Ideas for an expansion of the theological foundation of diaconal ministry

The work of John Collins has revolutionised understanding of diaconal ministry, giving it a Christological foundation that broadens it from a focus on humble service of caring for people in need to being a ministry of heralding the kingdom of God, with service directed before all else to God but with humans as the beneficiaries. This paper argues for a further development of the theological underpinning of diaconal ministry which recognises that the ministry of Jesus was empowered by the Holy Spirit and that he sent the Holy Spirit to empower his followers in their proclamation of the gospel. Strengthening the pneumatological foundation of diaconal ministry gives it a more secure Trinitarian foundation and an impetus for mission that could help to transform the mission of the church.

Keywords diaconate, theology, ecclesiology, Christology, pneumatology, mission

As at 6 th January 2017,

Deacons have been part in the public ministry of the church from its early beginnings yet, over subsequent centuries, the understanding of their ministry foundered. This is vividly illustrated by the Church of England which in 1974 was recommended to abolish deacons altogether, oversaw a temporary massive expansion of the Order in the 1980s which then contracted equally rapidly when women were ordained priests, and is now undergoing a more steady but active recovery of the ministry in some dioceses.

Diaconal ministry in different Churches and different countries has many common roots but varied expression. In 2013 the Roman Catholic Church had just over 43,000 deacons; about 6,000 in Latin America, although dioceses there and in Africa and Asia have been slow to ordain permanent deacons.1 All deacons are male and many are married. In addition to liturgical roles, they are ordained to

… transmit the word in their professional lives, either explicitly or merely by their active presence in places where public opinion is formed and ethical norms are applied – such as the social services or organizations promoting the rights of family or life...They may be entrusted with the service of charity in Christian education, in training preachers, youth groups and lay groups; in promoting life in all its phases and transforming the world according to the Christian Order.2

How they fulfil this vocation varies: in England in 1999 the 423 deacons were mostly assistants to priests, whereas in France the deacon has a wider, ‘hands on’, ministry which is often outside parochial boundaries and is given a personal Lettre de Mission by the Bishop at his ordination.3. In 2016, Pope Francis established a commission to investigate whether women might be ordained to the diaconate.

1 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/deaconsbench/2015/03/number-of-priests-permanent-deacons-worldwide-continues-to-grow/ accessed 27th August 2016 and https://alejandrodiazd.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/surveys-among-catholic-deacons-in-latin-america/ accessed 20th August 2016 and http://www.americancatholicpress.org/Cardinal_George_The_Bishop_and_His_Deacons.html accessed 27th August 20162 The Congregation for Catholic Development, The Permanent Diaconate. The Catholic Truth Society 1988.3 Diocese of Salisbury, The Distinctive Diaconate. Sarum College Press. 2003 p. 43

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At the Reformation both Luther and Calvin took the Seven in Acts 6 as the prototype of deacons. In 2016 the Church of Scotland, with Presbyterian polity, had 58 deacons ordained for service primarily in disadvantaged areas, to equip people, build bridges between church and world and contextualise the gospel in day to day living.4 They rarely have a liturgical role. The Presbyterian Church in the USA ordains deacons to lead the church in its ministries of compassion (distributing aid, caring directly for the poor, the sick, refugees, and prisoners), and justice (working for equity in society).5 They have a modest liturgical role. In England, the United Reformed Church follows the model that evolved in the 16th century Congregational Church in which elders assumed deacons’ role in relation to the poor.

In the Lutheran tradition, hundreds of deacons, mostly female, are primarily agents of the church’s social, charitable and pastoral outreach, often working from an institutional base and with government funding. The various Nordic Lutheran churches hold different understandings of whether diaconal ministry is an ordained ministry.6 Most deacons are stipendiary and, in some countries, funded by the government to deliver welfare services for which qualifications in social work, healthcare or other caring professions are required. While in some countries, like Sweden, the deacon is normally ordained and anchors this outreach and caring work in the liturgy, in others this link between caring work and worship is more tenuous and thus implies a different ecclesiology as diaconal ministry is more a social service than an expression of the church’s identity and mission. In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America deacons are committed to service in and for the church and have responsibilities for public works of mercy, witness and worship; while not ordained, their service in the liturgy reflects their tangible, actual service in the world.7

The United Methodist Church in the United States ordains deacons to extend the witness and service of Christ’s love and justice in the world and connect the church with the most needy, neglected and marginalised. They equip all Christians to fulfil their call to Christian service.8 In England, the Methodist diaconal order, which was reopened in 1986, had just over 100 active deacons by 1999, many serving in difficult areas. Deacons describe themselves as linking together aspects of presence, service, discernment, witness and enabling others. They come alongside people wherever they are, interpreting where God is in every situation and getting involved, asking what it means to be a servant in a particular place and then doing it.9. Uniquely, the diaconate is also a Religious Order which integrates deacons’ active and contemplative life and is ‘a mission focused, pioneering religious community committed to enabling outreach, evangelism and service in God's world.’10

The Orthodox Churches have retained the diaconate to a greater degree than other churches, but it has ceased to have any charitable functions, now being primarily a liturgical ministry in the Eucharist with ability to sing being a vocational qualification. A consultation in

4 http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/serve/ministries_council/partnership_development/the_diaconate accessed 27th August 20165 http://oga.pcusa.org/section/mid-council-ministries/ministers/ordination/ accessed 27th August 20166 The Diaconate in Porvoo. Background notes for the January 2006 consultation on the Diaconate7 http://www.mnys.org/assets/1/7/Diaconate.Guidelines.2015.pdf accessed 27th August 20168 http://www.gbhem.org/clergy/deacons-and-diaconal-ministers/serving accessed 27th August 20169 Andrew Orton. Making Connections: Exploring Methodist Deacons’ Perspectives on Contemporary Diaconal Ministry. Executive Summary. The Methodist Church, Durham University and the Wesley Study Centre. 2016, p310 http://methodistdiaconalorder.org.uk/ accessed 27th August 2016

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1988 looked to expand this ministry by reviving the order of deaconesses and restoring the original ministry of service alongside liturgical responsibilities.11

The diaconate is stronger in some churches of the Anglican Communion than in others.12 Following the revival of diaconal ministry fifty years ago in the Episcopal Church of the USA, the Association for Episcopal Deacons’ 350 members are ordained to ‘serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely ... to interpret to the church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world ... to make Christ and his redemptive love known by your word and example ... and to show Christ's people that in serving the helpless they are serving Christ himself.’13 In Australia the ordained diaconate is now flourishing, and in Canada, where the diaconate was revived in the 1980s, there were some 300 active deacons by 2014 with a liturgical, enabling and ambassadorial ministry.14

This diversity of ecclesiology and practice, with its creative tensions between care and worship, nevertheless expresses some common roots. Many of the recent changes have been in response to recent developments in biblical scholarship for which the Roman Catholic scholar John Collins was the catalyst and which exposed the paucity of biblical, theological and ecclesiological underpinning of diaconal ministry. This paper, which focuses on diaconal ministry in the Church of England but I hope has wider interest, builds on the now widely-accepted Christological understanding of diaconal ministry which Collins reinvigorated. It proposes that this should be complemented by a greater and more explicit pneumatological foundation for diaconal ministry which would both help to underpin the Ordinal and encourage deacons as key players in the Church’s evangelistic proclamation of the Kingdom of God.

The deacon: a theological and ecclesiological conundrum?

The rediscovery over recent years, albeit in rather patchy ways, of the ministry of the deacon as a distinctive ministry within the Church of England is a welcome recovery of a vibrant and vital ministry in the early church that had almost disappeared in the Middle Ages, surviving largely in attenuated form as a ministry of convenience in universities where ordination was a requirement for academic advancement. It never recovered from that distortion and diminishment, although the Reformers recovered the concept of deacons serving the poor and needy. Nevertheless, in the post-Reformation period, most people in diaconal orders were fulfilling a different primary vocation that was enabled by diaconal ordination. The Ordinal in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) refers, rather condescendingly to contemporary ears, to the diaconate as an ‘inferior office’, albeit for the honour of God and the edification of his church, and presumes that deacons who behave themselves well may be found worthy to be called to higher ministries in the church. Described like that, it becomes hard to provide a clear theological rationale for such a ministry.

The nineteenth century Church of England faced further ecclesiological confusion about diaconal ministry which then comprised about 10% of all ordained ministry.15 Early in that century it was promoted to encourage men from the ‘inferior classes’ or ‘the class of the

11 Ecumenical Patriarchate Inter-Orthodox Theological Consultation, Rhodes 1988. VIII. 32,3412 http://www.diakonia-world.org/en/main/members.shtml accessed 27th August 201613 The Book of Common Prayer, The Church Hymnal Corporation 1979, p. 54314 D. Michael Jackson, The Diaconate Renewed: Service, Word and Worship. 2015, pp. 17-27.15 A full account is given in Francis Young, Inferior Office? A History of Deacons in the Church of England. Cambridge: James Clark and Co, 2015. See also The Faith and Order Advisory Group of the Church of England, (FOAG) The Mission and Ministry of the Whole Church. 2007, available online at https://www.churchofengland.org/media/1229854/gsmisc%20854.pdf accessed 2nd January 2016 and Christine Hall, The Deacon in the Church of England in Gunnel Borgegård and Christine Hall (editors) The Ministry of the Deacon 1: Anglican-Lutheran Perspectives. Uppsala: Nordic Ecumenical Council 1999 pages 181-247,

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commonality’ to serve and evangelise among their lower middle class peers and to try to stem the exodus to the non-Conformist and Roman Catholic Churches. 16 New innovations in lay ministry followed: Deaconesses, Readers and the Church Army emerged alongside revived Religious Orders as responses to the needs of urban society. The Church knew it needed to reconnect with and evangelise the poor but apparently did not think through the ecclesiological foundation or the relation of lay to ordained ministry.

This situation continued into the twentieth century, culminating in a proposal to abolish the diaconate in 1974 followed by the massive expansion of the diaconate in the 1980s when women were ordained and it became, effectively, a holding container while the Church agonised over the priestly ministry of women. 17 By default, it became yet another expression of an order of ministry in search of a theological and ecclesiological foundation and it is a good thing it did not find it because, at the time, it was more about what deacons were not and, in the case of women, could not be, than it was a distinctive and vital ministry in its own right. When women were ordained priest, a smaller group of deacons remained who were confident in their diaconal vocation. Serendipitously, this coincided with the new theological insights and ecumenical interest in the diaconate as John Collins’ work from the Roman Catholic Church came to the fore.18

In practice, in the Church of England, the default attitude remains that diaconal ordination is primarily a necessary stepping stone to ordination as a priest.19 Many priests experience their (wrongly described) ‘diaconal year’ as training for priestly ministry rather than a time to inhabit diaconal life. This lacuna in understanding the positive role and ministry of a deacon in the threefold order of ministry which the Church of England has received results in few diaconal role models for the Church for would-be deacons. To a large extent, we still live with this untidy and unresolved legacy which expressed itself in 2001 when the General Synod failed to grasp the distinctiveness of diaconal and Reader ministries and, effectively, side-lined a report on the ministry of deacons, ‘For such a time as this’,. 20

The Bishop of Salisbury then commissioned a working party, which I chaired, which produced the 2003 diocesan report, ‘The Distinctive Diaconate’. 21 The same year also saw a report in the Diocese of Chichester.22 In 2007, in response to the demise of ‘For such a time a this’, the Faith and Order Advisory Group (FOAG) of the Church of England published a broader report ‘The Mission and Ministry of the Whole Church’ which addressed the interrelationship of various ordained and lay ministries and affirmed the place for distinctively diaconal vocations. 23

16 A Presbyter of the Church of England, Reasons for the Restoration of the Order of Deacons. London: Francis and John Rivington, 1845 pages 7-8. Quoted in Young op cit page 6917 Church of England Advisory Council for the Church’s Ministry Deacons in the Church. London: CIO 1974 18 John Collins, Diakonia: Reinterpreting the Ancient Sources, Oxford: OUP 1990 and John Collins, Deacons and the Church, Leominster: Gracewing and Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 200219 In previous centuries, sometimes the two ordinations were virtually coterminous and so the resulting priest had no experience of what it is to be a deacon. Francis Young’s detailed research indicates that in 1590 nearly all ordinations of his sample of Cambridge alumni took place on the same day. Young, op cit pages 19-26. See also Mary Tanner and Stephen Platten, Deacons in the Ministry of the Church: A Report to the House of Bishops of the General Synod of the Church of England. London. Church House Publishing 1988, page 1620 Church of England Working Party of the House of Bishops, For such a time as this. London: Church House Publishing, 200121 Diocese of Salisbury, The Distinctive Diaconate. Salisbury: Sarum College Press 200322 Diocese of Chichester, Deacons in the Church: Report of a Diocesan Working Party. Chichester: Diocese of Chichester 2003.23 FOAG op cit

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What has gone largely unremarked in the Church of England and stimulates this paper is the significant redefinition of the diaconate in 2005 with the adoption of the new Common Worship Ordinal. It is not widely recognised that the Church of England is in new territory in relation to diaconal ministry because the Common Worship Ordinal gives a new description of the diaconate. 24 The BCP’s emphasis on diakonia as essentially humble service had survived into the Alternative Service Book (ASB) Ordinal, along with the concept, if not the terminology, of inferiority. Drawing on Collins’ work, this was reshaped radically in the draft Common Worship Ordination service, with which we worked when preparing the 2003 Salisbury report, by the description of the deacon as an ‘ambassador’ and ‘herald’ of Christ’s kingdom. 25 While both heralds and ambassadors represent their sending authority, heralds announce a message entrusted to them but do not carry the authority of an ambassador who can interpret and respond on behalf of his or her commissioning authority. Unfortunately, the concept of ambassadorship did not survive the draft Ordinal but ‘herald’ remains. Common Worship consolidated changes first introduced by the ASB, removing references to the possibility of future priestly ordination, thus restoring the diaconate to a full ministry in its own right, and modelling diaconal ministry on the example of Jesus Christ rather than on Stephen as in the BCP, a legacy that survives in the Reformed Churches. Significantly, the ordination prayer includes an invocation of the Holy Spirit by the Bishop when laying hands on the deacon. Ten years on we must ask if this expansion of the understanding of deacons is evident in the church.

In 2013, I was approached by the Diocese of Salisbury to revisit its report along with some of the members of the original team and some deacons. This paper, an earlier version of which was presented to an ecumenical gathering of deacons in York in November 2014, emerges from that further thinking, especially the theological underpinning of diaconal ministry. In doing this, I have been challenged Joe Cassidy’s address to the Diaconal Association of the Church of England (DACE) in 2006 in which he threw out some tantalising ideas.26 Rereading Acts 6 and following the Book of Common Prayer’s tradition of treating Stephen as a model for diaconal ministry, even though he recognised that Stephen is not named as a deacon, he had a timely warning that has gone largely unheeded. He suggested that there was a risk that the early Church might have quickly spiralled into irrelevance by its not caring enough about those who were unjustly treated in its very midst, by not addressing people’s actual concerns, and that the church is in the same situation of ‘spiralling into irrelevance’ today. He had a solution: the diaconate.

If deacons don’t do what deacons need to do, then the Word won’t get preached. … It’s not optional. It’s not a side-issue. It’s really that important. If the widows are not treated justly, if other key tasks aren’t done, then the community won’t work properly, and the mission of the Church will be subverted. But why ordain? … Why make such a formal fuss?

… It seems to me that they formalised it because such service cuts to the heart of the Gospel, to the heart of what it means to be Church. … They evidently saw this sort of service as being central to the life of the emerging community. Hence the emphasis on

24 Published in 2007 as The Church of England, The Ordination of Deacons, London: Church House Publishing, 2007, available on line https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-worship/.../texts/.../ accessed frequently, most recently 2nd January 201625 Collins’s work has been described by Paul Avis as ‘having a seismic effect on the understanding of diaconal ministry’ Paul Avis, A Ministry Shaped by Mission, London: T and T Clark 2005, p. 10526 This paper is dedicated to Joe, a colleague and friend, whose untimely death in 2015 meant he never lived to see his dream fulfilled.

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the ‘deacons’ being filled with the Holy Spirit. The work of service was central to what the Holy Spirit was doing in that community.27

If that is the challenge, how do we approach it theologically?

Within the context that the world is created, sustained and loved by God, the incarnational example of Christ’s servanthood has shaped recent thinking on diaconal ministry. All Christian ministry and engagement with the world flows from the incarnation. Yet, over the centuries we have largely lost Jesus’s radical, transformative vision of a world made whole as God intended it, settling too often for a truncated concept of the Kingdom of God derived from a tenuous theological grasp of God’s ways with the world. There is difficult truth in Nicholas Lewis’s observation,

Judging from church history, we might painfully conclude that the Kingdom of God will always be a mere reflection of the everyday values of congregational or social systems – the Body of Christ made in our own complacent image. But surely we know such characterisations only attest to our limited vision, falling far short of the creativity of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God.28

We have to ask ourselves, what does animate and galvanise the church’s ministry? Surely it should be more than reaction to the current proclivity for analyses of our statistical decline? What so electrifies the people of God that we cannot help but proclaim the good news of the coming of the kingdom of God? What are the underlying theological understandings of the Church’s sharing in God’s activity in the world? What is the vision of the kingdom of God that drives the Church’s ministry? What contributes to a theological understanding of the ministry of deacons in the Church and in the world? And, in the context of this paper, where do deacons fit into all this? Building on the wisdom and insights of this Christological foundation and recognising the Holy Spirit’s empowering of the ministry of Jesus Christ, without which he could not have set his example of servanthood or proclaimed the proximity of the kingdom of God (Mark 1.14-15), I believe that the work of the Holy Spirit should be made more explicit in the theological underpinning of diaconal ministry.

The Christological foundation of diaconal ministry

Developments in the early church’s evolving structures of ministry are detailed elsewhere.29 In relation to deacons, by the turn of the second century, before there was any developed Trinitarian theology, the Church perceived bishops as representing the Father whilst deacons represented Christ. Early in the second century, by which time the church also had presbyters, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, wrote to the Trallians throwing light on the ministry of deacons and their contribution to the essence of the church,

And those likewise who are deacons of the mysteries of Jesus Christ must please all men in all ways. For they are not deacons of meats and drinks but servants of the Church of God. …[L]et all men respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, even as they should respect

27 Joseph Cassidy, The Renewed Diaconate. Paper given at the AGM of the Diaconal Association of the Church of England, 4th February 2006. I am grateful to the Revd Roy Overthrow for providing me with a copy.28 Nicholas Lewis, The Kingdom of God: Fantastic Voyage in Reflections, New Haven: Yale Divinity School Fall 2015, p. 4629 FOAG op cit chapter 2. See also James Barnett The Diaconate, A full and equal order. New York, Seabury Press 1981, and Ormonde Plater, Many Servants, an Introduction to Deacons, Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004

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the bishop as being a type of the Father and the presbyters as the council of God and as the college of Apostles. Apart from these there is not even the name of a church.30

Ignatius also wrote to the Magnesians,

Take care to do all things in harmony with God, with the bishop presiding in the place of God, and with the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles, and with the deacons, who are most dear to me, entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ, who was with the Father from the beginning and is at last made manifest.31

How did Ignatius and the early church define ‘the business of Jesus Christ’? Ignatius related it to the Father, saying the Son was with the Father from the beginning. Ignatius’s reference to not being deacons of meats and drinks suggests that even by the early second century the ministry of deacons was being linked to, if not constrained by, the only specifically reported ministry of the Seven – who were not even named as deacons – in Acts 6: the distribution of food to widows in the church. This ignored any other ministry these men had, despite Stephen being described as performing signs, wonders and prophetic proclamation and Philip being an evangelist (Acts 6.8-14, 8.26-40). Ignatius had to correct the undue narrowing of the ministry of deacons: anything they did with meat and drink was subsumed into their primary, Christ-centred ministry which depended on the Holy Spirit’s empowering.

As presbyters assumed greater liturgical roles in the local churches (by the fourth century being referred to as ‘priests’, thus downplaying the priesthood of the whole church), deacons became assistants not to bishops but priests. By the Middle Ages, the sacramental ministry of priests in the Mass resulted in priests, rather than deacons, being perceived as representing Christ. This diminishment of theological and ecclesiological understanding of diaconal ministry left deacons almost as ministerial appendages. John Collins’ work in the 1990s, by reinvigorating the primarily Christological theological underpinning of diaconal ministry, has returned it to its early roots. The exemplar and focus is Jesus Christ and deacons draw people – monarch or misfit, lovable or loveless – into relationship with God through Jesus Christ who invites us to call his Father ‘our’ Father.

As the dust settles, there has been exploration of the implications. Given Ignatius’s insight that the deacon represents Jesus Christ, David Stancliffe wrote,

This saving activity of Incarnation, Redemption and sanctification is given visible focus in the life of the Church by the three historic orders of ministry. … The incarnation is the foundation of God’s redeeming activity. It comes first. ‘That which God did not assume, he did not redeem’ says Gregory of Nazianzus, making it clear that for God to change people, he needed first to engage with us and share human life. In the same way, the ministry of the deacon is the foundation of all ordained ministry. … The deacon focuses this sense of God sharing our life and engaging with us directly by making God’s incarnation, his being rooted in human life, central to the Church. 32

Stancliffe argues that just as there cannot be resurrection and new life without first there being incarnation so, expressing the Trinitarian life of God who created the world, redeemed it through Jesus Christ and, through the Holy Spirit, is active in the world today, reaching out to save rather than to oppress, there cannot be transformative ministry in the world unless there is first engagement with the world. This more expansive and outgoing perspective calls the deacon to be the visible sign of what the Church is called to be, living the mission of God through deep, life-giving engagement in the world today and leading others in 30 Ignatius, Epistle to the Trallians 2.3 - 3.131 Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 6:132 David Stancliffe in The Distinctive Diaconate, p. 6

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that mission. Indeed, the Church of England Ordinal now describes deacons as being ordained so that the people of God may be better equipped to make Christ known.

What this means in practice is described by Collins as a call to share in Christ’s servant ministry. In an approach to the texts that is more nuanced than is sometimes summarised, he notes that Jesus uses a simile: he is ‘as’ one who serves, he does not literally fetch and carry things in menial service but his service is laying down his life for others (Mark 10.45). The next question is, ‘Who is being served?’ In the context of the slave or servant, it is the master of the servant who orders the servant to act, rather than the recipient of that service. Paula Gooder provides the helpful contemporary example of a waiter in a restaurant who follows the orders of his or her employer: their job description requires them to serve customers well, so they do not care for a customer because they are kind (although they may be) but because they are employed to do so and are answerable to their boss. Gooder’s conclusion is that ‘service is more about carrying out orders than it is about looking after others (this may come into service but is secondary.)’ 33 The FOAG report sums it up, ‘Collins’ proposal changes the focus from what is done (ie humble service) to for whom it is done (i.e. who sends the diakonos.)’34

This example puts flesh on the bones of Ignatius’ teaching that the deacon is a servant of the church of God, not a deacon of meat and drink. Kind actions express our service to God of which humans are the beneficiaries. Jesus’s parable about the sheep and the goats points to this same insight that our service of others is in fact service of God: ‘As you did – or did not – do it to the least of these you did –or did not - do it to me.’ (Matthew 25.40,45).

Collins discusses the Church’s tendency to elide different forms of service thus prompting the assertion that deacons should adopt a ministry of menial service directed towards others, a narrowing that Ignatius, emphasising the deacon as being entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ, would have refuted vigorously. Avis bluntly describes as ‘inept’ the idea that Paul uses diakon- words to describe service to the community rather than his God-given mandate to proclaim the mystery of Christ. 35 As is now well-known, Collins draws on meanings of diakonos in contemporary secular society which can be summarised as deacon as ambassador, attending to and entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ, a person on mission, a messenger, making connections, building bridges, faithfully delivering his or her mandate. This is indeed someone who is ‘entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ’ rather than someone in an ‘inferior office’. So, Paul understands himself as a diakonos with the Lord’s commission (Romans 1.1) set apart for the gospel and, in Colossians (1.18), he is described as ‘a servant of this gospel’ rather than servant of the hearers of that gospel.

God’s life-giving ways with the world

The gospel that deacons serve is world-changing. While as Christians we believe that God is Trinity and that creation and salvation history are the work of the Trinity, we tend to focus on Father and Son, overlooking the Holy Spirit’s presence and work. God is first revealed as creator: God spoke and worlds came to be, God made the heavens and the earth, then a living being in God’s image. God’s instinct in relation to creation is to bring life. So the life-giving Spirit swept over the face of the waters (Genesis 1.2); God breathed life into the human creation so that man became a living being (Genesis 2.7) just as breath came from the four winds, entering the slain in Ezekiel’s vision and they lived (Ezekiel 37.9). The psalmist rejoiced that ‘When you send forth your Spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.’ (Psalm 104.30).

33 Paula Gooder, Diakonia in the New Testament, a dialogue with John Collins. Porvoo Consultation 2006, published in Ecclesiology, Volume 3, Issue 1, pp. 33 – 5634 FOAG op cit p. 2335 Avis, op cit p. 110

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Isaiah describes the work of the Spirit to bring righteous judgement of the poor and decision with equity for the meek, peace, wholeness and joy (Isaiah 11-12), justice for the nations, care for the vulnerable and people at their tether’s end who are described as bruised reeds and dimly burning wicks (Isaiah 42.1-4). The breath and Spirit of God brings light to the nations, liberty for captives, and is eye-opening for the blind (Isaiah 42.5-7, 16). The Spirit does this through humans, an example being Micah who was empowered by the Spirit to declare justice and to call people to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God (Micah 3.8 and 6.8).

Luke attributes Jesus’s conception to the Holy Spirit (Luke 1.35); Elizabeth’s outburst of praise occurred when the Holy Spirit filled her and she recognised the work of God in Mary and herself, a woman hitherto disgraced and secluded (Luke 1.42, 25). Mary’s Magnificat echoes the Old Testament prophets as she responded to the news of God’s coming among us in the world, taking human flesh, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things, helping his servant people, scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts, bringing down the powerful from their thrones, sending the rich away empty (Luke 1.46-56). Similarly, the Holy Spirit inspired Simeon in his waiting for and recognition of the Messiah and his prophetic greeting of the child (Luke 2.25-35).

Jesus’s baptism was a manifestation of the Trinity, although the term was then unknown. The Spirit descended on him before driving him (Mark 1.12-13) or leading him (Luke 3.21-22, 4.1-2) into the wilderness. Jesus returned to Galilee proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God (Mark 1.14-15), doing the Spirit-empowered works described by Isaiah (Luke 4.14-18). He called disciples to become apostles, sharing his mission, empowered by the presence of the Spirit of their Father (‘your father’, not just ‘my father’) speaking through them (Matthew 10.19-20). There are anticipations of the ministry of deacons in the apostles’ blend of proclamation of the good news with caring and life-giving ministry (Matthew 10.5-8). Having prayed to the Father to send the Holy Spirit in his name, Jesus, after his resurrection and ascension, sent the Spirit to bear witness to him and to empower the fledgling church in its mission (Luke 24.48-49, John 20.21-22). The Spirit takes what is Christ’s, declares it to his disciples and glorifies Christ; proving the world wrong about sin, righteousness and judgement (John 16.8,14). The Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, in its report ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit’ reminds us that it is the Holy Spirit who works to bring about expressions of the Kingdom of God in the world today, forming people who, made in the image of God and renewed by the Spirit of God, embody the kingdom of God, ‘The Spirit’s work is to form a Christ-like humanity, not simply to spread abroad sensations of the transcendent; to create the relationships that constitute the Kingdom of God, not to nurture individual intensity.36

Although the early church had not yet developed a doctrine of the Trinity, it knew about this mutual love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit into which it had been drawn and which motivated its proclamation of the good news.

The Kingdom of God: the deacons’ proclamation

When ordaining deacons, the Bishop reminds the church that deacons are ordained to be heralds of Christ’s kingdom, proclaiming the gospel in word and deed, as agents of God’s purposes of love.37 The beneficiaries of the Spirit’s work are the vulnerable people described by Isaiah. With that context in mind and as the Church of England devotes more resources and energy to mission, some earlier writing on the diaconate, which shifted the focus of diaconal ministry to the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, bears being revisited. Robert Hannaford,

36 The Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, We Believe in the Holy Spirit London: Central Board of Finance of the Church of England, 1993 p. 6037 The Church of England 2007 op cit

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writing in Christine Hall’s book, ‘The Deacon’s Ministry’ one of the earliest contributions to the revived debate about the diaconate, drew attention to the diaconate as a powerful sign of the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the Church. He wrote,

It belongs to the diaconal office to be a sign both of the new age of the kingdom already breaking out in the ministry of the Church and also of the call for the Church to be ever more closely conformed to the image of the servant Messiah. The diaconate is therefore a powerful sign of the relationship between the kingdom of God and the Church. It signifies both the presence of the Kingdom in the Church’s ministry and also something of the transcendent demand of the Kingdom addressed to the Church. 38

Noting that the priesthood and episcopate tend to stress the continuity of the Church with the Kingdom, Hannaford suggests that the diaconate is needed as a sign of the discontinuity, a reminder that the Kingdom is not of this world. If works of charity are signs of God’s Kingdom at work in the ministry of Jesus then, ‘The full import of the diaconal ministry of charity is therefore lost unless it is also seen as a powerful sacramental focus for our faith in the new age of God breaking into the present.’39

Hall’s contribution to the ecumenical Porvoo consultations on the Ministry of the Deacon explored the interface between the deacon’s liturgical ministry and the ministry of social engagement. She suggested there needs to be ‘recognition of the integrity of diaconal ministry in liturgy and social engagement, and a realisation of what this integration signifies for the church as a whole.’40 She quotes Stanley Harakas’ observation that in the 1980s the Orthodox tradition began to speak of ‘the liturgy after the Liturgy’ to describe the continuing ‘Eucharistic dynamic’ through which the Holy Spirit incites the Church to live a Christologically and pneumatologically fashioned life.41 Harakas wrote,

In each culture the eucharistic dynamics lead to a ‘liturgy after the Liturgy’, i.e. a liturgical use of the material world, a transformation of human association in society to koinonia, of consumerism into an ascetic attitude towards creation and the restoration of human dignity. Thus, through ‘liturgy after Liturgy’, the Church, witnessing to the cosmic dimension of the salvation event, puts into practice, daily and existentially, its missionary vocation.42

Essentially, Hall understands the deacon as being ‘at the fulcrum where Church and Kingdom intersect … [I]n the liturgical actions of the deacon at the Eucharist, itself the foretaste of things to come, the integration of the present with the eschatological perspective is revealed.’43

All this places diaconal ministry firmly under the Spirit’s life-changing influence, leading or driving people out in the proclamation of the gospel, bringing new life in weary places. The deacon who models the Spirit-filled life in church and world then shares the work of the Holy Spirit through the liturgy: proclaiming the gospel of the coming of the kingdom of God here on

38 Robert Hannaford, Towards a Theology of the Diaconate in Christine Hall (editor) The Deacon’s Ministry Leominster: Gracewing 1991 pp. 38-3939 Hannaford, op cit40 Christine Hall, The Liturgical-Social Axis of the Deacon’s Ministry in Gunnel Borgegård, Olav Fanuelsen and Christine Hall (editors) The Ministry of the Deacon: Ecclesiological Explorations 2.Uppsala: Nordic Ecumenical Council 1999, p. 8641 Hall, ibid p. 9642 Stanley Harakas, Living the Faith: the Praxis of Eastern Orthodox Ethics. Minneapolis Light & Life Publishing Company, 1992, page 20, quoting I. Bria (ed) Martyria / Mission: the Witness of the Orthodox Churches Today. Geneva: Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, World Council of Churches, 1980 pp. 66-7143 Hall, op cit p. 71

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earth and the demands that makes on us, dismissing people to go to love and serve the Lord in their weekday lives.

By carrying the Gospel book during the introit procession, the deacon acts as a reminder that the Gospel makes demands, that repentance, sacrifice and judgement precede entry to the Kingdom.

The deacon’s liturgy moves the Church on to its final destination in the Kingdom. … dismissing the worshippers to take the dynamic life of the Eucharist with them into every area of social engagement.44

Writing about the integration of liturgy and social ministry, she adds,

The idea of the deacon in the Eucharist as the agent of the Kingdom … finds its complement in the ministry of the deacon in the social sphere. … The deacon’s Kingdom-orientating voice of prophecy and challenge acts as a powerful advocate within the Christian community for those who have no voice: it challenges vested interests and complacency, and urges the Christian community to live its own serving and transforming ministry to the full beyond the perceived borders of the Church …45

Given Lewis’s critique, quoted earlier, of our limited vision and tendency not to envisage the Kingdom of God beyond our own values, it is significant that over twenty years ago Hannaford and Hall drew attention to the overarching frame of the Kingdom of God as the context for any ministry. If, as Hannaford proposes, the deacon’s calling is to be a sign of the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the Church, in Ignatius’s words to be about the business of Jesus who was empowered by the Holy Spirit, then being called to follow Jesus means being empowered and guided by the Spirit whom Jesus sent to equip the church to share in his mission (I Corinthians 12.1-11, Matthew 28.19-20, John 20.21-22). That is why the apostles looked for people not only of good standing and wisdom, but also full of the Spirit (Acts 6.3).

A pneumatological foundation for diaconal ministry

In focusing rightly on Jesus’s own ministry as the model for diaconal ministry, we must also focus on the life-giving role of the Spirit in inspiring and shaping Jesus’s definitive ministry which culminated in his bestowal of the Holy Spirit on his apostles when sending them to proclaim the good news, ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ and his breathing on them to receive the Holy Spirit. (John 20.21-22). Sven-Erik Brodd’s contribution to the Porvoo consultation encouraged the recovery of the early Church’s interpretation of ordination as prayer for the reception of spiritual gifts, ultimately the Holy Spirit.46 Common Worship’s inclusion of the invocation ‘Send down the Holy Spirit on your servant N for the office and work of a deacon in your Church’ at ordination is, therefore, vital. The next step is to expect God to answer! We must pay attention to what happens, letting that shape our understanding of the diaconate which is, first of all, to do with the person: the church makes a deacon. There is no ordination without the empowering of the Holy Spirit, but the Church cannot determine how that prayer is answered. Diaconal ministry and action will follow, but only because the person is a Spirit-filled deacon responding to the lead of the Holy Spirit..

So, in the given context that the mission entrusted to the Church derives from God’s creative and redemptive love for the world and God’s passion that the world should embody his

44 Hall, op cit, pp. 86, 9045 Hall, op cit p. 10246 Sven-Erik Brodd, Caritas and Diakonia as Perspectives on the Diaconate, in Borgegård et al, p. 51

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justice and mercy, I suggest that the Christological foundation and model of diaconal ministry must be strengthened and broadened by adding a greater, more explicit, Spirit-based, pneumatological underpinning. This places diaconal ministry on a more secure Trinitarian foundation and gives added impetus to the deacon’s role in the Church’s mission of proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Writing in response to seeing an early draft of this paper, a Canadian Deacon commented, ‘I believe that the prophetic and visionary responsibility of the diaconate can be suffocated to some extent in a purely Christological perspective. Within the Canadian context (and this is a broad brush statement) … the limitations of the Christological understanding … has the implication of focusing the diaconal work on “divine drudgery” and not on advocacy nor the prophetic.’47

The Church of England claims to believe that, ‘Deacons are ordained so that the people of God may be better equipped to make Christ known. Theirs is a life of visible self-giving. Christ is the pattern of their calling and their commission; … [They] serve as heralds of Christ’s kingdom. They are to proclaim the gospel in word and deed, as agents of God’s purposes of love.’48 We have come a long way from the ‘inferior office’ for the ‘class of the commonality’. However, it has to be said that the church has shied away from any emphasis on the deacon as herald and proclaimer. Now that the Ordinal has fixed these words it is time to consider what impact they might have on the shape of diaconal ministry.

During discussions in Salisbury, the suggestion was made that the church might adopt the language of deacon-missioner to explain and encourage this ministry, particularly among evangelical and charismatic parishes. This would not downplay the serving and pastoral focus of much diaconal ministry but would reclaim the exemplar in Acts and align it more clearly with the Five Marks of Mission which frame the ministry of the Church:

To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom To teach, baptise and nurture new believers To respond to human need by loving service To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind

and to pursue peace and reconciliation To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the

earth. 49

These marks of mission have a Christological foundation as they express the redemption secured in Jesus Christ and his own example of Spirit-empowered proclamation of the proximity of the Kingdom of God. Without the stimulus and power of the Holy Spirit there would have been no spreading from Jerusalem and no fulfilment of this ministry today. The Holy Spirit brings life where there is death, fullness of life where there is constriction and life is being sucked out of people, and empowers the people of God to do God’s life-giving work in the world. So Pharaoh recognised the presence of the Spirit of God in Joseph who proposed a way to care for the people during famine (Genesis 41.38) and Moses, burned out by care of the people, was assisted by men with whom the Spirit of God was shared (Numbers 11.17). The Spirit sent Isaiah ‘to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoner; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn and to provide for those

47 I am grateful to Roy Overthrow for passing on this comment from Deacon Nancy Ford, sent to him in an e-mail.48 General Synod, op cit 200749 The Five Marks of Mission were developed by the Anglican Consultative Council between 1984 and 2012 and adopted by the General Synod of the Church of England in 1996. They can be found at https://www.churchofengland.org/media/1918854/the%20five%20marks%20of%20mission.pdf

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who mourn in Zion, giving them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.’ (Isaiah 61.1-3). This well-known passage bears careful consideration as a description of the empowering of diaconal ministry because these life-giving actions are articulated in the bishop’s probing of ordinands about their calling to diaconal ministry. The bishop describes this vocation in terms of serving the community in which deacons are set, bringing to the Church the needs and hopes of all the people, working with their fellow members in searching out the poor and weak, the sick and lonely and those who are oppressed and powerless, reaching into the forgotten corners of the world that the love of God may be made visible, sharing in the pastoral ministry of the Church and in leading God’s people in worship, preaching the word and bringing the needs of the world before the Church in intercession, accompanying those searching for faith and bringing them to baptism, assisting in administering the sacraments and distributing communion and ministering to the sick and housebound.50

Isaiah goes on, in words often overlooked in our enthusiasm for the first part of chapter 61, to describe people thus enlivened by God’s Spirit as oaks of righteousness and the planting of the Lord to display his glory. They rebuild ancient ruins, raise up former devastations, repair ruined cities and the devastations of many generations (Isaiah 61.3-4). This is reflected in the fourth and fifth mark of mission and flows from the God-given mandate to humans, in the creation stories, to tend the world (Genesis 1.28-31, 2.15-17). In his encyclical ‘On care for our common home’ Pope Francis wrote, ‘We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature. … We have to realise that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.’51

Increasingly deacons see their ministry as embodying and encouraging others in the care of God’s creation, repairing the devastations of many generations, whether ecological or urban, which were either not understood or overlooked in previous centuries. Notable exceptions to this past neglect were the deaconesses and religious orders that emerged in the nineteenth century to serve in industrial slums, making small but faithful inroads into the desolation of industrialisation. We would do well to revisit these responses because there are urgent challenges for the church today as we seek ways to proclaim the gospel by word and deed in our urban areas.

This holistic understanding of ministry has significant bearing on diaconal ministry in an era when the Church rushes to find instant ameliorative answers to its obsession with statistical decline. Cassidy’s challenge, quoted earlier, that ‘if deacons don’t do what deacons need to do, then the Word won’t get preached’ goes on,

It goes almost without saying that the Christian community preaches most effectively when it lives the kind of community life Christ intended us to live, when (to use Nietzsche’s challenge) we look as though we were actually redeemed. … What if [the care of the needy] was to be one of the hallmarks of a radical living of the Gospel, one that was the platform for an equally radical proclamation of the Gospel? 52

50 General Synod op cit 200751 Encyclical Letter ‘Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home. 2015 http://cafod.org.uk/content/download/25373/182331/file/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf accessed 21st January 2016, paragraphs 44 and 4952 Cassidy, op cit.

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He adds that Acts 6 records how the Apostles, seeing the risk of not tending to genuine needs as part of that proclamation, acted decisively: they could not go on with their vocation if widows were uncared for, because the injustice of that situation negated the gospel they proclaimed.53 Surely it is time for the Church to see the same risk and act in a similarly decisive way by seeking out more vocations to diaconal ministry in order to further the Church’s calling to embody in word and deed Christ’s proclamation of the good news of the kingdom of God coming near, and the call to repent and believe in that good news (Mark 1.15)? The challenge was laid out in 2001, ‘A renewed diaconate … operating as a catalyst for Christian discipleship, in the mission space between worship and the world, can help the Church to become more incarnational. … We have not been good at doing equal justice to these two vital movements of the Church’s life: sending and gathering. The re-envisioned diaconate can help to hold them together.’54

Deacons in mission today: proclaiming the kingdom of God

If my thesis is correct, that the church needs to take seriously the Church’s recovered understanding of diaconal ministry and the work of the Holy Spirit in inspiring and enabling it, then practical opportunities and questions arise which I highlight rather than develop here.

Deacons are well-placed to lead on all the marks of mission in an integrated way. We should allow deacons to reinvigorate the mission impetus of their ministry, facilitating and focusing Spirit-led mission in God’s world. Incarnational diaconal ministry combines pastoral care of people in need with prophetic ministry in the world, speaking by word and action into situations of injustice or need, proclaiming the gospel in its fullness. Although not named as a deacon, Stephen is frequently held up as our example. He antagonised the rulers of the synagogue in Acts 6:8-14 by his words and actions: feeding widows was exemplary but not a cause of martyrdom unless there was more to Stephen than that. Somehow, his Spirit-filled proclamation of the good news in word and deed destabilised their status quo.

I suggested in ‘Being a Deacon Today’ that the deacon, who needs to be fully rooted in the church and fully familiar with the world, belongs in three places: the church, the world and the margins. 55 The margins are both the far margins of the world where people who never set foot in church are to be found and the margin of the church doorstep, the often hard-to-cross threshold between church and world. From this flows the diaconal mandate to bring the needs of the world to the attention of the church in the intercessions and, in the dismissal at the end of the Eucharist ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’, dismissing people to help to meet those needs. Diaconal ministry is a dynamic extension of the Eucharistic celebration of the Church: deacons are ministers of the Eucharist in the forgotten, awkward corners of the world.

If we seek a flourishing, visible Christian presence in every community, might this be expressed in some places not only by a priest, Reader or Licensed Lay Minister rushing between churches on a Sunday to lead worship, but by a deacon’s evident presence in places where the gospel should be heard during the week? Deacons are charged to reach into the forgotten corners of the world that the love of God may be made visible. So we should free them to be busy on those margins with the lonely, the overlooked, the homeless and the misfits; to be the church present and active in those situations. The Spirit-breathed, prophetic 53 Thomas Briedenthal, in Exodus from Privilege: Reflections on the Diaconate in Acts in Anglican Theological Review, 95.2, 2013 suggests that the food crisis in Acts 6 taught the Church it could not simply depend on the Holy Spirit but, as a redeemed community riddled with sin and open to Spirit, had to be actively engaged in the work of discernment of change. 54 For such a time as this, op cit p3055 Rosalind Brown, Being a Deacon Today. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2005

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role of deacons might beneficially be further emphasised, challenging injustices in society from a theological and practical perspective. For example foodbanks, which have sprung up across church and secular structures, began with Christians in Salisbury and in most places retain a strong church connection with many deacons involved. We can also expect to find deacons in asylum centres, prisons, debt advice centres, as Street Pastors and in other forms of engagement that address the contemporary equivalents of the needs Isaiah envisaged would be met as the Spirit inspired the Servant of God.

To give an example of how this might work in Durham, which I know best and where the Cathedral is part of an ecumenical liaison group, which includes a Methodist Deacon, for city centre ministry among the homeless and other people in need, I can envisage a deacon licensed to one of the city parishes and commissioned to work ecumenically with Durham Christian Partnership which oversees the Foodbank, a debt advice centre, the Street Pastors, the Christian Listeners, a grandparents’ group and other mission groups. Their role would be not only to be involved in these vital ministries alongside lay people but, as part of the ‘liturgy after the Liturgy’, to take this ministry back into the churches in prayer within the liturgy and in encouraging others to participate. This raises ecclesiological and vocational questions. As we look for evidence of prophetic ministry that proclaims the Kingdom of God, flowing from the holiness and justice of God, are there existing foodbank workers, street pastors, debt advisors, pastoral assistants or environmental campaigners who should be challenged about a vocation to diaconal ministry which builds on their existing engagement in God’s world? To ordain such people as priests would be to distract them from their calling of enabling the Church’s focused engagement with people in need; to ordain them as deacons could set the church on fire through their example and leadership. Deacons belong on the doorstep of the church so we can expect them to help baptised Christians understand why they too must cross that threshold, leaving the security of the church building to proclaim the gospel and serve in the world. What distinguishes this as distinctively diaconal ministry, rather than professional or voluntary work with people in need, is that the practical care of the needy beyond the doors of the church is then integrated back to the church in a prophetic and challenging ways as deacons lead the church in response. Deacons are evangelists for mission.

Ecclesiologically, recognising that when Ignatius addressed the relationship of bishops to deacons he worked without the Trinitarian theological understandings of subsequent centuries, the mission of the church could be helped if we recover the understanding of deacons being closely linked not only to priests but to bishops, being their eyes and ears in the diocese. A deacon commissioned to be the bishop’s representative fulfilling a particular ministry might enable the ministry of, and act as a resource for, several parishes or a Deanery thus recovering something of the centuries-old ‘minster’ approach to mission and ministry. Wherever they are licensed might be their base rather than the entire focus of their ministry. Their day to day ministry emerges from that local situation and their link with the bishop sets it in a wider frame of reference and enables it, where appropriate, to transcend that local context. So, as well as providing practical leadership on the ground, the deacon would bring the needs he or she encounters to the bishop and the churches for prayer and response.

All this has implications for our understanding of diaconal leadership. Past emphasis on the deacon having little leadership role or, at best, sharing leadership rather than being in overall charge, coupled with a narrow but pervasive view of leadership as governance and decision-making, has led us to underemphasise any leadership role for deacons, especially leadership expressed in enabling and equipping the ministry of others.56 The Ordinal has changed that. Now deacons are ordained to set a virtuous circle in motion by enabling and 56 My own thinking on this has developed since I wrote Being a Deacon Today and, while I still think that deacons should be happy to be behind the scenes where this is appropriate, were I writing that book today I would want to add something about move overt diaconal leadership.

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resourcing the ministry of all baptised Christians wherever they live and work. Their leadership calls and equips others to serve alongside them; they lead by example and take the initiative when faced with situations of need or injustice, rather than being entirely reactionary. This is representational ministry empowered by the Holy Spirit: this deacon represents the Church, the body of Christ, and is about the business of Jesus Christ. It is different leadership from that of the priest or bishop, but is leadership nonetheless. Where such potential leadership is seen in lay people, the church would be foolish to ignore a possible diaconal vocation.

This raises questions about parish-based, diaconal-enabled mission as a complementary model to more freelance and evangelistic mission, and thus the relationship of deacons to pioneer ministers, Church Army evangelists who often focus their work beyond the parish church, and to new religious orders such as the Community of St Anselm which the Archbishop of Canterbury has formed, all of which could be nurturing-ground for diaconal vocations. In day to day working, these callings to proclaim the gospel should be complementary. However, their ecclesiological underpinning differs as they are not part of the three-fold ordained ministry of the Church. One practical test of whether a person’s vocation is lay or ordained might be whether their primary vocation is to a specific ministry, for example as evangelist, pastoral assistant, youth or community worker which might point to a lay ministry. On the other hand, if a person is capable of enlarging such a lay vocation to include enabling and empowering the ministry of others, leading by example, being a representative person and integrating that vocation with the church’s worship, then that might point to a diaconal ministry which embraces but exceeds a particular expression of lay ministry, being a sign of what the Church is. Paul Avis writes that ‘the bridging, go-between role of the deacons becomes significant here, their involvement in and linking of the divine liturgy and the needs of the unchurched out in the community.’57 The Methodist Church also uses the language of ‘bridging’, ‘connecting’ and ‘go-between’ in describing its deacons.58

If we believe what we pray in the Ordinal about diaconal ministry, we should be ordaining more deacons who are called to active, people-focused, front-line ministry, without having the responsibilities of priesthood overlaid on them. As church and society lay more and more administrative responsibilities on priests, many are distracted from availability for the very ministry they are charged to oversee in the parish. So we desperately need deacons, not so encumbered and with a distinctively diaconal vocation, empowered by the Holy Spirit to be about the business of Jesus Christ, proclaiming the gospel in word and deed as the church’s representative perople, making and maintaining the connections between church and world, transforming situations, keeping the mission of God before the church. We should be encouraging new vocations which understand this missional, pastoral role of diaconal ministry within the threefold order of ordained ministry and the ministry of all the baptised people of God. This means urgent searching for existing lay vocations that are capable of developing in new ways to be more fully expressed in diaconal ministry, questioning everyone who presents with a mission vocation whether this is a diaconal vocation, offering a theological dimension upon which they can reflect with a Vocations Advisor to consider whether they are being called to ministry that is more than they envisage, having an ecclesial component that is distinctively diaconal.

This could revolutionise the mission of the Church. Joe Cassidy dreamed aloud,

57 Avis op cit p. 11258

Andrew Orton and Todd Stockdale, Making Connections: Exploring Methodist Deacons' Perspectives on Contemporary Diaconal Ministry. Durham: Sacristy Press 2014

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If the early church did get it right, I wonder what our church would look like if we took the same inspiration to heart? What if each of our parishes had seven or so deacons, charged not just with maintaining and leading liturgy in the community, but chiefly that ensuring justice was done and that justice issues were addressed? … What if every Bishop had seven deacons assigned to him or her; deacons who spent their time on the lookout for ways in which our communal lives might be subverting the apostolic work of the Church? … What would our presbyters and bishops sound like were they thus empowered to preach from a platform marked by more integrity? Can you imagine a Church where priest and bishops were emboldened by a Church that sacrificially cared for others? Can you imagine how differently they might preach?59

St Francis famously told his followers to proclaim the gospel and use words if they needed to. The privilege of diaconal ministry is to be part of that proclamation in the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing glory to God through Jesus Christ. It is to be entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ. Why do we not encourage it?

59 Cassidy, op cit.

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