Third in the Mission Administration series. The wider frame is in Waiting on Tables; the practical playbook for the church / parachurch relationship is in The Hands and Feet.
I want to take the third step in the argument I have been making.
The first article said the parachurch is the church on mission, and that her work is, in very large part, the church’s deacon ministry at industrial scale. The second article said what that recovery looks like in working order — what it asks of the parachurch as an institution, what it asks of the local church, what it asks of the worker. This article is the deepest of the three because it goes underneath both of those to the office itself.
I want to argue that the recovery of the diaconal office is the load-bearing piece of the whole project. The parachurch is the church sent, yes. The local church should commission her, yes. The worker should be a member of a local body and accountable to elders, yes. But all of that assumes the local church has somewhere to put him. It assumes a recovered diaconal office on the receiving end of the commissioning. Most local churches do not have one. The office in most evangelical churches today is what I called it in the first article — a ceremonial shell where a man passes the offering plate, helps with communion, and visits a widow twice a year. That cannot bear the weight of the recovery I am calling for.
I want to be careful with one framing point before I go further. It would be easy to read this article as saying the recovery has to start in the local church before the parachurch can move. That is theologically tidy but historically inaccurate. The recovery of the diaconate has often started somewhere else — in a mission society that needed deacons it could not get from its sending churches, in a relief crisis that forced congregations to recover the office, in a confessional document that named the office and the practice followed. Geneva in the 1540s organized a diaconal renewal that the local parishes had not been driving. The early Reformed cities had to recover an office their inherited tradition had largely lost. The recovery is mutual. The local church recovers her office and the parachurch presses her to recover, and the two reinforce each other. I will write the rest of the article as if the local church were the starting point because that is where most of my readers can act, but the actual historical pattern is that the recovery moves in both directions at once.
A word on polity.
Before I describe what I think the recovery looks like, I have to acknowledge that the diaconate looks different in different traditions, and the article that does not say so is going to be unreadable to most of its potential audience.
In Presbyterian and Reformed polity, the deacons are an office of the church, ordained by the elders, with their own scope and their own gravity, accountable to the session and through the session to the congregation. In Baptist polity, the deacons are typically lay servant-leaders selected by the congregation, with the elders or pastor holding the spiritual office and the deacons holding a delegated ministry of service. In Anglican polity, the diaconate is an ordained order, often a step on the way to the priesthood (which is part of what the Reformed tradition reacted against). In non-denominational churches, the office can be anything from a board of trustees to a serving rotation to something close to the Presbyterian model.
The argument I am making is meant to work across all of these traditions, with the polity-specific shape filled in by each church. The central conviction is the same: the church has, in scripture, an office for the administration of her material and operational care, exercised under the spiritual authority of the elders or the equivalent overseers. The diaconal office, however it is structured in your tradition, has been narrowed in most evangelical practice to a ceremonial shell. The recovery, however it is structured in your tradition, returns the office to the work scripture gave it.
I will use Reformed language where I have to use any specific polity because it is the tradition I know best. Translate it into yours where needed.
A second matter to address. Some traditions ordain women to the diaconate. Some do not. I have my own views, and the question of women in the diaconate is contested enough that I do not want to either smuggle a position past my reader or pretend the question does not exist. The argument I am making does not depend on its resolution. It depends on the recovery of the office, however your tradition fills the office, in the scope and gravity scripture gave it. Where I refer to a deacon as “she” later in the article it is because I have known many gifted women whose vocation was diaconal whether or not their tradition recognized them in the office, and the writing is meant to honor that work without prejudicing your position on the polity question.
The office as scripture names it.
I will not relitigate Acts 6 here. The first article did that work and I will not repeat it. The summary is that the seven were appointed for spiritual character, given real responsibility over the church’s material and operational life, and entrusted with work that turned out to be inseparable from the spread of the gospel. The office that follows from that appointment, settled in 1 Timothy 3 and Acts 6’s afterlife in the early church, is an office under elder oversight that administers the church’s material and operational care with spiritual seriousness. The deacons are not a junior eldership. They are a distinct office, with their own dignity, and their own qualifications.
The qualifications matter, and the way they matter is worth pausing over. The 1 Timothy 3 list is not a generic character list. It is the specific list of qualifications for a person who will handle money, hold confidences about vulnerable people, represent the church’s reputation in the city, and bear the temptations that come with all three. Not double-tongued — because she will hear what families share in benevolence intake and must not betray it. Not given to drunkenness — because she will have authority over resources and judgment under pressure. Not greedy for dishonest gain — because she will handle the church’s money. Holding the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience — because she will be asked to make hard calls and must be settled in her own walk to make them. Tested first — because the work cannot be entrusted to the untested.
Read the list with that lens and the qualifications are not generic at all. They are precisely fitted to the work the office actually does. The contemporary church has often missed this fit. We have read the qualifications as a generic mature-Christian checklist and selected deacons by it as if the office were a senior membership status. The office is not that. The office is a specific work, and the qualifications are specific to it.
This is the first thing the recovery has to address. The selection of deacons has to look like the selection of elders in seriousness, formality, and spiritual scrutiny. The qualifications are different, but the gravity is the same. A man being considered for the diaconal office is being considered for an office of the church. The church should ask the same kind of questions she asks of elder candidates. Walk with Christ. Marriage. Family. Reputation outside the church. Doctrinal soundness. Pattern of life under pressure. The diaconal office does not require the same teaching gift the elder office does, but it requires the same spiritual seriousness.
The second thing the recovery has to address is what the office is for. Most congregations cannot articulate this, and the failure to articulate is what allows the office to drift into ceremonial work. The office is for the church’s material and operational care of her people and her mission, exercised under elder oversight with real delegated authority. The deacon is the person — male, or in your tradition possibly female — through whom the church does her care work. The widow’s pantry. The single mother’s rent. The mission budget. The relief work in the city. The benevolence fund. The hospital visit. The funeral support. The administration that holds it all together. The deacons are not the support staff to the pastors. They are an office of the church alongside the eldership, with their own scope and their own gravity, operating under delegated authority from the elders to administer the church’s material care.
If a congregation cannot articulate what her diaconal office is for, she does not have one. She has a title that has been ceremonialized.
The scope between communion-server and CEO.
Let me name the natural scope of the recovered congregation deacon, because I think readers will hear my argument and assume I am calling for either ceremonial reform or full institutional reinvention, and the right answer is neither.
Between the communion-server scope on one end and the parachurch-CEO scope on the other, there is a middle range that is the natural home of the recovered congregation deacon. She runs the church’s actual mercy work. She administers the benevolence fund at scale — multiple cases a month, real money, real judgment calls. She owns the relationship between her local church and the parachurch organizations the church partners with — knows their staff, attends their board meetings as the church’s representative, brings their needs and their fruit back to the congregation. She manages the church’s relief work in the city. She handles the operational work that holds the congregation’s care together, with real authority and real accountability.
This is the scope. Not parking lot duty. Not running a $40M nonprofit. The work of a body of three to twelve deacons, each with a defined area, each operating under elder oversight, each bringing to her work the spiritual seriousness the office requires.
And here is the move that has been hiding in plain sight. The people in your congregation who are most qualified to fill this office are often the parachurch administrators in your pews. The COO of the relief agency knows how to administer benevolence at scale. The CFO of the missionary care fund knows what financial discipline costs. The development director of the campus ministry knows how to handle the temptations of money in ministry settings. The technology director of the publishing house knows operations under pressure. These are the people whose vocation in the world is already diaconal, and the church has, by accident or neglect, not noticed.
Recovering the office in your local church may not require finding new people. It may require recognizing the people who are already there and have been waiting, often for years, to be asked.
What recovered deacon ministry looks like.
Let me try to describe it concretely, the way I described the church / parachurch relationship in the second article.
A recovered deacon ministry in a local church looks like a body of three to twelve men and women, selected for spiritual character against the New Testament qualifications, ordained or commissioned according to your tradition’s polity, set apart for specific work in specific scopes, meeting regularly for prayer and discernment, exercising real delegated authority over the church’s mercy budget and operational decisions, and held accountable to the eldership for the spiritual character of their work.
What it does not look like is a rotation of volunteers who fill ushering and communion roles on Sundays.
The scope is concrete. Each deacon is given a defined area: benevolence, mercy, missions support, building, hospitality, finance, technology, congregational care. Within that scope she has real authority — to make decisions, to allocate resources, to bring the work of her area to completion without elder micromanagement. The elders ordain her, equip her, and hold her accountable. They do not run her scope for her. The point of ordination is that the church has recognized she has the spiritual gift to bear the office, and she is now responsible to Christ through the church for that work.
The cadence is concrete. The diaconal body meets at least monthly, opens with extended prayer for the people inside their scopes, reviews the cases that have come in, makes decisions, plans the work, supports each other in the discernment. Most evangelical deacon ministries either do not meet regularly or meet to coordinate logistics. The recovered ministry meets to minister. The difference is felt in the room.
The teaching is concrete. The deacons receive instruction from the elders or from trained teachers in the church on the theology of their office. They study the New Testament passages. They study the historical development of the office. They study practical questions about mercy work, financial discretion, congregational care. The ministry is not learned by osmosis from the previous rotation; it is taught.
The relationship to the elders is concrete. The deacons and the elders are not the same body. They are two offices of the church, each with its own scope. The elders attend to word and prayer; the deacons attend to the church’s tables. The two bodies meet jointly several times a year, share information across their scopes, and shepherd the congregation together. The deacons are not subordinate to the elders in office. They are accountable to the elders for the spiritual integrity of their work, and the authority they hold is delegated authority from the elders to administer the church’s material care.
I am describing what some Reformed and Presbyterian churches already do. I am describing what most evangelical churches do not. The recovery is not from nothing. There are models. Most pastors who would read this article will know a church in their network that runs deacons something like the way I have described. The barrier is not knowledge. The barrier is the cultural pull of the truncated diaconate, which is so well-established in the average evangelical church that the recovery feels like an unusual innovation when it is, in fact, the older practice.
A word on what the recovery costs.
I want to address what I know many pastors are thinking by now. The recovery I have described is expensive. It costs elder bandwidth — the time to teach, equip, ordain, oversee, meet jointly. It costs deacon bandwidth — the monthly meetings, the case reviews, the formation. It costs congregational attention — the pulpit time to teach the office, the patience to let it grow, the willingness to have decisions made by people the congregation has not been used to seeing in that role.
Many pastors who read this will think: I cannot do all that. I want to say plainly that nobody has to do all of it at once.
The recovery happens incrementally. Begin with selection. Choose two or three deacons in the next ordination cycle against the qualifications I have described, rather than the qualifications you have been using. Begin with scope. Give those two or three deacons real defined work — one area each — and let them grow into it. Begin with formation. Read 1 Timothy 3 with them slowly, over a year, with one practical case per month. Begin with cadence. Meet monthly with them in the way I described, even if the rest of the deacon roster is still operating in the old pattern. Let the recovery be visible in pockets first, and let it expand from there as the congregation sees it work.
A full recovery in a five-hundred-member church may take five years. A starting recovery in any church can begin in the next ordination cycle. The cost is real and the time is real, but the work is incremental. The pastor who reads this article and tries to recover his whole diaconate by Easter will probably fail. The pastor who reads this article and resolves to ordain his next two deacons differently will probably succeed.
Formation. The piece we keep missing.
This is the section where I want to spend the most time, because it is the piece I think most often gets left out of recovery proposals.
The office requires formation. The man or woman called to the diaconal office cannot be expected to walk into the work fully formed. The qualifications screen for character; the work itself requires skill, theological grounding, practical wisdom, and a settled spiritual life under pressure. None of that is automatic. The church has to form the deacon for the work. Most do not, because the office has been so attenuated that there is nothing to form anyone for.
What does diaconal formation look like? I will sketch it, because nobody else seems to have, and the sector needs the sketch even if the sketch turns out to be wrong in detail.
It begins with theological grounding. The deacon needs to know what the office is biblically and historically. She needs to be able to articulate, in her own words, what scripture asks of her and what the tradition has done with the office. This is not seminary work. It is the kind of catechesis a serious local church can deliver in a year of monthly meetings, with a reading list and a teacher.
It continues with practical formation. The deacon needs to learn the work the way an apprentice learns from a master. She needs to sit alongside an experienced deacon on hard cases. She needs to be walked through the discernment process for a benevolence request, the conversation with a family in crisis, the budget review, the building decision. The work is craft. Craft is learned in apprenticeship.
It continues with spiritual formation. The deacon needs a rule of life that is fitted to the work she is doing. A prayer rhythm that holds her under the weight of the cases. A pattern of confession and accountability that catches the temptations of the office — favoritism, suspicion, financial bitterness, savior posture. A connection to scripture that goes deeper than Sunday morning. The elders have a corresponding rule of life appropriate to their office; the deacons need theirs.
It continues with peer formation. The diaconal body is itself a formation community. The deacons learn from each other. They pray for each other. They challenge each other. The monthly meeting is not only operational; it is also formational. The young deacon learns from the older one. The deacon under pressure brings her struggle to the body and receives the body’s wisdom.
I have to be honest that the resources for this formation do not really exist yet. We do not have a widely available curriculum for diaconal formation in the way we have seminary curricula for the eldership. We have a few good books, scattered denominational resources, the historical record of how Geneva and the Dutch Reformed and the early American Presbyterians did it, and the practical wisdom of the pastors who have already begun the recovery in their own congregations. We do not have a settled, transmissible body of formation material that a new pastor can pick up and use.
This is a gap. It is also an invitation. The reader who feels the gap most acutely is probably one of the people who could help fill it. The seminary professor with one elective slot to spare. The Reformed denominational executive with budget for a curriculum project. The parachurch educational organization looking for a project worth doing. The well-formed deacon with twenty years of practical wisdom and three months of writing time. The recovery of the office requires recovery of the formation resources, and the formation resources will not appear unless people the gap is calling decide to write them.
The local church and the parachurch, forming each other.
This is the move that I think matters most in the whole series, and I want to develop it more carefully than I gestured at it in the draft.
The deacons of the local church and the administrators of the parachurch are doing the same work in different scopes. The CFO of the parachurch is administering the same kind of stewardship the church’s deacons are. The HR director of the missionary care agency is making the same kind of personnel judgment calls. The operations director of the relief agency is doing the same operational work the church’s deacon of mercy is doing, only at a different scale and with different specific cases. The temptations are the same. The skills are largely transferable. The spiritual character required is the same.
This means the formation can be shared.
The recovered local church does not have to form her deacons alone. She has, sitting in her pews, parachurch administrators whose vocational experience is exactly the experience her deacons need to learn from. The parachurch administrators do not have to be formed by the parachurch alone. They have, in the local church that has recovered her diaconate, a formation community fitted to exactly the work they do. The two have, by accident, been forming each other for decades — the parachurch administrator picking up theology from his pastor on Sunday, the church’s deacon picking up operational competence from his administrator member during the week — but the formation has been informal, accidental, often invisible.
Make it intentional. The local church that recovers her diaconate can invite her parachurch members into the formation life of the diaconal body. Joint study. Joint prayer. Joint case discussion. The deacons of the local church learn from the administrators of the parachurch how the work scales and what the temptations look like under scale; the administrators of the parachurch learn from the deacons of the local church how the work is held theologically and pastorally under elder oversight. Both bodies are strengthened. Neither is asked to surrender her distinct vocation.
The parachurch leader reading this should hear it as an open door. The local church reading this should hear it as a gift she has been carrying without knowing it. The administrator in the pew should hear it as the place his vocation has been waiting to be received.
I do not know of churches that have built this formation pattern intentionally. The proposal is that they should. Where it happens — in pockets, by accident, in small groups within congregations — it works. The fruit is in the lives of the people inside it. The scaling work is in front of us.
What gets in the way.
Three things, in my experience.
The first is the persistent assumption that elder ministry is the real ministry and everything else is support. The qualification lists in 1 Timothy 3 do not bear this reading, but the cultural pattern does. The deacon is, in most churches’ working theology, the elder-in-training, or the lay-volunteer, or the support staff. The recovery has to displace this assumption directly, from the pulpit and in the ordination services and in the way the church speaks about her own offices. The deacon is not a lesser office. The deacon is a different office.
The second is the loss of any theology of materiality. Evangelical Protestantism has, in many quarters, drifted toward a working theology in which the spiritual work is the real work and the material work is the support work. The deacon’s office is grounded in the conviction that material work is itself spiritual when it is done by the Spirit in the church under elder authority. The food distribution in Acts 6 was not a material problem solved so that the spiritual work could continue. The food distribution was spiritual work in material form.
This loss runs deeper than most pastors realize. We sing about heaven and we preach about the soul and we treat the material life of the church as the necessary infrastructure under the real work. The building campaign is the necessary evil before the discipleship can happen. The benevolence fund is the necessary outflow before the preaching can land. The financial review is the necessary diligence before the ministry can run. The grammar is always the same: material before spiritual, material underneath spiritual, material for the sake of spiritual.
But the Christian story is not gnostic. The body is not the cage of the soul. The material is not the necessary infrastructure under the spiritual; the material is one of the places the spiritual is enacted. The food the deacons distributed in Acts 6 was not the warmup before the apostles preached. It was, itself, the church doing the work of the church. Stephen at the table on Tuesday and Stephen at the sermon on Sunday were not doing two different things on a hierarchy. They were doing the same thing in two different shapes.
Until the church recovers this theology of materiality, she will not recover the office that depends on it. The deacon whose work is dignified the way Acts 6 dignifies the seven is not a junior support to the real work. He is doing the real work, in the real shape it takes when it touches bread and money and bodies and buildings. The recovery of the office is the recovery of that theology, made visible in the life of the congregation.
The third is the absence of the categories at the level of the everyday Christian. Most members of most evangelical churches do not know what a deacon is supposed to do. They know what a pastor is supposed to do. They know what an elder is supposed to do, more or less. The deacon is, for them, a fuzzy category they associate with offering plates and communion. The recovery has to teach the congregation what the office is, why it matters, why they should expect their deacons to do something different from what they currently do. The teaching is the work of the elders, from the pulpit, in the catechism, in the children’s ministry, in the new members class. None of that is currently happening in most churches.
I do not think any of these three is insurmountable. I think the first is hardest because it is the deepest. The cultural pattern of elder-as-real-minister, deacon-as-support is so ingrained that pastors themselves often hold it without examining it. The pastor who has done the work of his own ordination, his own seminary training, his own preaching preparation, will sometimes look at the deacons of his church as the people who help him do what he does, rather than as people who hold a different office of the same body. The first move toward the recovery is for the pastor to take the diaconal office seriously enough to teach it, ordain to it, equip for it, and submit himself alongside it under Christ.
What this asks of the parachurch, in light of the office.
I want to close the loop with one more move, because the recovery of the office matters for the parachurch as well as for the local church.
If the parachurch is, in very large part, the church’s deacon ministry at industrial scale, then the recovery of the diaconal office in the local church is the upstream investment that makes the parachurch’s recovery possible. The local church that has a recovered diaconate has elders who understand the office, deacons who know how to work in it, and a congregation that has the categories to receive parachurch administrators as people doing the same work in a different scope. The local church without a recovered diaconate cannot offer any of this. Her elders do not have the categories. Her deacons are ceremonial. Her congregation does not see the parachurch administrator’s work as the church’s work because she does not see her own deacons’ work as anything other than ushering.
The recovery has to be mutual. The parachurch cannot be received properly by a church that has not recovered her own offices. The local church cannot fully recover her offices without the people whose vocation is already diaconal — many of whom are working for parachurch organizations — being part of the recovery. The two move together.
So my closing ask of the parachurch leader reading this is unusual. Pray for the recovery of the diaconal office in the local churches your staff belong to. Encourage your staff to invest in that recovery. Where you can, partner with the local churches who are taking the office seriously, support their formation efforts, invite them into the work of forming your administrators alongside their own deacons. The parachurch’s recovery and the local church’s recovery are not two separate projects. They are the same project, run at different scales of the same body.
The closing image.
I have spent three articles trying to say what the New Testament said in a few pages of Acts. The church is gathered on Sunday and sent on Monday. The work she does on Monday is not a different work from the work she did on Sunday. The office that organizes the work has a name and a history and a recovery available to anyone willing to do it.
I close with one picture. Wednesday morning. A church basement, somewhere in any city. Three deacons sitting around a folding table. The benevolence fund spread out in front of them in a notebook. A pastor across the room praying for them while they work. A parachurch CFO who happens to be one of the deacons sharing what she learned from a hard case at her day job last week. A widow’s name on the list, and the deacons deciding what the church is going to do. The cases written down. The decisions made. The body of three closing in prayer for the cases they could not solve and for the spirit of the office they are trying to recover.
That is the office. Most churches do not have it. Some are starting to. The work of getting it back is, in the end, smaller than the writing about it. Three deacons. One folding table. One Wednesday morning.
The recovery starts there.
— Brandon Harvath