One Church That Already Brought the Office Back

While most of the debate over restoring the ancient female diaconate remains open and unresolved in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches discussed elsewhere in this entry, the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria took the more decisive step of actually reviving an order of deaconesses starting in the 1980s under Pope Shenouda III, training and setting apart women for a ministry of social and pastoral service, catechesis and care for women and children within the church, presented by Coptic authorities as a continuation of the ancient office documented in early Christian sources rather than as an entirely new innovation.

The Coptic revival has not been matched by a return to the specific ordination rite historically used for deaconesses in the early church, and Coptic deaconesses today generally function through a blessing and commissioning for ministry rather than through a rite fully equivalent to diaconal ordination for men, so the revival occupies a middle position, real and functioning in ordinary parish life, but stopping short of settling the harder sacramental question of whether the restored office is, or is not, formally identical to the ancient ordained deaconess the historical sources describe.