The argument over deaconesses in the Orthodox Church tends to center around past history and present needs, but the history of deaconesses is obscure, easily distorted, and not always relevant. After all, history is not tradition; it only becomes tradition when it is handed down and kept alive.

There are also important principles at stake that must be preached if we are to remain faithful Orthodox Christians. We cannot expect to win the argument while keeping silent about a fundament truth for fear of offending women.

Below are three talking points on principles and six talking points on history, plus a list of links to additional sources of information and insight, for both reading and listening. All of these points are backed up by my book, The Disappearing Deaconess: Why the Church Once Had Deaconesses and Then Stopped Having Them. Please like and share, that others might be enlightened and encouraged.

Three Talking Points on Principles

1. Today’s push for deaconesses is not just about deaconesses: It’s about a complete feminist revolution—opening the door on ordination and leaving it open for female priests and bishops. “[W]e ought to welcome this conversation” about women as priests and bishops, says Carrie Frederick Frost, board chair of the St. Phoebe Center, in her recent book Church of Our Granddaughters (p. 95, read my review here). Frost’s main complaint, made many times in her book, is that the Church is ruled by men. To fix that, her “minimum that is necessary” includes deaconesses, subdeaconesses, lectresses, altar girls, altar women, women as homilists and catechists, women at synod meetings and church councils, women creating “new rituals that mark women’s lives”—the demands never end.
2. Those pushing for deaconesses today don’t want to revive the ancient order of deaconess; they want to create a wholly new order with all new duties and none of the limits put on ancient deaconesses (celibacy, advanced age, limited duty, no presence in the altar, no authority over men, and no vocal role in church besides singing as part of the congregation). This is stated explicitly by Frost in her book. Making deaconesses, in her words, will be a “creative” act in which history “will not be determinative; deaconesses for the twenty-first century will be different from deaconesses in the ancient church.” Her new deaconesses might also have different roles and responsibilities under different bishops. “Uniformity is not required.” 
3. The fundamental issue, which cannot be avoided, is the natural and economic order of the man and the woman. Feminists are in rebellion against that order. Their apostles are not Peter and Paul but Marx and Rousseau. They do not believe what the Church has always taught about the man and the woman. They believe what the woke world tells them to believe—gender doesn’t matter, women can be whatever they want to be, and no man can tell women otherwise.

Six Talking Points on History

1. History is not tradition; history only becomes tradition when it is handed down. Deaconesses have not been handed down to us. We know them only as history—for two very good reasons: (1) nothing that women may do that needs doing requires clerical rank, and (2) promoting women to clerical rank upsets the natural and economic order of the man and the woman by setting women over men in the Church, which we cannot do and still claim to be Orthodox.
2. It is not at all certain that St. Phoebe was a “deacon” or that deaconesses were apostolic. It is very likely that later deaconesses owed their origin to anachronistic readings of Romans 16:1, after the meaning of diakonos had shifted from “trusted servant” to “deacon.” The word is used many times in the New Testament—of Christ, of the Apostle Paul, of the wine stewards at the wedding in Cana, of civil rulers, and of a half-dozen named men, none of whom was a “deacon.” Only in Philippians 1 and 1 Timothy 3 does diakonos certainly mean “deacon.” Read more about this point here.
3. Deaconesses were never really needed in the early Church. Their main duty was assisting in baptizing women, and that could and was done by others who were not deaconesses throughout the early Church, even in those parts where deaconesses did exist. The whole Church has never had a tradition of having deaconesses, but the whole Church has had a longstanding tradition of not having deaconesses.
4. The heyday of deaconesses was in the fourth and fifth centuries, when converts were flocking to the Church and needing to be baptized. By the early sixth century, Severus of Antioch was telling his priests that the rank of deaconess was more honorary than ordinary. It was an award for exceptionally pious, able, and wealthy widows or virgins; a consolation for the wives of men to be made bishops; and a way to bring proud, potentially troublesome, aristocratic women under episcopal control.
5. The Byzantine rite of ordination for deaconesses was essentially a monastic rite. Deaconesses had to be at least 45 years old and celibate, and the only place they served in the altar was in female monasteries. Once the Church formalized the tonsuring of nuns and appointments of abbesses, neither churches nor monasteries needed deaconesses. Nuns replaced them.
6. The terms diakonos and diakonissa were always problematic because they seemed to put deaconesses on the level of deacons and thereby elevate women over men in the hierarchy of the Church, contrary to the natural, economic, and apostolic order. That is why deaconesses were banned in the West, which had no early tradition of deaconesses, and why they were allowed to fade away in the East, where they were never universal and mainly a feature of big-city churches.

Additional Resources

For Reading:

A review of Carrie Frederick Frost’s recent book Church of Our Granddaughters:

A presentation to the St. Phoebe Center’s 2017 conference in Irvine, Calif., succinctly framing the issue, reviewing the history and its significance, and outlining a theological basis male and female fully consistent with Church teaching:

A Public Statement by Concerned Clergy and Laity from 2018:

A downloadable slide presentation on deacons and deaconesses, covering both the history and the principles at stake:

A paper on the theological basis of male and female, presented at the 2023 meeting of the International Orthodox Theological Association (IOTA):

A brief lesson on the relevance of history to tradition:

For Listening:

An interview on deaconesses with Fr. Tom Soroka on Ancient Faith Radio:

A wider ranging interview with Rebecca Dillingham of Dissident Mama on gender issues generally: https://www.dissidentmama.net/dissident-mama-episode-79-rev-dr-brian-patrick-mitchell/