A couple or so years ago, I found myself in conversation about the Ministry of university chaplains saying that I felt my ministry was more expressing my diaconal orders than priestly. And I recently read a post about 'distinctive deacons' in the diocese of Europe which seemed here to offer an explanation of orders that supports what I found myself saying then:

 ... a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain thingsDeacons are ordained to hold up before the Church and the world, diakonia, the distinctive ministry of Christ the Servant, as being central to all Christian ministry.

Some ask how a deacon is different from a priest; is a deacon not simply a junior priest? Well, no. A priest’s focus is on the parish community and sacrament. They are pastors/shepherds of the community, feeding them and leading them. The deacon’s focus is on outreach, service, and supporting the ministry of the faithful in the world. Eurobishop: Deacons make history in the Diocese in Europe: 

I'm not focussed on a parish community (though I do serve some), I don't preside at communion very often -it's not a major strand of being a chaplain to a university. I do tend to focus on outreach, serving the people and institution I'm placed with. I try to support the ministry of Christians (and others!) in the world of 'my' university and HE more widely. It's good to feel that my diaconal orders are still being 'used'.



On a separate note, Eurobishop's comment " a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain things" is a widely shared trope of more Catholic theologies. And I do agree with the reasons I often see or hear it shared: it provides a respite from functionalism and activism with their implied works-based judgmentalism. I've always felt that we should notice that being and doing are integrated and that where the priority goes in thinking about them depends on what one is trying to consider. I note that the 'being' in that passage is justified in terms of functions. Which makes my point that we can't conceive of pure being without taking in what it is doing.  Can we just not work with that distinction? Rather let's consider such things as dynamic and relational: a deacon is in relation to the church and the world, typcially, in certain ways and those ways are definitive of a deacon's 'being' in some way such that diaconal actions are likely to result and in turn the diaconal being is consolidated and grows in the doing of the ministry. Let's refuse to put ministry and minister asunder except for the briefest of thought-experiments.