So, What is a Deacon?

Abstract

"Until women began to be ordained as deacons in 1987, the diaconate in the Church of England had always in practice, with few exceptions, been a probationary year for candidates for the priesthood. It is, therefore, hardly to be wondered at that the ordination of women to the diaconate precipitated a crisis of identity. If women were not being ordained to an interim state, which would lead, after the space of a year, to ordination to the priesthood, then to what were they being ordained? It seems a strange way to proceed, that the business of deciding what a deacon is should follow only in the wake of a decision to ordain and it adds strength to the conviction that the Church of England had not gone much beyond the point of noting that while it has protested for 400 years that it has retained the threefold ministry, it has done so in theory rather than in practice. That is the more strange, since the reintroduction of a permanent and distinctive diaconate has been discussed at successive Lambeth Conferences for over 100 years. 1 In 1958 the Lambeth Conference recommended 'that each province of the Anglican Communion shall consider whether the office of Deacon shall be restored to its primitive place as a distinctive order in the Church'; in 1968 the Conference recommended that the Anglican Communion 'should move towards a recovery of the diaconate as a significant and operative order within the sacred ministry"