Archdeacon - Anglican Communion

Anglican Communion

See also: List of archdeacons in the Church of England and List of archdeacons in the Church of Wales

Archdeacons serve the church within a diocese by taking particular responsibility for buildings, including church buildings, the welfare of clergy and their families and the implementation of diocesan policy for the sake of the Gospel within an archdeaconry. An archdeaconry is a territorial division of a diocese; these vary in number according to the size of the diocese and in a few cases an assistant bishop in a diocese will also fulfil the duties of an archdeacon in part of it, as in the Archdeaconry of Bodmin 1953-62 (the Archdeaconry of Bodmin is one of two archdeaconries in the Diocese of Truro). An archdeacon is usually styled The Venerable instead of the usual clerical style of The Reverend. In the Church of England the position of an archdeacon can only be held by a priest who has been ordained for at least six years. (This rule was introduced in 1840; the requirement that an archdeacon be in priest's orders was enacted in 1662.) In some other Anglican churches archdeacons can be deacons instead of priests. The Anglican Ordinal presupposes that the functions of archdeacons include those of examining candidates for ordination and then presenting them to the ordaining bishop.

In some parts of the Anglican Communion where women cannot be consecrated as bishops, the position of archdeacon is effectively the most senior office a female cleric can hold: this being the current situation, for example, in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney. Very rarely, "lay archdeacons" have been appointed, most notably in the case of the former Anglican Communion Observer to the United Nations, Archdeacon Taimalelagi Fagamalama Tuatagoloa-Leota, who retained her title having served as Archdeacon of Samoa.