, the word the NIV translates as “their wives” (as does the KJV and the ESV) could be translated as “women” and, in context, thus refer to women deacons. Further, it is argued that the male-only character of the ministry and the eldership, clearly taught in the Bible, derives from the biblical doctrine of the headship of the male and applies to those offices precisely because they are offices of authority and rule (e.g., 1 Tim. 2:12; 1 Cor. 11:3; Eph. 5:23). As the diaconate is not an office of authority, the male-only criterion does not apply.

None of these considerations, however, is as weighty as it may appear at first glance. Phoebe is indeed called a diakonos in Romans 16:1, but the word is the ordinary word for servant and is used many more times in the New Testament in that general sense than it is used to designate a church office. For example, it is this word that Mark employs to report the Lord’s remark to his disciples that “whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (10:43). The term is so flexible that it can be applied to apostles (2 Cor. 3:6) or to ministers and preachers (1 Tim. 4:6) because, when faithfully discharging their office, they are certainly servants of the Lord Jesus. Indeed, of some thirty uses of the noun diakonos in the New Testament, only three are unmistakably references to the office of deacon. 

The leadership of the church, on account of principles clearly, emphatically, and repeatedly taught in Holy Scripture and related to the fundamental structure of human life as God made it, is placed in the hands of men only.

In 1 Tim. 3:11, while it is theoretically possible that the reference is to women deacons and not to the wives of deacons, in the context, “their wives” is altogether the more likely meaning. The word employed is used earlier in the same paragraph of the wives of elders and is used in the following verse unmistakably of the deacon’s wife. It is an ordinary term for wife, and if it does not mean wife in 1 Tim. 3:11, it is the only place in that paragraph where it does not have that meaning.

Finally, the argument derived from the fact that the office of deacon is not an office of authority and, therefore, might as well be filled by women as men rests on a traditionally Presbyterian distinction between the offices of elder and deacon but on no teaching of the New Testament itself. As many times as one hears this distinction, one is reminded how little may be said in its favor. It is perfectly obvious that deacons exercise authority. Deacons control at least some of, if not all, of the church’s money. Deacons make decisions about the church’s ministry to individuals. All of this is the exercise of authority, and people affected by those decisions understand that very well. Fact is, the Bible never distinguishes the deacon from the elder or minister in terms of the respective “authority” of each office.

Much more to the point, there is, one would have thought, unmistakable evidence that the office of deacon was an office that was intended to be reserved for men only. First, it is worth remembering that, otherwise, all church office in the Bible is the province of men. The priesthood and the eldership of the Old Testament and the ministry and eldership of the New Testament are unmistakably male offices. If the diaconate in the New Testament broke with this pattern, the change would have represented a dramatic revolution in biblical polity. It is fair to expect that such a revolution would be clearly identified in the pages of Holy Scripture. That it is not is a weighty argument in favor of the natural assumption that the office of deacon, like all other church offices, is restricted to men.

Second, as reported in Acts 6:1–6, when they established the office of deacon, the apostles told the church to choose seven men. The word for “man” there is the Greek word anēr, a term that, more so than anthropos, designates a man in contrast to a woman. It is no surprise then that, in obedience to the apostles’ instructions, the church selected as the original deacons seven males. Each deacon has unmistakably a man’s name. This is all the more interesting in that the particular duty these men were to perform was ministry to widows. It is often alleged that the diaconate should contain women because of the need to minister to women. But in the first case, seven men were charged with the church’s ministry to its widows. It certainly seems a fair reading of Acts 6 to conclude that the apostles never entertained the idea that deacons would be anything other than men.

That is all the more likely a conclusion given the fact that the New Testament does bear witness to an order of women workers in the church, the order of widows mentioned in 1 Timothy 5:9–10. They are clearly not deacons! It seems entirely likely that this is the origin of the early church’s order of deaconesses (the first certain evidence for which appears in the third century). These were women—again, almost always widows, sometimes virgins—who served primarily the women of the church at their baptisms and when they were sick or poor. It stretches credibility to be asked to believe that there were women deacons in apostolic Christianity and a separate order of women workers.

Finally, the burden of proof rests very heavily on advocates for women deacons in that, not only is there no unambiguous biblical evidence for the practice and some definitive evidence against it, but the early church does not know of women deacons—a fact hard to account for if the addition of women to the government of the church in this way was one of the revolutionary developments of apostolic Christianity. Some parts of the early church had deaconesses* (they are found in the East but not the West), but they were never confused with women deacons. The deacons of sub-apostolic and patristic Christianity were, so far as the evidence goes, universally male.

It is an interesting fact—and one that should be carefully pondered by those in our circles advocating the opening of the office of deacon to women—that churches that have done so have regularly found that an unintended consequence is that diaconates rather soon become either heavily female or entirely so. 

The leadership of the church, on account of principles clearly, emphatically, and repeatedly taught in Holy Scripture and related to the fundamental structure of human life as God made it, is placed in the hands of men only. The diaconate is part of that leadership. We would assume that it was to be a male office, and that is, in fact, what we are taught in the New Testament.

*A deaconess was a totally different order from the ordained office of deacon.