What does the word diakonia mean?
Deacons are, presumably, as their title implies, ordained ministers of the Church who do diakonia. But what is this diakonia, this ministry or service that they do or organise?
For many centuries, there has been a belief that diakonia was humble service that was to be distinguished from the superior ministry of the Word. This belief was partly base upon a particular interpretation and translation of the word Greek word diakonia as used in Acts 6:1-7. If you follow the account in most of the common English translations, you are told that in the young church in Jerusalem, the Greek-speaking widows were not getting their fair share of the daily distribution of food. The apostles did not want to neglect their preaching of the Word of God, so they appointed seven men to handle this somewhat menial welfare task. This text is regularly used as the text at the ordination of deacons and perhaps suggests that they must expect to do menial service whilst they are still in training to become priests when they will be able to perform the superior ministry of the Word!
In 1990 a Roman Catholic scholar, John Collins, published a ground-breaking book, Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources, a linguistic study of the use of the diakon- words in the New Testament and the Greek-speaking society of the time. The study thoroughly revised how to interpret (and translate) diakonia.
He argued that past misinterpretation has led to the diaconate being considered an inferior form of ministry.
So, before looking at the meanings of the diakon- words, it is instructive to look at Collins’ s account of the Acts 6 story of the commissioning of the seven. As was pointed out even in ancient times, this interpretation is rather confusing because two of these seven were soon out preaching and converting with such enthusiasm that Stephen gets martyred (Acts 6:8–7:60) and Philip converts the first African, an Ethiopian (Act 8:26-40) and is described as “the evangelist” (Acts 21:8). Clearly not a running a soup-kitchen, waiting-on-tables job description! Something odd here, surely?
The problem is that the word diakonia in this passage has been translated, and misleadingly so, in three different ways. Take the New Revised Standard Version. It says that the widows were being neglected in the daily "distribution of food”. The New International Version is similar: "distribution of food". But in the original Greek text there is no mention of the distribution of food: it says “daily diakonia”. Then it says the seven have to “wait on tables”. The Greek text says “diakonein of tables”. And lastly, the apostles by appointing these men, are said to have been freed to engage in “serving the word”. But the Greek says the apostles do the “diakonia of the word”. The New International Version is similar: distribution of food; wait at tables; ministry of the word.
So the single Greek word diakonia has been translated as if referring to the distribution of food, being a waiter, and being a minister preaching the word. Given that Jesus said (in Mark 10:45) that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” the word diakonia has to have more multi-dimensional meaning than any single one of these interpretations, one that covers many forms of God-commissioned service.
Unfortunately, because of the Acts 6:1-7 misinterpretations, charitable or welfare or social and economic justice actions may be taken as inferior to “preaching the word” and thus diakonia of these types may not be seen as essential – they can be sub-contracted out to ‘deacons’ or welfare societies instead of being something that all Christians have to do if they are true followers of him who came to do diakonia.
So re-looking at Acts 6:1-7, one can now have a very different reading.
The writer of Acts has already told us that the Christian community was a sharing community and all the believers shared and were cared for in their community. It is improbable that some widows would not be given any food at a communal meal of all the disciples. But the disciples were growing in number and complaints arose from the Greek-speaking disciples that their widows were being neglected in the “daily diakonia”. This first verse mention of diakonia probably refers to administrative responsibility, one of whose aspects is concern for widows, without specifying the kind of assistance required.
The Twelve apostles, who were all Aramaic speaking, were constantly engaged in preaching and evangelising in the Temple (doing the diakonia of the word). They probably did not have the language or cultural capacity to serve the needs among the Greek speakers. Indeed it is likely that the Greek-speaking widows were excluded from hearing the preaching, both because of a language barrier, and on account of the custom of them being more restricted to the home than Aramaic speaking women.
So the Twelve ask the Greek speakers to select some suitable people (“full of the Spirit and of wisdom”) to deal with this. The seven Greek-speakers were therefore commissioned to take the preaching and any other necessary ministry into the widows’ homes and more generally, the Greek speaking environment, while the apostles were freed up to carry on the public preaching (in Aramaic) of the Word in the Temple. It is not a story about some people being delegated to run a soup-kitchen but about selecting people to lead the full diakonia, what Christ does, to a particular community (who would otherwise for cultural and language reasons be excluded). The seven receive a diakonia, a sacred commission, to minister to the Greek-speaking women and community.
It can thus rightly be pointed out that Acts 6:1-7 is actually about a radical expansion of the apostolic ministry beyond that of the Twelve. Indeed Acts uses the diakon- words for the kind of ministry by which the Word of God is to spread out from Jerusalem to the world, as seen in these two statements ascribed to Paul:
“the diakonian which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the good news of God’s grace.” (Acts 20:24)
“He related one by one the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his diakonias.” (Acts 21:19).The rediscovery of the meaning of diakonia
Sometimes we are not fully aware of how ideas and practices change, often quite radically, over time. For Christians, the changes in their thought often come because people keep discovering, or rather rediscovering, what is in the Christian scriptures.
Collins’s 1990 book led to precisely such a re-evaluation of the meaning of diakonia. The 2001 Church of England report, For Such a Time as This: A Renewed Diaconate in the Church of England, went so far as to describe it as “the recent rediscovery of the biblical idea of diakonia” (p. 9).
Collins found that in the recent past diakonia had been interpreted as menial service, which he believed was incorrect and led to a serious theological misunderstanding of the diaconate and indeed of ordained Christian ministry in general. In modern times the understanding of diakonia as service to the needy (owing much to the Acts 6:1 translation of diakonia as meaning the distribution of food to the deprived) began to influence how ministry in general was understood in the Church. Translations tended to replace ministry words with service words. Yet, Collins (2002, p. 20) contended:
“If service is the defining characteristic of deacons, in what way does their involvement in works of service distinguish them from other members of the Christian community, all of whom are called by the gospel to attend to the needs of those round them?”
Collins’s (1990, 2002) evidence is that in the Greek-speaking world of the time the diakon- words carry a general meaning of:
- delegate/messenger/ambassador (e.g., in Greek pagan religion Hermes is the diakonos, the messenger and agent of Zeus)
- the highly honoured table attendants at a religious festival or formal banquet who gave dignity to the event.
The words imply mediation and mandate in the name of a commissioner. Collins found that the diakon- words were not about humble service but about persons acting as the assistants or attendants or delegates or messengers of people of higher authority. They were in a person-centred relationship with the one doing the commissioning.
So diaconal work was always the work of a commissioned agent, operative, envoy or delegate. Indeed the work of a diakonos is closer to that of a messenger (apostolos) than to humble service. For example, typically Paul used the term diakonos in reference to an agent with a sacred commission. Even the ruling Roman government administration in Romans 13:4, is described by him as the commissioned agent of God, “God’s diakonos for your good.” In 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 Paul says that false apostles are the disguised “diakonoi” of Satan. The Christian ministers doing diakonia that Paul mentions include himself (Romans 15:25; 1 Corinthians 3:5; Ephesians 3:7; Colossians 1:23, etc.), Epaphras (Colossians 1:7), Tychicus (Ephesians 6:21-22; Colossians 4:7-9), Phoebe (Romans 16:1-2), Apollos (1 Corinthians 3:5) and Jesus Christ “became a diakonon to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness” (Romans 15:8).
Collins further contended that the diakon- words were never used as a synonym for, or restricted to describing, caring and welfare activities, nor did it designate people who were agents of such welfare service. This seems so startling a position, given the extent to which diakonia and service by deacons has often been seen for so long precisely as this loving response to the needs of others and particularly the poor, the sick and the oppressed. This view of Collins has been contested. A good example is Breed (2017, p. 49) who argues that it is clear, for example in Mark's gospel, that Jesus’ diakonia as done out of compassion and love for others, and as an envoy of God. However, the point is, not what the actual diaconal work done is, that can be hugely varied, is not in any way restricted to welfare work, but that it is the work of a person sent and mandated by God or Church. As Paul says of himself: “Of this gospel I have become a diakonos according to the gift of God’s grace that was given me by the working of his power.” (Ephesians 3:7).
The rediscovery of the meaning of the diakon- words has immense implications for what we understand to be the place of diakonia in the Church and more specifically for re-examining the function of the order of deacons in the Church.
The evidence is clear that the people doing diakonia in the early Church were not menial skivvies – waiters at table – but commissioned agents and officers of the Church doing a wide variety of works in furtherance of the gospel. The people who came to be called deacons – diakonoi – and who in time became one of the three orders of the ordained ministry must have in their functions reflected the status and actions denoted by the diakon- words and intended to ensure that the gospel imperatives were performed by the whole Church.
Service and care for all was the duty of the whole Church, of all Christians. But from the evidence in early Church writings it seems that the mandatory task of deacons, as authorised agents of the Bishop, was to get ministry and service organised – whether that was by evangelising, exhortation, preaching, communicating or simply good management of resources. Deacons were there to get all to do loving service. And their authority to do this was from the Lord.
So diakonia is the Trinity’s commission to ‘the people of God’ to be the servants of and spokespersons for the kingdom of God. That commission is to make the kingdom community’s gifts of life, liberation, love, learning and servant leadership manifest in today’s world.
Note: This information on the term diakonia is largely based upon Chapter 2 of the 2024 document, the Report of Archbishop's Commission on the ministry of the distinctive and permanent diaconate.
