Deacons and the Ministry

There are days when I begin to wonder whether some folks can read. Or perhaps I should phrase that in the question of St. Philip the Deacon, who asked the Ethiopian eunuch: “Do you understand what you are reading?” (Acts 8:30)

On the one hand, we hear the shrill voices which shout about “sacerdotalism” when we agree with the Book of Concord that “no one should publicly teach in the Church or administer the Sacraments, unless he be regularly called” (AC XIV) and “it is manifest that ordination by a pastor in his own church has been appointed by divine law” (Tr. 65). (How can anything which the Church confesses “has been appointed by divine law” be an adiaphoron?) Thus we state in our Malone Theses:

3) Laymen ought not preach or read sermons at the divine service.  Laymen are not to administer the sacraments of the Church.  Emergency baptism is the only exception to this rule.  (AC 14)
4) The Church, corporately, possesses the office of the ministry.  Our Lord Jesus Christ gave the office of the keys to the whole Church.  That office is conferred upon men by the Church through call and ordination.

For Lutherans, neither of these theses are really all that hard to understand— we are simply agreeing with the aforementioned confessional statements.

But now it seems that some of the same folks who ‘got the vapors’ over  the ELDoNA having a bishop, are now all confused about our deacons, purporting that we are doing the same thing that other ‘Lutherans’ are doing: commissioning laymen to usurp the pastoral office and calling such laymen ‘deacons.’

Let me make this really, really clear: No, we’re not. No one but called and ordained ministers preach and administer the Sacraments in the ELDoNA. As we make clear in the Malone Theses:

6) We seek the restoration of the historic, preferred polity—that is, the offices of Bishop, Presbyter, and Deacon—within the one divinely-established office of the ministry as local circumstances warrant.

We have returned to the nomenclature of the Lutheran Reformation and Age of Lutheran Orthodoxy, using the term “deacon” to refer to what some of have taken to calling “assistant/associate pastors”. Anyone who has tried to make sense of the jumble of titles out there— sole, administrative, assistant, associate and senior pastors (or is that “minister of the Gospel-ordained”?)—  not to mention the confusion of so-called ‘lay ministries,’ a seemingly-endless confusion of grades of “minister of the Gospel-commission,” really shouldn’t have a hard time with understanding a basic element of our polity: there is one office of the holy ministry. Men are called and ordained into that one office. According to the needs of the Church in various places, the ELDoNA retains the man-made, three-fold distinction of grades: bishop, pastor, deacon, but they are all pastors, not laymen.

Let’s consider an example of how this works in practice. Take, for example, the Rev. Jeffrey Ahonen (pictured above with me on the day of his installation here at Salem). Rev. Ahonen is the only deacon presently serving in the ELDoNA and he was ordained to the holy office and served as pastor of several Lutheran congregations before his call to Salem. His divine call to Salem is in a capacity to assist me in serving the people of God in this place, and also to serve within mission congregations in Wisconsin and Michigan (where he resides most of the year). When I need to be away from Salem for a Sunday (something that only happens a few times a year) Deacon Ahonen travels to Texas and preaches, celebrates the Lord’s Supper, visits the sick and shut-in, etc., in my absence. When Deacon Ahonen isn’t filling in for me at Salem, he is busy serving God’s people at two parishes in Wisconsin. We anticipate that over time, more men will be called as deacons within our fellowship, and their service will be built on this model. But no one will serve as a deacon unless he has been called and ordained to the office of the holy ministry.