The Whole Deacon

My friend Patrick Sanders gave a seminar at the 2025 PCA General Assembly titled “The Whole Deacon: Using the Office of Deacon to Its Fullest.” Patrick is a deacon at Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church in Athens, Georgia. He has posted his slides, and they are worth your time.

His argument runs against a common instinct that treats the deacon as a lesser officer: a glorified janitor, an assistant to the elders, or a stepping stone toward the “real” office of elder. Patrick answers that the deacon holds a distinct office, coordinate with the eldership rather than subordinate to it. Reading Acts 6, he shows that the point of appointing the seven was not mainly to define what deacons do but to keep the apostles from leaving the word of God to serve tables. The deacon oversees the tables (the temporal, physical, and financial affairs of the church) so that the elders can devote themselves to word and prayer.

He goes further. Table ministry means oversight of the congregation’s whole temporal life, carried out with real authority and the freedom to delegate. It is more than mercy ministry or general service, and it reaches past the local church into the communion of saints and the connectional work of the church’s courts, committees, and conferences.

What makes the deck valuable beyond its argument is how it is built. Patrick assembles his case from a wide range of Reformed and Presbyterian sources (Bucer, Calvin, Owen, Turretin, Girardeau, Thornwell, Bavinck, Ridderbos, Van Dam, Willborn, and more), then closes with a working definition of the office and a bibliography that runs for pages, his recommended readings marked in bold. Even on its own, apart from his live teaching, the deck reads as an anthology of the best Reformed writing on the diaconate.

If you are a deacon, or you train them, read it. It will raise your view of the office and point you to more good books than you will finish in a year.