The Deaconship

James B. Ramsay, a minister in Lynchburg, Virginia, read this essay before the Synod of Virginia, which voted to publish it in the Southern Presbyterian Review in 1859. He names four leading functions of the church (the aggressive, the teaching, the governing, and the charitable) and argues that the deacon is the divinely appointed organ of the charitable, whose vigorous exercise is necessary to the church’s fullest spiritual life and power.

On that footing he makes deacons treasurers of all the church’s funds and benevolent schemes, calls the mission boards “great central deaconships,” and traces the office’s general disuse to the want of the primitive church’s liberality and brotherly love.

He concedes that small churches without qualified men may let the elders discharge both offices, but insists the two should ordinarily be kept distinct.