Being a Deacon Today
Rosalind Brown
Morehouse Publishing
139 pages

Rosalind Brown writes this prophetic book about a prophetic ministry for the whole church. This is a book that is revealing to all orders of the church: bishops, priests, deacons and laity. Being a Deacon Today is well researched, well thought-out and well organized. This is obviously not a book that was churned out over night.

Brown is an Episcopal priest serving as Canon Residentiary at Durham Cathedral in Durham, England.

Being a Deacon Today analyzes diaconal ministry from all angles. Brown looks at the deacon from church history, liturgy and theology. The role and ministry of the deacon in modern times is difficult to put one’s arms around. Much of the original deacons’ duties during the early church have been subsumed over the years by government organizations and priests.

Brown frames her analysis of the diaconate in Christology, particularly the servant Christ. She centers her analysis on the role of the deacon in the Eucharist. A courageous tack taken by Brown is to emphasize Aidan Kavanagh’s liturgical viewpoint: “Aidan Kavanagh points us to the truth, made explicit in the early Church, that it is the deacon rather than the bishop or priest who represents Christ, ‘. . . the server of server, cantor of cantors, reader of readers. He is the butler in God’s house, major domo of its banquet, master of its ceremonies! Given the service emphasis of his office and ministry, the deacon is the most pronouncedly Christic of the three major ministries. This implies that it is not the Bishop or Presbyter who are liturgically ‘another Christ’ but the deacon.’”

For a church that has for hundreds of years focused on the president of the Eucharist as the iconic Christ in the liturgy, Brown’s analysis is reorienting and a new paradigm. When viewed in this way, ordination to the diaconate becomes theologically essential for all clergy.

She makes much from the idea that the diaconate is a kind of alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, a “fringe ministry,” a ministry that is paradoxically where the world ends and where the church begins: “If the incarnation is central to diaconal ministry, one consequence is that deacons will find themselves in most unlikely places, simply because God is there. The margins are God’s territory, and one of the persistent themes of the Old Testament is the struggle of the people to understand that God was not confined to their safely circumscribed territory. When the people went into exile, they learned that God was there too – they were not abandoned, not without hope. When they did return home it was with their theology forever upset by the experience of living on the margins of their known world.”

This is a book worth reading again, and still again, as we journey to unveil the deacon as server of the Creator, the Christ in us all.