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Resources for Deacons

Tim Hopper

At the OPC Presbytery of the Southeast conference for deacons, I spoke on “Resources for Deacons.”

You can watch the talk here or listen to the audio here.

Books mentioned

Articles and other resources mentioned

Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the talk. Filler words have been trimmed for readability.

As organizer of this event, I nominated myself to share this, which is really just the result of some work I’ve done in my own life to grow in wisdom and knowledge as a deacon, as I seek to serve the Lord. Three or four years ago, I realized I had a lot to learn. I’ve served as a deacon now for five years, and I wanted to read more and learn from the past and from wise men today who are writing on the diaconate. So I started compiling lists of resources on the diaconate, and I have that online. Some of you may know about that already, but I’ll share that at the end. This talk is really just going to be a selection from my compilation of things that are worth reading.

Looking through this, it’s interesting—very few of these things, maybe any, are actually written by deacons. I have a theory: maybe deacons don’t actually want to write anything because someone will try to make them an elder if they do. Similarly, as deacons there’s often a kind of personality where we’re out serving, realizing there are always things we could be doing in our church buildings and serving those in need. I don’t think we often have the desire to step back and reflect on our work and study and read about it. I think there’s a lot of value in doing that, and I’ve found a lot of value in doing it. I wanted to talk through some of those things with you that have been helpful for me, that I hope will be helpful for you also. So that’s what is coming over the next hour or so. If you have any questions as we’re going, I’m happy for you to interrupt and ask, or we’ll have time at the end.

Foundations: Scripture and the Book of Church Order

To go through the fundamentals, we would be wise not to neglect thinking about what Scripture says about our calling as deacons. We can say a lot of things about what deacons should or shouldn’t be doing or be like, but ultimately we need to come back to the foundation of that in Scripture, and come back regularly to 1 Timothy and Acts 6 talking about deacons. First Timothy 3 reads,

Deacons likewise must be dignified, not double-tongued, not addicted to much wine, not greedy for dishonest gain. They must hold to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. And let them be tested first; then let them serve as deacons if they prove themselves blameless. Their wives likewise must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus.

That’s something you could even memorize. I would commend to you to memorize it, to hold it before you, and as we heard from Pastor Holst last night, be reminded of the high calling and the responsibility that we have as deacons in the Church of Christ.

Similarly, our Book of Church Order, as a secondary standard, has a brief section on deacons summarizing what Scripture says and then applying it to our own context in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It’s worth just keeping in front of us. Deacons are called to show forth the compassion of Christ in a manifold ministry of the church toward the saints and strangers on behalf of the church, and this service is distinct from that of rule in the church. We are to be men of great faith, exemplary lives, honest repute, brotherly love, warm sympathies, and sound judgment. We are to oversee the ministry of mercy in the church and collect and disperse funds for the relief of the needy. We are to be under the supervision and authority of the session. We submit our records to the session every three months, and the session may require the board of deacons to reconsider any action or, if necessary, overrule it. These are the standards we have agreed to and vowed to uphold. The session and the board of deacons are to meet together at regular intervals, as Dr. Willborn was commending yesterday. That’s in our Book of Church Order. You don’t need to come back to this every day, but it’s worth taking the time from time to time to go back, read through it, and read also what it says about the elders and ministers and the session together, so you remember what you’re called to. It doesn’t take too long.

Books

A Little Book on the Christian Life — John Calvin

Beyond that, I wanted to make some recommendations of books I’ve found valuable, and then go from there to recommend articles I’ve found valuable. There are some good historical articles, and then a lot of things in Ordained Servant, the online journal of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church for church officers, that are helpful.

This book is not specifically on the diaconate. It’s John Calvin’s A Little Book on the Christian Life, which is actually just an excerpt from the Institutes of the Christian Religion. This one was translated and edited by Burk Parsons in Florida and Aaron Denlinger. I’m pretty sure this is the same passage from the Institutes as an earlier book called Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life from Banner of Truth. This is John Calvin’s instructions on our Christian ethics—how we’re to live our Christian lives. There are sentences and paragraphs in this that were just really convicting and helpful for me. One of the interesting things I’ve found in reading on the diaconate is that often the whole article or book may be good, but a few sentences just really stick with me and shape my heart and serve as reminders. This book is one like that.

A quote in particular: Calvin talks about how we don’t love and serve others because they deserve it, but because they’re made in the image of God. He says,

The Lord enjoins us to do good to all without exception, though the greater part, if estimated by their own merit, are most unworthy of it. But Scripture subjoins a most excellent reason when it tells us that we are not to look to what men in themselves deserve, but to attend to the image of God which exists in all and to which we owe all honor and love.

If we’re honest with ourselves, it can be hard at times to love everyone and serve everyone when sometimes they seemingly don’t deserve it. Calvin reminds us that that’s not the foundation of our love, much like that’s not the foundation of Christ’s love for us—not that we deserve his love, but that he loves us as his children nonetheless. I commend this book to you. It’s short. It’s available on Kindle if you want, but it’s a little book. It’s a great book. I’ve given it as a wedding present. My wife and I read it together as a family. It’s about five short chapters.

Rules for Walking in Fellowship — John Owen

Similarly, John Owen’s Rules for Walking in Fellowship. Has anyone read this book? It’s come out in some other versions too. If there’s one book I could get everyone in church to read, it would be Owen’s Rules for Walking in Fellowship. The original title was about ten times as long, but it’s John Owen’s recommendation for Christians as to how to live as Christians in the body of Christ and how to love one another in the church. Obviously very relevant to our work as deacons.

A quote, not from this book but from an article I’m going to recommend later by R. C. Reed, a Southern Presbyterian in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Reed writes on the diaconate:

To avoid friction between members, to promote happy pastorates, and to develop the grace of liberality, nothing is more important than a good deacon—one who can be patient, one who can smile at unreasonable people and speak a soft word to turn away wrath, one who is willing to give time and take trouble on himself, and make himself all things to all men.

That’s one of these quotes that has really stuck with me. One of the ways we serve as deacons is in setting an example for the congregation in godly living—working to smooth over trials and to hear harsh words and let them pass by without responding in kind. This book is particularly good for thinking through how to do that. Owen quotes a lot from Scripture and just walks through what godly living in the church looks like. A quote from Owen: “Daily strike at the root of all dissension by laboring for universal conformity to Jesus Christ.” The book is full of great, rich content like that, and humbling reminders of how we’re to live in the body of Jesus Christ.

The Deacon — Cornelis Van Dam

The next book is specifically on the diaconate: The Deacon: Biblical Foundations for Today’s Ministry of Mercy. This one’s been making the rounds. It came out a few years ago by Cornelis Van Dam, who is from the Canadian Reformed Church. I believe he’s retired now. He has a book called The Elder that came out prior to this. David Nakhla reviewed this in Ordained Servant, and I think someone reviewed it in New Horizons. David has been promoting it, and I couldn’t agree more. If there is a single best thing I’ve read on the diaconate, it’s this book. It’s not terribly long—maybe 200 pages. He goes through Old Testament foundations of the diaconate, the New Testament institution of the diaconate, the history of the diaconate from the early church through the early Reformed churches, how it’s been shaped today, and then some practical things on functioning as a diaconate. Just a really excellent and comprehensive book. If you’re doing deacon training, I would highly commend this book.

A quote from it:

Often relatively little attention is paid to educating and equipping deacons or those aspiring to this office. Unlike elders, who tend to be older and armed with years of spiritual growth and maturity in the faith, those chosen to be deacons can be younger and may wish they had a clearer understanding of the office and its expectations.

I chose that quote because that’s partially what’s motivating this talk today. It’s easy to neglect this, and I think there’s a risk of harm being done by deacons who are unwise, not tactful, and not yet mature enough to apply biblical principles in their work. This book both offers some of that and commends further study of the work of the diaconate.

Anyone read that one yet? I know Matthew’s deacons are working on that. I would commend, if you don’t practice this, reading a book together as a diaconate. We’ve been doing that in the five years since we were particularized and have not regretted it. We are not yet through our second book in five years, but it’s been worthwhile nonetheless. Most recently we’ve been reading Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray together, which is great. We read it before our meetings and then someone gives a brief summary at each of our meetings. I commend that practice to you also.

Helping Without Hurting in Church Benevolence — Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert

This is a fairly recent book. Many of us are familiar with When Helping Hurts. I have, unfortunately, not read that book yet. It’s by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert from the PCA’s Covenant College. Helping Without Hurting in Church Benevolence is basically When Helping Hurts abridged and applied specifically to church situations rather than the bigger picture.

It’s significantly shorter than When Helping Hurts. You can read it in a few hours—about 130 pages. This helped me so much in thinking through how we provide money in a way that’s constructive and helpful. The big picture is that unless it’s an emergency where someone is at risk of harm, we usually don’t need to be providing money to someone unless they’re willing to engage with you in not just meeting an immediate need, but working toward a longer-term solution. Mike Cloy is nodding about this—he does this in his day job and has articulated this well. He’s a good person to talk with about this.

This is another book absolutely worth reading—worth all your deacons reading—and using to help shape the policy that you have. Just as everyone was arriving yesterday, this guy showed up at the church asking us to buy him a Greyhound ticket. We aren’t in an area with a lot of foot traffic, but we have a major bus stop right in front of the church. People get off the bus, see the cars in the parking lot, see the church, and—maybe eight times a year—somebody comes in asking for money. We wrestle with that. They’re wanting a very short-term fix. We’re desiring to engage them and have them hear the gospel and worship God with us, and work toward getting them out of their financial troubles, but it’s very hard. This book gave me a lot more concrete things to think about.

A quote from here:

Good intentions are not enough. If we misdiagnose the cause of their poverty or treat their symptoms rather than their underlying problems, we can do considerable harm to materially poor people in the very process of trying to help them. We have to get the diagnosis right.

This book walks through how to diagnose that and then how to treat underlying problems.

Resources for Deacons — Tim Keller (ed.)

Almost finally on deacons is a fairly old book that Tim Keller put together. He really edited it: Resources for Deacons: Love Expressed Through Mercy Ministries. I believe Tim Keller’s doctoral work at Westminster was on the diaconate. Despite what you think about some of the practices in recent years, it’s something he’s thought a lot about and reflected on well in many ways. This book is not so much theological foundations, though there is some of that. It’s a very practical book—little short chapters, one or two pages on practical issues.

The table of contents has sections like “Organizing diaconal ministry” and “Needs and programs for diaconal ministry.” Little things like surveying your community for diaconal needs, guidelines for your deacons’ fund, outlines for the mission groups, presbytery diaconal associations—exactly what we are. It’s one or two pages, maybe two or three pages, very short little sections.

You may or may not agree with everything in the book, and that’s fine, but a lot of these things—it’s easy for us to always be reinventing the wheel as we think through, “How do we serve in this way?” This is one of the maybe only references I know that offers a starting point for thinking, “How have people talked about this in the past? How have they organized this in the past?” versus every diaconate, as the members change, having to start that conversation over.

The “needs and programs” section covers programs for the poor, programs for the elderly, nursing home ministry, programs for disadvantaged children, a guide for visiting the sick. In our own diaconate sometimes we say, “Oh, we should think about doing X. How would we go about it?” This is a little book you can read through and start to shape your own programs and policy and thinking on these issues.

I don’t think this is readily available—maybe through the Westminster Bookstore. I got mine through the PCA’s online bookstore from their Committee on Christian Education. I think they still have it available, but I don’t think it’s just available on Amazon.

On Guard — Deepak Reju

Finally, this is a book we’ve really benefited from—not specifically on diaconal work per se, but the book is On Guard: Preventing and Responding to Child Abuse at Church by Deepak Reju, a pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., where Mark Dever is the senior pastor.

Yesterday we were talking about thinking about safety and the risk of things like shooters at the church. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I think the reality is that a much more likely vector of attack on your church would be some kind of child abuse. We regularly hear cases in the news of child abuse being covered up in churches—tragically, churches mishandling it. This book is an eminently practical guide to how to avoid these things happening, and if they do happen, how should your church respond. By “eminently practical” I mean there’s a chapter on how you should build your church building, design a nursery and children’s classrooms that are not going to be accessible to someone who may have malicious intent.

The book goes through two types of people who might abuse or attack a child. One is something we think about with the street out here: someone who appears out of nowhere and tries to kidnap a child. But the much more likely and much more dangerous person, he says, is the one who comes into your church and is deceptive and lying and over years trying to get into a position where he can take advantage of a child. He spends a lot of time talking about how you should set up your programs and organize your church to avoid that.

We had our deacons read this, as well as the woman who coordinates our nursery. It’s been very helpful for us. Maybe this isn’t something that necessarily falls on your diaconate, but if people in your church aren’t actively thinking about this, and you have children in the church, you really need to be. I can’t think of a better resource to start with than On Guard. Easily available—Kindle, Amazon, Westminster Bookstore, Barnes & Noble. Anywhere can order it. Great book.

Articles in Ordained Servant

I wanted to talk about a few articles in Ordained Servant. The OPC has been putting together this online journal for church officers at opc.org for probably more than 20 years. It’s a really great resource—maybe six or seven articles every month, book reviews, articles on pastoral work, historical articles. Danny Olinger has been doing a series on Geerhardus Vos that I think is going to be compiled into a book at some point. Just a lot of really interesting material. There have been several specific issues dedicated to the diaconate over the years. I think there was one fairly recently within the last few years, and then various articles on the diaconate over the years.

I went through and picked out a few that I’ve really benefited from. It’s worth maybe even trying to get through all of them. This could be overwhelming—I’m spending close to an hour recommending things for you to read. You don’t need to read all of these things this week or even this year. But if you don’t already, start to set aside some time to read these over the years. Don’t let this overwhelm you—just be aware of what’s out there available for you.

Bill Shishko on training deacons

There are two pieces by Bill Shishko on training deacons. One is “A Training Program for Deacons” from 2000, which is an outline of their deacon training course at Franklin Square. That’s sort of an extension of an earlier article from 1992 called “Training Prospective Deacons.”

I particularly emphasize this because, in my opinion (and the Van Dam book earlier alluded to this), there’s a lack of materials out there specifically on training deacons. That’s part of why we asked Dr. Willborn to speak on that this weekend. As far as I can tell, Shishko’s pieces are really the only material directly on this from Ordained Servant. I don’t think the PCA has a lot of resources specifically on training deacons either. The wheel gets reinvented a lot. In the days of email, pastors email each other their notes and PDF files. But there’s a lot of opportunity here for us as churches and church officers to think about sharing more and recommending training programs. I would commend, if your church has a program that has been thought through and tested, that you think about ways to share it—either within our presbytery, or see about getting it published in Ordained Servant. It would be worthwhile.

Bill Shishko’s materials are very good. One thing you’ll note is that they’re very theologically grounded and much in line with what we heard yesterday—making it clear that just because you’re a banker who knows about money doesn’t mean you’re qualified to be a deacon, but as Pastor Holst shared last night, deacons are to be Christ-centered, spiritual, godly men. He really emphasizes that.

“Reforming the Diaconate” — Bill Shishko

Also by Bill Shishko is a three-part series from the early ’90s called “Reforming the Diaconate.” It’s just a really nice read on defining the diaconate and thinking through what it means for us. I appreciate his wisdom and thoughtfulness on it. A quote:

Deacons in our view can continue their role of serving the congregation in any and every way that frees the elders to most fully do the work of praying, ruling, and teaching according to the word of God.

He’s addressing the question, are deacons only to do the work of mercy ministry, or are they called to do more broadly things to serve in the church—helping with our buildings and other things that allow the worship of God to continue? He’s arguing for this bigger view of the diaconate, which I think most do, but he addresses it specifically.

“Biblical Qualifications for Deacons” — Archibald Alexander Allison

Another good one is “Biblical Qualifications for Deacons” by Archibald Alexander Allison, Ordained Servant 1997. I think it’s also a multi-part series, but it’s a very deep walk through 1 Timothy 3 talking about deacons and breaking it down—kind of a commentary on that particular passage. Worth your time as you’re studying that in Scripture. A quote:

The deacon’s reputation should be above reproach. No one should be able to lay hold of him or assail him or reproach him because of his sins, whether in speech, conduct, or doctrine. Every Christian sins until the day he lays down this body of sin at death. Daily sins that are common to all men do not bring reproach and blame upon a person from others because they too are guilty of the same sins. A deacon, like an overseer, must have and maintain a good name. There should be no question as to his integrity or upright character.

Right in line with what we heard from Pastor Holst and Dr. Willborn yesterday.

Articles from Southern Presbyterians

I also wanted to recommend three articles from Southern Presbyterians. Another good resource is the PCA Historical Center—I think it’s pcahistory.org. It’s a fantastic collection of documents about both the history of the PCA and Southern Presbyterianism. They have scanned and in many cases typeset some of the classic articles on the diaconate from Southern Presbyterians.

Dr. Willborn alluded yesterday to how in the 1800s, churches both in the U.S. and Scotland had kind of lost sight of the diaconate. Elders many times were performing the work of the diaconate. In the Southern church, they were wrestling with whether denominational boards should hire people to come in and oversee their finances, or whether deacons should be serving on the denominational level in overseeing finances. The Southern Presbyterians particularly were wrestling with and reflecting on the diaconate, and many of the men whose names we know well, like Girardeau, were really seeking to restore and establish the diaconate.

Some of the articles can be tedious polity arguments that may or may not be valuable. I picked out three that are very practical and have been helpful to me in reading both these original sources and the Van Dam book on the diaconate, which has a lot of historical overview. It’s really helpful to have a broader perspective on how our Reformed churches—both the American Presbyterian tradition, the Scottish churches, the Dutch churches, and the other continental Reformed churches—have thought through the diaconate, and how they haven’t necessarily always structured things exactly the same as us or practiced the same as us. It pulls us out of our box of thinking things must have always been done the way we do them now, which isn’t true. Likewise, we see in the 1800s these men wrestling with many of the same issues we wrestle with. Though it’s valuable to see the diversity, we also see great continuity in the work we are doing now in Christ’s church—work they were doing, just with fewer emails.

“The Deaconship” — James Ramsey

The three articles I recommend are all available through the PCA Historical Center, and I’ll show you at the end how to find my website where all of these things are linked. That’s reformeddeacon.com. Literally all it is is links to where you can find all these resources—just because I was trying to organize them for myself.

“The Deaconship” is by James Ramsey, Southern Presbyterian Review, 1859, before the Southern Church split. He was a pastor in Lynchburg, Virginia, if I remember correctly. It’s not terribly long, but it’s really edifying and instructional. A quote that has stuck with me:

That, indeed, is a sadly defective state of the church where there are no poor.

He’s responding to: “Well, what are the deacons to do if you don’t have poor people in your church?” And he’s saying you’re a sad church if you don’t have poor people in your church. He continues:

There must be something very deficient in its zeal and aggressiveness if, amid the multitudes of poor around us and mingling with us, there were none in the church itself.

Convicting to me. People have been asking about our building in this part of Raleigh. This is a very affluent part of Raleigh, and yet you can drive less than a mile away and you’re in very poor parts of Raleigh. Unsurprisingly, for the most part we are a white middle-class church here. There is so much wealth in Raleigh and yet so much poverty in Raleigh. It’s a good reminder to me as we think outwardly that it’s to our shame if this is not a place where the poor are welcome and want to be.

“The Importance of the Office of Deacon” — John L. Girardeau

By Girardeau: “The Importance of the Office of Deacon,” Southern Presbyterian Review, 1881, after the Civil War. Girardeau ministered in South Carolina and was particularly known for his ministry to slaves and then to the freed slaves afterward. Intimately bound up with that was his emphasis on the diaconate. He’s one of the great names in Southern Presbyterianism and certainly worth hearing as he writes on this topic. Girardeau writes,

The church therefore which shuts up the channel of diaconal ministration must expect to be dwarfed in the development of experimental religion.

A little bit of a mouthful, but his point is that if we aren’t practicing the work of mercy ministry through the diaconate, we are dwarfed in the development of our experimental religion. This is such an important part of the labor and work that we do.

R. C. Reed on the diaconate

Third piece by a Southern Presbyterian, R. C. Reed. This one is one of my favorites. It’s a little later—those first two pieces were from the 1850s and 1880s, and now we’re up to 1903. This is the one I quoted from earlier in commending Owen’s Rules for Walking in Fellowship. Reed was Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Polity at Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. A quote from Reed:

A good deacon is the pastor’s most valuable ally. Officially, he is worth two good elders. The one trouble about a good deacon is that the church, desiring to compliment him, will very soon elect him an elder, and thus place him on the retired list. His splendid gifts will at once fall into innocuous desuetude.

Dr. Willborn alluded to this yesterday—we need to be careful to not see someone serving effectively as a deacon and think then he must necessarily be an elder. There are good and godly men that the Lord is going to call to be deacons for their entire lives. And that should be such a blessing and encouragement to us, to see men serving as deacons into old age, when that happens. It’s a wonderful and excellent thing.

This piece was written for the seminary magazine. It was not a paper for presbytery like I believe that first one was, and maybe the Girardeau one also, which were more ecclesiastically written. This one is more popularly written, and I’ve found it very helpful and edifying.

In all of these things, there’s going to be overlap in the material. It’s not that each of these has totally unique things to say. But as I read through them, I’m so often struck by a sentence here and a sentence there. The whole thing is valuable, but these sentences have really stuck with me and are great reminders. Reed is not the only one to emphasize this point in particular: deacons are a great service and encouragement and blessing to the pastors of our church. You can debate at lunch whether or not a good deacon is worth two elders.

Defining diaconal ministry

I didn’t break these down, but as a highlight, some other things to recommend on defining diaconal ministry.

Two from the OPC that are really worth your time: the “Principles of Diaconal Ministry” that the Committee on Diaconal Ministries (which Nathan serves on) put together at some point. It’s just a three-page outline defining principles of diaconal ministry. Similar to it is “Principles for the Ministry of Mercy” by the OPC Uganda Mission, which really wrestles with how to serve in an area where people are constantly asking for financial help. They put this together as a guideline for thinking through cases of aid.

We certainly have broad guidelines from Scripture for how to be wise in offering diaconal aid, but in my mind it is wise to summarize these things and put them on paper, so we can think about what our guidelines and principles are—not necessarily so we go back and read them every time someone’s asking for help, but so we can think through how to serve and help. Going back to the Helping Without Hurting book: we want to not just dole out money thinking that is actually serving a need, but we want to think through how to help people live lives that are glorifying to God, teaching them to be good stewards and to work diligently and use their money well. These are two pieces that are particularly helpful—a three-page outline you can obviously read in a few minutes. The “Principles for the Ministry of Mercy” by the OPC Uganda Mission is interesting in that they have 12 pages of just Scripture texts about principles of mercy ministry. They’ve done a lot of the legwork for you.

Both are available on the OPC Committee on Diaconal Ministries’ website, which David Nakhla and Janet Bergman (the administrator for that committee) have really put a lot of effort into in recent years. If you’ve not taken a look at that website, they have recordings of the conferences—the diaconal summits—and slides and materials handed out at least this last year in Wheaton. Just a lot of valuable things on it that would be worth us making use of.

Pastor Trice’s “A Presbyterian Approach to Mercy Ministry” from New Horizons is good for thinking through what it means for us to be particularly Presbyterians as we do this. A lot of the writings outside of our circles on mercy ministry often aren’t thinking about them through our church polity at all. But our church polity has a lot to say about how we do this work of mercy ministry.

Dr. Willborn’s piece, “The Deacon: A Divine Right Office with Divine Uses,” is a foundational look at the diaconate in one of the volumes of the Confessional Presbyterian Journal. (Update: GPTS has since revamped the CPJ site, and this article — along with Willborn’s follow-up, “The Gospel Work of the Diaconate: A Ministry Proportioned in Number” — is now freely available.)

Another piece from Ordained Servant is “A Proposed Job Description for a Deacon”—a neat piece in trying to succinctly describe the diaconal role as a job description, putting it down on paper. These things aren’t all just breaking new ground, but different angles and perspectives are helpful for us.

Denominational study reports

All of those are readily available on the OPC website except Dr. Willborn’s article.

Denominational study reports: I know everyone loves to stay up late on Saturday night reading them. The OPC hasn’t specifically done one on the work of the diaconate. There is some discussion of the diaconate in the study report on women and church office that was done many years ago in the OPC, but we don’t specifically have one on diaconal work. It’s helpful to look at some of our sister denominations to see how they might think through things differently, and also see the ways we overlap.

The PCA did one fairly early in the life of the denomination. It wasn’t particularly a biblical study of the diaconate, but it was a study report looking at how the other NAPARC denominations were doing diaconal ministry. Certainly that’s changed in the last 40 years, but it’s still valuable to look at. The three headings in the report are “Diaconal Principles of NAPARC Churches,” “Diaconal Ministry of NAPARC Churches,” and “A Survey of PCA Diaconal Principles and Ministries.”

More recently the URCNA, a newer denomination, has done a study report on the office of deacon in the churches, 1997. Both of these are available through the PCA and URC websites. The URC attempted to do a more comprehensive study of the diaconate. I don’t know all the history, but I think they were formed just a few years before that, and they were thinking through how to establish their own diaconates. They were coming out of the CRC, who had started ordaining women in all their offices, and they were wrestling through what diaconal ministry looked like in their church. They have a scriptural overview, a history, and then a section on the place and task of the diaconate today.

I haven’t actually read through this one in full. I’ve skimmed it. They’re a denomination we are close with in ecclesiastical fellowship and like-minded with in many ways. And yet they come from a different historical context as a Dutch church. It’s a great place for us to see our similarities and differences and learn from them and grow through that. Good free resources available for you.

My bibliography and the PCA Historical Center

That’s all I want to recommend here. I wanted to point out my website, Readings from the Reformed Diaconate. I’ve been putting this together over the last few years—since 2015. It’s really just a bibliography. There’s no content original to me, except three introductory paragraphs that everyone skips anyway. I’ve categorized a bunch of the articles, and each card is just a link to one of the articles, books, or various resources.

I put this together for myself and thought it would be valuable for other people. Part of the early motivation was that the articles on the OPC website from New Horizons and Ordained Servant aren’t terribly well indexed. It’s really hard to say, “Show me all the articles on the diaconate on the OPC website.” So it started with me just trying to find all the articles that had shown up in Ordained Servant a few years back. Then I’ve been extending that. I haven’t read every word of everything I recommend, but I’m trying to make it a resource of things that seem to be biblical and reliable and faithful—confessional, Presbyterian resources on the diaconate.

If there are other things you know of that might be valuable to put on there, you can send me an email. There’s a link at the bottom which has a little form to recommend something. I put things solely on the discretion of Tim Hopper—this is not officially endorsed. Well, David Nakhla did put it on the Committee for Diaconal Ministries’ website, so it’s moderately endorsed by the OPC. I’m putting things on there at my discretion that I, as one who has taken vows as an officer of the OPC, see to be upholding what Scripture teaches and what our confessional standards teach—and hopefully things that are helpful and constructive. So that is out there for your benefit and edification.

I would like to do more things in the future—maybe put up some outlines of “this is what readings could look like for a diaconal training class,” or take something similar to what this talk is and say, “Here’s a good reading plan.” Right now the site doesn’t really provide any kind of hierarchy or priority for going through it, but I haven’t had time to do that yet. If anyone ever wants to lend a hand with that, I’d be interested in talking to you.

Linked on the site is the PCA Historical Center. Wayne Sparkman is the historian of the PCA and does an excellent work there. There’s a page listing resources on the diaconate. These are largely just historical articles that they’ve consolidated—the ones from the Southern Presbyterians they’ve taken out of old journals and typeset really nicely, so you can print them and read them on a tablet. Very readable. They also list some they haven’t been able to digitize yet but would like to. A fantastic resource.

In Wheaton last summer the CDM shared a diaconal ministry reading list. There’s a lot of overlap between that and reformeddeacon.com, but it’s a PDF available on the CDM website with recommended readings for you.

Closing

I hope this has been an encouragement to you. I again would reiterate that I don’t want this to overwhelm you and make you feel like you need to have all of this read right away. I would encourage you to take time in your service as a deacon to step back and reflect and learn.

One thing that has become very clear to me in five years of serving as a deacon is how important it is for us to have wisdom as we serve the Lord in this. Every case that comes to us is new and different. We need wisdom constantly—thinking about how we can organize things at our church, and so many other things. James teaches us that if we need wisdom, we should ask the Lord. At the same time, the Lord has provided many resources for us, many more than I realized when I started. There’s a lot out there. When I started putting all this together, I realized there’s lots of room to grow. I’m going to add Thomas Peck’s notes on ecclesiology, which Dr. Willborn mentioned yesterday has a section on the diaconate. I’ll add that on there soon if I can find a link to it.

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