Deacon

Diakonos means "servant" or "minister." The Church's tradition has always seen the order foreshadowed in the Seven of Acts 6, chosen to serve tables so that the apostles could "give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word" (Acts 6:4) — among them St. Stephen, the first martyr, whom the Church honors as Archdeacon. Within a generation the office had its own qualifications: "Likewise must the deacons be grave, not doubletongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre" (1 Timothy 3:8). Writing around the year 107, St. Ignatius of Antioch reminds the deacons that their service belongs to the heart of worship — they are entrusted, as he puts it, with the mysteries of Jesus Christ.

In the early centuries deacons were also the Church's administrators and social workers — the bishop's hands for the treasury, the widows, and the poor. The tradition tells how the Roman archdeacon St. Laurence, ordered to surrender the Church's treasures, presented the poor. Some of the Church's greatest hymn-writers were deacons, among them St. Ephrem the Syrian and St. Romanos the Melodist. The ancient Church also knew an order of deaconesses — St. Paul commends Phoebe, a diakonos of the church at Cenchrea (Romans 16:1) — who assisted especially at the baptism of women; the order faded in later centuries, and its history is still remembered and discussed in the Church today.

Liturgically the deacon is the go-between. He spends the service in motion between the sanctuary and the people: standing on the solea before the iconostasis, he leads the litanies — beginning with the Great Litany, "In peace let us pray to the Lord" — raising the end of his orarion, the long ribbon-like stole over his left shoulder, with each petition. He summons the assembly's attention ("Wisdom! Let us attend!"), asks the priest's blessing before each of his own acts ("Bless, master"), censes the altar, the icons, and the people (censer-thurible, incense), carries the diskos in the great-entrance, and, where a deacon serves, ordinarily chants the Gospel.

Just as important is what he does not do. The deacon does not bless, does not celebrate the mysteries, and never serves the Liturgy alone: his whole office presupposes the priest's. Over his sticharion the orarion is his badge of office, and the tradition likes to see in the deacon's raised orarion the lifted wing of an angel — the deacons imaging in the earthly Liturgy the angels who serve around the throne of God. He is the people's voice gathered into ordered prayer, and the service's timekeeper.

Not every parish has a deacon — the Liturgy is complete without one, and the priest then takes the diaconal parts himself — but where one serves, worship gains a whole dimension of dialogue and movement. Some men pass through the diaconate on the way to the priesthood; many others serve as deacons for life, earning their living in secular work and standing at the altar on Sundays. Senior deacons carry the titles protodeacon or, among monastics, archdeacon (see clergy-titles-and-forms-of-address). A man reaches the order through ordination at the bishop's hands, usually after serving as reader and subdeacon — and often after years as one of the parish's altar-servers.