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Administration within a local Baptist church is divided between the pastor and the diaconate, the latter a lay group of unspecified number. The selection of deacons occurs as part of the formation of a church or as soon as the membership includes qualified men to fill the position. Baptist churches generally refer to I Timothy 2:1-5 for those qualifications. Since the New Testament also mentions a woman named Phoebe who served as a
deaconess(Romans 16:1), Baptist churches have, in some periods of their history, appointed women to serve in that capacity. English Baptists listed the office in their earliest seventeenth-century confessions of faith and left numerous records of the performance of deaconesses in specific congregations. Although they were formally ordained and sometimes financially maintained by the church, deaconesses were not equivalent to deacons, but were assigned the special task of visiting and caring for the sick. Charles W. Deweese, "Deaconesses in Baptist History: A Preliminary Study," Baptist History and Heritage , XII (January 1977), 53.
Deaconesses made their appearance among Baptists in America, as in England, in a period of intense preoccupation with liberty—in America's case, the latter half of the eighteenth century. These women, like their English counterparts, concerned themselves with the sick and poor, tending to
those things wherefor men are less fit.\ Ibid., p. 54. As mentioned previously, deaconesses were common among the Separate Baptists who spread widely through the back-country of the South during that period. Their numbers declined, however, after 1800, due to the tightening of orthodoxy that accompanied the mergers of Baptist groups and the official establishment of a denominational hierarchy (exclusively male) and to the suppression of women that was invoked by southern males' reaction to the abolition and suffrage movements. Charles Deweese suggests that another reason for the decline of deaconesses was the growing tendency to limit the diaconate to business and management functions, excluding the caring and supporting ministries. Ibid., pp. 54-55.
Women continued to fill the same benevolent roles without ordained status, and they assisted deacons by serving on committees to approach other
sisterswho were subjects of church discipline Sweet, p. 49. and by helping with the preparation for the baptism of women, as modesty dictated. Women voted on candidates for church membership and on basic church documents, but throughout the nineteenth century, the
businessof the church was restricted more and more to meetings male members were specifically required to attend. Although a woman was responsible, in many cases, for writing or asking a pastor to come and form a church, once the church was established, her official leadership was inevitably surrendered to males.
Since women had lost designated roles in church government and had been virtually silenced in worship, they pushed for a re-evaluation of their place in the local church in the period of cultural shifting that followed the Civil War. They did so in part by reviving the concept of deaconess. That office was a continual topic of controversy from the time the Texas Baptist church revived from Reconstruction until shortly after the turn of the century. Prior to the consolidation of state Baptist forces, the convention of the south-central portion of the state debated the topic "Do the Scriptures Authorize the Appointment of Women as Deaconesses?" at its 1884 annual meeting. McBeth, p. 142, quoting Minutes of the Baptist State Convention of Texas, 1884 , p. 53. No record of the content of that debate exists, but interest in the issue might have been generated by the organization in 1880 of a women's mission society in conjunction with the State Convention. A few churches named women to the office of deaconess, including the First Baptist Church of Waco, Frank Burkhalter, A World-Visioned Church (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1946), p. but it is likely these were women in charge of the "circles" that the pastor, B. H. Carroll, directed. Mrs. W. J. J. Smith, A Centennial History of the Baptist Women of Texas: 1830-1930 (Dallas: Woman's Missionary Union of Texas, 1933), pp. 49-50. Given Carroll's outspoken chauvinism, they could not have exercised congregation-wide leadership, McBeth, p. 143, concurs with this opinion. although they were undoubtedly influential among the women.
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