I was a lay delegate to the General Conference back in 1996, when the United Methodist Church decided to create a new order of “deacon,” eliminating lay “diaconal ministers” and transitioning the deacon from merely a transitional step on the way to elder’s ordination. Looking back over the past decade, I think the change has been good, even though considerable confusion still exists about the role of the deacon in relation to both elders and laypersons in local churches. Deacons are not allowed to administer either sacrament, and, as a former seminary professor of mine mentioned several times, deacons are not empowered to do anything a layperson cannot already do. In fact, he cautioned, the creation of the order of deacon might possibly detract from the ministry of the laity and discourage laypersons from taking the necessary initiative in Christian leadership that the church needs in this new missional time.

I personally believe that deacons have an important role to play in the church today, and perhaps may actually help move the church out of its maintenance-focused Christendom mode into a more modern missional stance. As an example, Steven Croft sees the possibilities in recovering of the office of deacon-evangelist in his own Anglican tradition.

Within United Methodist circles, confusion about the deacon’s role in the church continues. Increasing numbers of deacons argue for the authority to administer the sacraments, particularly in their own settings of ministry which are sometimes outside of traditional churches. When student pastors, local pastors, and lay supply pastors (none of whom are formally ordained) are offered the authority to administer sacraments, some question why deacons, all of whom with extensive theological education and training, would not also be fit to do the same.

A recent study of ordained ministry commissioned by the General Conference and conducted by a committee of pastors and laypersons took on the task of reviewing the denomination’s theology and practice of ordained ministry in light of the decade since the sweeping changes of 1996. In spite of the numerous requests and arguments by deacons for the authority to administer sacraments, the committee decided not to extend sacramental authority to deacons, and instead recommended making changes to how sacraments are administered by pastors who are not full elders. In essence, they took the arguments of the deacons about non-elders presiding at the sacraments at face value, but their recommendations had the effect of “closing the loophole” that deacons were using as part of their argument for sacramental authority.

Such a move is really unfortunate. It smacks of turf-protection dressed in theological garb. I suppose if deacons were allowed to administer the sacraments, there would be no real difference between elders and deacons (in the mind of elders). I hope I’m not jaded enough to actually believe that such a perspective informed the study committee. I would rather like to believe that missional, theological reflection formed the heart of their conclusions and recommendations.

The problem for me is that I see no biblical warrant for reserving sacramental authority to either deacons or elders. There are certainly practical considerations which, over time, would have led the early church to reserve these practices to representative leaders of the various church communities. It’s easy to see how these practices were eventually reserved specifically for ordained leaders of the community. There’s nothing terribly wrong with this development, as long as the church institution maintains a missional connection with its surrounding community.

And there’s the rub. The western church is slowly coming to grips with the death of Christendom. The cultural power that the western church has enjoyed (and depended upon) for 15 centuries is coming to an end and a new frontier is opening up. Like the Israelites fresh with memories of the “security” of Egyptian bondage, we peer restlessly into the land of God’s promise with evidence of both grapes (reward) and giants (risk). It is quite possible that the institutional structures (buildings, ordination, etc.) that brought us through the Christendom era simply are not fit to take us into God’s preferred future for the church.

If, as some suppose, God is moving in new ways to create new forms of Christian community, are we willing to move with God? If a “church” consists of a small network of home-based communities, apart from any physical buildings, can our forms of ministry (elder and deacon) respond to the “new thing” God is doing? My sense is that these “new things” will challenge us to rethink old categories that make the argument about whether deacons should administer sacraments seem pale and uninteresting.