Distinction Between the Offices of the Ruling Elder and Deacon

Samuel Miller, professor at Princeton Seminary, devotes this chapter of his essay on the ruling elder to keeping the deacon’s office distinct from the elder’s, since the two “have been so often confounded.” Taking Acts 6 as the sole scriptural account of the office’s origin, he answers three mistaken readings in turn: that deacons existed before the Seven, that the Seven were only a temporary trusteeship, and that their work was later enlarged to include preaching or rule.

A long array of patristic and Reformed testimony (Origen, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Jerome, and others) supports his central claim that the deacon was appointed to manage the church’s money and care for the poor, not to teach or govern; “serving tables,” he argues, means the money-table, the pecuniary affairs of the church.

Miller laments how widely Presbyterians have let the office lapse or merged it into the eldership, and he presses for its recovery, urging that deacons manage not only poor relief but the whole range of the congregation’s contributions to missions, Bibles, and benevolence. He closes with nine conclusions, among them that the deacon is divinely instituted, that preaching and government form no part of his office, that uniting the offices of elder and deacon in one man is inadvisable, that deacons should be ordained by the laying on of hands, and that they may sit with the session for counsel but hold no vote in rule or discipline.