THERE has always been ambivalence about the ministry of deacons. At their first appearance in the Bible, they are shown to serve two distinct ministries. In Acts 6:2-4, their task was to administer “charity” to the widows and to serve at tables:

“Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, ‘It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait at tables. Therefore, friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word.”

That seems clear enough, but what follows is less so. After the selection of seven deacons to meet what are described as local administrative needs, we are told in the following two chapters how two of the deacons — Stephen and Philip — embarked on an outstanding ministry of evangelism, which had nothing to do with the domestic chores of “waiting at tables” or “keeping the accounts” (an alternative meaning of the Greek diakonein trapezais).

The biblical account leaves the Church with two contradictory texts by which to define her understanding of the diaconate — one local and administrative, and the other peripatetic and evangelical. Until our own time, this uncertainty was unresolved. As the Church developed in the West, the status of the diaconate diminished. It came to be regarded as a transitional order, preparatory to the priesthood.

AT THE end of the service for the Ordering of Deacons in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, there is a rubric which declares a candidate “must continue in that office of a Deacon the space of a whole year (except for reasonable causes it shall otherwise seem good unto the Bishop)”. This suggests that the office of deacon was generally understood not as a permanent order, but as one of transition to a higher one.

We would now, in 2026, regard this understanding of a deacon’s ministry as defective. Although our Church’s Reformation in the 16th century was founded on the principle of continuity with the ancient past (albeit a continuity purged of medieval error), Cranmer’s Ordinal contains a liturgy somewhat skewed by his own prejudices, notwithstanding his profound knowledge of the early Fathers and his study of their Greek and Latin texts. His liturgical conclusions are not above criticism, and one of these was his readiness to accept a diminished diaconate.

In drafting the Ordinal in 1550, Cranmer was influenced by the work of his friend, Martin Bucer, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. In his treatise, De Regno Christi, Bucer wrote that a deacon’s ministry is to teach, to relieve the poor, and to examine the nature and genuineness of their needs. He may have had in mind a permanent ministry, but that was not how Cranmer’s Ordinal understood it.

After he Reformation, “schoolmaster deacons” begin to make an appearance. The term “schoolmaster” carried its original meaning, that is, “the master of a school”, and not its later one of “a teacher in a school”. After Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the consequent loss to the nation’s education, free schools were founded by his son, Edward VI.

Examples of schoolmaster deacons include Thomas Browne at Westminster (1564-1570), Nicholas Goldsborough at King’s, Canterbury (1580-84), Henry Alston at King’s Lynn (1606-12), and, briefly, John Anderson at Kimbolton (1611).

In the 18th century, some headmasters chose to remain in deacon’s orders, such as Edward Abbot, head of Repton (1705-14); John Gaylard, head of Sherborne School (1733-43); and Richard Lloyd, head of Shrewsbury School (1687-1723) (Inferior Office: A history of deacons in the Church of England, Francis Young, 2015).

There have been other occasions on which men have chosen to remain in the diaconate. Of these, the best-known is Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637). He founded a religious community of about 30 members. It comprised family and friends, who lived a common life of prayer, work, and study. William Laud ordained him at Little Gidding, knowing that Ferrar intended his diaconate to be permanent.

DURING the 19th century, suggestions were made to revive the diaconate. In 1839, Thomas Arnold proposed a class of deacons who should be in secular employment. They would constitute an intermediate order between the clergy and the laity. Thus, a career in the Church would be “most safely and beneficially opened to persons of inferior rank and fortune, who cannot afford the expense of a university education”.

While Arnold’s concern was to recruit men of “lower rank” into ministry, there was also the growing fear in some parts of the country that the Church was losing its members to “Dissent” — a widely used term denoting not only Baptists and Methodists, but the growing number of Nonconformist sects. In 1899, a petition by the Church of England Young Men’s Society suggested the revival of the diaconate for “the evangelisation of the mechanic classes and other sections of the community as yet but little reached by ordinary ministration”.

UNTIL recently, the Church of England accepted Cranmer’s opinion and regarded deacons as trainees, awaiting admission to the sacred ministry. They stood at a half-open door, waiting permission to come in. But, according to their original status, they had already crossed the threshold. As a sign of their ordained rank, nothing could be more telling than their right to proclaim the Gospel at the eucharist, and to wear a stole (albeit across one shoulder, to differentiate them from priests). And, according to social custom, their ordained status is acknowledged by the clerical collar and, in written address, by the honorific title “The Revd”.

In recent years, our Church has accepted what our ancestors failed to that the diaconate embraces two sorts of minister: those whose vocation is ultimately to the priesthood and those called to serve permanently in the diaconate. We have moved on and we are all the better for it.

The Revd Adrian Leak is a retired priest. His most recent publication is Aspects of Glory and Other Reflections (Book Guild, 2025) (Books, 9 May 2025).