Deaconess

A deaconess is a woman set apart for a ministry of service in the church, an office of the early church that was later revived in modern Protestantism and Orthodoxy.

The ancient office

In the early church the deaconess was a woman set apart to assist in the ministry to women, notably at the baptism of women, which for reasons of modesty required a woman assistant, and in the care of the sick and the poor and the instruction of female converts, so the office was one of service directed particularly toward women and the needy. In the Eastern church the deaconesses were ordained with a rite that closely resembled the ordination of male deacons, which is why scholars debate whether they held the same order, and the office flourished for several centuries before it declined.

Revival and the modern question

The office was revived in the nineteenth century, first in Protestant churches, where communities of deaconesses were founded for nursing, teaching and charitable work, and the movement spread widely, and there has been renewed attention to the ancient female diaconate in the Orthodox and Catholic churches, where the question of restoring it, and whether it would be the same order as the male diaconate, is under discussion. In churches that now ordain women, the female diaconate is simply part of the ordained ministry. The deaconess thus represents both an ancient office of women service in the church and a modern revival of it, and the historical evidence of the ordained deaconesses of the early church stands at the centre of present debates over the ministry of women.

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.