Nine-year-old Gary Baird’s daily route home from school meandered near a forested area not far from his house. One afternoon he heard a “crying in the woods” and slowed down to investigate.
The source of the weeping was a young man several years older than Baird. Even with his limited life experience, Baird knew something was seriously amiss.
“I stopped and asked what was wrong. He told me stories which I didn’t understand until years later, but I had a great deal of compassion for him — a wanting to reach out,” Baird said. “That was my social awakening. I didn’t have the spiritual vocabulary, but I had the emotions.”
Baird, now 50, relates how he walked side by side with the young man until the sorrow passed. “I understood the concept of compassion, the concept that no matter how fragile we are, we are still a comfort to each other.”
Baird said he knew, even at that young age, he was called to do something special, and at 22 felt his place was to be a deacon.
Frustrated that he couldn’t find any formal training, he gave up pursuing a conventional route to fulfill the call. He married, raised a family and found a profession in landscaping. But he never stopped caring for people in any way he could.
Now, 41 years later, Baird’s calling has finally been formalized. Last year, he was ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church, thanks to a new course pioneered by the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas.
The course offers individualized, self-paced training that focuses more on the individual and less on lectures and classroom settings. Church leaders say it works especially well for adults in rural areas where resources may be few.
After a rigorous curriculum of reading and studying in seven areas, which took more than two years to complete, Baird was ordained with two other Arkansans, Curtis Jones and Cindy Fribourgh, in a service at Little Rock’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.
Four human elements make up the Episcopal Church — the laity, the bishops, the priests and the deacons. The latter three are ordained positions. According to the North American Association for the Diaconate in Providence, R.I., there are 2,200 ordained deacons in the Episcopal Church scattered throughout the nation’s 99 dioceses. Baird is one of only 14 in Arkansas.
According to the church, it is the duty of the laity to bear witness to Christ, carry on His work in the world and take a place in church life. It is the duty of a bishop to “represent Christ” as apostle, chief priest and pastor of a diocese.
Priests and deacons are given the same charge as the bishop to represent Christ, but priests serve as pastors of local congregations.
Deacons, on the other hand, serve as “servants”to those in need and assist bishops and priests in the execution of their duties.
“My goal is to be a bridge between the world and the church,” Baird said. “I bring to the church the concerns and needs of the world and I take to the world the gospel, the good news.”
Baird reads from the Gospels during services at Grace Episcopal Church in Siloam Springs, Ark. He also prepares the communion table and cleans up afterward. “Very much like a waiter,” he said.
The re-establishment of the diaconate and the ministry of deacons is a post-World War II development within the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, said Edwin F. Hallenbeck, the executive director of the North American Association for the Diaconate.
The emergence of deacons has helped alleviate a critical clergy shortage in both churches, but especially in Catholic parishes.
“It’s still in the process of evolution, but if you go back more than 30 or 40 years, the deacons you would find are not the kind we’re talking about now,” he said. “Then they would have been on their way to the priesthood.”
While there are some “transitional deacons” in the Episcopal Church who aspire to be priests, most deacons in the church today see the ordination as the final step in their call.
Very few deacons in the Episcopal Church are under 35, Hallenbeck said, and most are in their late 40s or older. Of the more than 2,000 in the nation, half are women. Each of the 99 dioceses in the nation helps members of the laity follow a call into the diaconate, but the programs take many different forms. In many cases the procedure consists of weekly or monthly classes that could run for years.
“Before, each individual tried to do it on his own with his parish. The Commission on Ministry started this new kind of process where it takes a minimum of two years and maybe four,” said John Barton, vicar at Grace Episcopal Church, of the new course offered in Arkansas. “(Baird) is in the first class we’ve tried to produce.”
Hallenbeck said the urban dioceses tend to run programs that look more like schools. The new program in Arkansas works well in relatively rural states where there are fewer participants.
“It’s a competency-based program where there is a pattern worked out with each person coming in,” he said of the Arkansas program. The training program is more individualized and self-paced, which works very well for adult learners,” Baird said.
Joyce Hardy is the director of the new Deacon Formation Program of the Diocese of Arkansas. She said Arkansas’ program, which is now being featured in national guidelines, was started two years ago. Baird signed up almost immediately.
During the past 24 months, his group studied several subjects, including Scripture, church history, ethics, theology, practice and theory of ministry and contemporary society. The class met four times a year for a weekend that included classroom instruction, practice, discussion and lectures.
The collegiality of the group was no small factor in Baird’s educational experience.
At the end of the prescribed courses, Baird and his classmates had to write seven canonicals — papers that indicated their knowledge in the areas of training.
“The canonical requirements are to demonstrate that they are competent in seven different areas. But how they demonstrate that and how they prepare to demonstrate that is really up to them,” said Hardy, who was ordained as a deacon in Tulsa in 1985.
“Not everyone learns best from lectures” she said. “Not everybody can get across what they know best by writing a paper.”
Deacon training popular among Alabama Baptists, emphasizes partnering with staff
Wallace Russell remembers the struggles his deacons were having a few years ago in trying to meet the needs of his congregation.
“We were foundering with our deacon family ministry,” said Russell, pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Dothan. “We were defeated.”
Russell said the challenge of meeting the needs of the congregation’s approximately 1,200 members was more than the deacons could handle adequately.
Recognizing that, he said Bethel’s decision to move toward a deacon team ministry approach proved to be the solution.
He said each one of the three teams — hospital, grief and new members — is charged with specifically addressing that area of church members’ needs. “For us, it’s the best thing we could do as far as our deacons,” said Russell.
Bethel began the program about three years ago. Both the church’s 18 active deacons and inactive deacons are involved.
Assuring the effectiveness of deacons in the Baptist church is a concern pastors, church members and the State Board of Missions (SBOM) said is most adequately addressed through training and constantly re-examining their roles.
Jerry Miller, a deacon at First Baptist Church in Huntsville for more than 30 years, said the role a deacon plays is defined by the size of a church and the direction it wants to take.
Miller said deacons made major decisions at one time in some churches, with their role shifting to that of benevolence, welcoming new members, grief counseling and other areas as the church grew and additional staff members were added.
“We still consider ourselves spiritual leaders, but we do it alongside our staff,” Miller said.
Henry Lyon, a retired employee with the SBOM and current consultant in the SBOM’s office of discipleship, deacon and family ministries, said it is important deacons understand their roles.
“One of the things we’re focusing on is teaching the biblical model for leadership, which is servant ministry and being spiritual leaders,” Lyon said, “as opposed to being managers or the board of directors of the church.”
Some 1,500–2,000 deacons have been trained annually at SBOM seminars held at associations across the state, along with an annual retreat for pastors, deacons and spouses held each September at Shocco Springs Conference Center, Lyon said.
“I think it’s made a dramatic difference,” Lyon said of the Shocco conferences and the associational seminars. “I emphasize that deacons are in a partnership with the pastor.”
Lyon said the annual retreat and seminars stress the importance of how deacons are to conduct themselves. “When they’ve presented themselves as spiritual models, the church is going to follow,” he said.
Lyon said the SBOM can provide pastors with an agenda for pastors who wish to conduct their own seminars.
“I always ask the pastor what he wants to target, what he perceives as the need of his deacons,” Lyon said. He adds that the SBOM also has a dozen deacon trainers throughout the state who have experience as deacons and lead conferences.
Praising the resources provided by the SBOM, Miller said the key is adapting their materials to meet the needs of individual churches.
“What they do is good, but we have to address it along with our needs,” Miller said.
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