Kindle Notes & Highlights
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May 15 - June 8, 2020
From the whole company of the baptized, the Church calls, tests and forms some of its members in whom it recognizes distinctive gifts to be ordained to minister in Christ's name.
‘a walking sacrament’, a person who embodies the ministry of God in Christ that he or she represents.
If the first thing that God in Christ does is attend to his people and share their life in order that he may redeem and change it, then the deacon in his or her pastoral, liturgical and catechetical ministry is there to hold before the Church the truth that, before you can change people, you must attend to them and engage with them.
that incarnation comes before redemption, and attentive engagement before change. In other words, listen before you speak; share people's lives before you try to impose your own ideas on them.
five values for missionary churches: they are focused on God the Trinity, incarnational, transformational, disciple-makers and relational.
Deacons embody the Church in mission, encouraging and facilitating the ministry of all the baptized.
Diaconal ministry has three particular strands – enabling people to worship, providing pastoral care and proclaiming the gospel. Deacons are also role models and catalysts for the baptismal ministry of all Christians.
Deacons are church people, also at home in the world, and liminal people who are comfortable living on boundaries.
the Church of England's 2001 report, For Such a Time as This,5 which identifies three strands to the ministry of the deacon: liturgical, pastoral and catechetical.
far from being unrelated or even opposed to each other, one without the other two is incomplete – worship loses touch with life, teaching becomes purely academic and not transformative, and pastoral care becomes secular social work.
Diaconal ministry is not just the caring, social work arm of the Church that some assume it to be; the deacon is a constant reminder to the Church of its sharing in Christ's servant ministry as the deacon encourages and helps all Christians to live into their baptismal vocation.
It is a reflection of the fact that deacons are in one sense a prism through which the light of the incarnation shines, and a challenge to the Church to live in and engage with the world which God so loved, seeking and finding God's presence in all of life.
As we are liberated from our own fear Our presence automatically liberates others.
How Christians relate to the church is part of their relationship with Christ, it is not additional to it.
Without this integration of love for God's church with our love for God, we are in danger of either setting our passion for the church above our love for God or acting independently of the church which is the body of Christ.
We need to remember that deacons point to the truth that who we are, rather than what we do, is the basis of life in the church.
the deacon is called to focus in a particular way the ministry of the church and enable others to recognize and develop their own gifts and skills so that together the church expresses its ministry as the diaconal body of Christ.
Deacons are not set apart by ordination into special territory, but in order to reveal to Christians the serving ministry that has always hallowed our homes, workplaces, community and church.
there can be no sense that the deacon's ministry is ‘better’ or more valid than that of people who are not ordained, because the deacon serves alongside others in the church in mutual collaboration, support and encouragement.
Deacons need to develop leadership gifts, for they are indeed leaders, but gifts that reflect a willingness to be collaborative leaders.
‘It is not possible to love all the brethren to the same degree. But it is possible to associate in a manner that is free of resentment and hatred.’
The deacon is not set apart for menial service nor is expected to exhibit more humility than others, or to bear more than a fair share of suffering for Christ's sake. Instead the deacon is a person on a mission, an ambassador or messenger, making connections, building bridges, faithfully delivering a mandate.
The deacon, in common with all the ordained, is to promote, release and clarify the nature of the Church.
In ordination, the Church lays special responsibilities on those called to diaconal ministry and, in calling them to be public representative persons, calls them also to greater attention to the detail of holy living.
Once the deacon has been called, commissioned and ordained by the church, it is the deacon's vocation to enable the church to be itself in following Christ who gave his life for others.
Diaconal ministry takes its lead from this: deacons have a prophetic ministry in the world where injustice exists, and a pastoral ministry to people in need.
Diaconal ministry has this world as its context, and deacons need to be happy there, able to see Christ in the midst of its life.
Deacons keep before the church the truth that all humans, not just Christians, are made in the image of God.
The world can create institutions for dealing with some of the injustices of the world and the Church should be deeply engaged with them, but those institutions cannot deal with the alienation of the world from God: that is the Church's distinctive ministry.
Deacons need to be able to unpack moral principles for their congregations and to set an example in speaking for the poor and powerless.
William Law wrote in his eighteenth-century call to a devout and holy life, ‘If we are to be in Christ new creatures, we must show that we are so, by having new ways of living in the world. If we are to follow Christ it must be in our common way of spending every day.’
It can be a challenge to be the local person who is ordained – there is no room for mystique or pulling the wool over people's eyes: they know us too well for that.
What is perhaps overlooked is that fact that they could deal with the appalling because they daily dealt with the routine, unintentionally laying the foundation for the trust in the ministry of the church that was needed in this emergency.
we should take our smallness lightly but our presence seriously.
Deacons make connections for the church and the world, speaking theologically of contemporary society, asking how and where God is in this situation, acting to bring about God's life, seeing Christ in the people on the margins
In order to be safe on the margins, we need to be secure in the centre.
Deacons are grievers and lamenters, because they move among people who grieve and lament. However, they do not grieve and lament without hope, and the fact of their presence there as deacons of the Church is a tangible sign of a hope that is not simplistic but has its roots in the fertile soil of the Paschal mystery, that out of death God brings life. To do this requires that we are not identical with the marginalized, but are identified with them.
if there are no church buildings how will people know where to find the church?
it is sometimes supposed that conduct is primary and worship tests it, whereas the truth is that worship is primary and conduct tests it.
Before anything else deacons are worshippers. Only thus can the deacon be a guide into the liturgy. Worship led by a non-worshipper will be a performance.
Liturgy is radically related to how we live our lives, how we fulfil our baptismal vocation, how we offer God our souls and bodies to be a reasonable sacrifice; it means the ‘work of the people’ and the people should work, aided by the deacon.
Our worship leadership is not to satisfy our own need to be involved or to showcase our talents, it is to use and hone our gifts so that the church may worship in the beauty of holiness.
Good liturgy enables people from diverse backgrounds to identify with the prayers offered by the whole Church. Teaching others to pray in public is true diaconal ministry.
To be near to the love of God is to be near, as Jesus showed, to the darkness of the world. That is the “place of prayer”.’
The deacon's role in public worship is as representative person, making visible in the liturgy the diaconal nature of the church.
in the early Church care of the Gospel scrolls and books was a responsibility not lightly entrusted in the face of persecution so the deacon – who needed to be able to read and had been proven to be trustworthy – stored the Gospels at home during the week, brought them on Sunday to the assembly and read from them. In doing this the deacon acted for and on behalf of the whole baptized community, and we know that some deacons paid for this with their liberty or their lives.
If we have the rights and privileges to worship in the heavenlies we have the responsibility to come back to earth.’
The deacon who has learned to wait in Advent, to rejoice at Christmas and Easter, to repent in Lent, to wonder at Ascension and to be surprised at Pentecost is being equipped to help people bring their daily lives into the story of God's ways with the world.
The deacon as a liturgical person must be a person who understands what is being grasped at here – that liturgy is formative in ways of which the casual worshipper cannot dream, that to be given to liturgical ministry is to set ourselves in the path of constant transformation.
Once linked to liturgy and the proclamation of the gospel, pastoral ministry takes on the vision of the reign of God.
