Deaconesses are inescapable.
Every healthy church has deaconesses, whether they call them that or not, whether the recognize them or not, whether they organize them as such or not.
Every healthy church has older women who teach and counsel younger women, per Titus 2 – a ministry of women to women. Every healthy church has women who serve by making meals for the sick and grieving, who serve by showing hospitality, who help make church feasts and festivals happen, who carry out mercy ministry, especially to other women and children.
Of course, deaconesses, properly speaking, have no official authority in the congregation. They do not have a public teaching ministry. They do not rule over men — or anyone — in the congregation.
The pastor and elders are shepherds to the entire congregation. They rule. They teach. They discipline. Deaconesses are not shepherdesses. But the church cannot do without them. An order of women who minister to other women is ancient — going back at least to Exodus 38:8. The early church recognized this order. Calvin and many of the Puritans did as well. Those men lived long before the rise of modern feminism, so their openness to deaconesses could not some kind of compromise with contemporary feminism.
When pastors and elders are anxious about deaconesses, they tend to reveal their own insecurities. It looks like their main concern is to “keep women down” — all the while very much benefitting from the inescapable ways that such women serve in the congregation. When the local church has competent, confident masculine leadership, deaconesses are not a threat. There is always a ditch on both sides. Yes, we must resist all encroachments of feminism. But in our efforts to guard and promote masculine leadership in the church, we should aim to be faithful to Scripture, and Scripture certainly makes allowance for what could be called an order of deaconesses (even if Scripture does not use the terminology that eventually became common in the church).
It’s interesting that is some ecclesiastical circles, men register no objections to women who have a rather public online ministry aimed at instructing other women (even those in other congregations), and this goes on without controversy — but then when the subject of deaconesses comes up, even though it is a quiet, behind-the-scenes ministry in the context of the local church, these same men flip out.
There is no slippery slope in what I am advocating. It has biblical and historical precedent. Obviously, in a fallen world, everything is dangerous. But our rule of church life is not what we think x, y or z might lead to, but what Scripture says about x, y, and z, and how we are to carry out x, y, and z.
For more, see a couple old Sunday School classes I taught on this topic:
See also the TPC Constitution and my paper on women in ministry.
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