It’s an order in The United Methodist Church for laity who want to serve with a greater engagement and mission.
There are only two of them in the Great Plains Conference, with a third in the process of completing requirements.
Mary Ellen Kilmer and Leah Wandera are deaconesses and home missioners, while Jesi Lipp is targeting 2028 as a commissioning date.
“With the current movement in the church right now, it’s the best way of evangelization,” Wandera said. “Because deaconesses are out there in the community as teachers, as doctors, as firefighters, as cooks, as cleaners, as whoever. Every day, someone wakes up to go work and serve, (asking) how do you become a Christ-like teacher, a Christ-like doctor, and that's how we get to evangelize and make more disciples.”
Wandera not only works as a deaconess in health care in the Omaha area, but she is also coordinating the program in Africa and is believed to be the first deaconess on the continent.
Kilmer is a deaconess through her role as a substitute teacher at Gering schools in the Nebraska panhandle.
“It gave me a title and a status,” said Kilmer, who has been a deaconess since 2010 and a Certified Lay Speaker since 1981.
“I wasn't verbalizing and being — I'm going to use the phrase ‘overly Christian,’” she said. “And I'm definitely one where there's a line between public school and church. I (practice role) modeling and doing things. I don't like the arm twister, the pushy verbal saying Christianese, to use those phrases. It's not verbally preaching the Gospel in my mind.”
Coincidentally, both are clergy spouses. Mary Ellen’s husband, Rev. George Kilmer, is an elder who retired in 2014. Wandera’s husband, Rev. Peter Karanja, is pastor of Omaha Maplewood UMC and director of the All People’s Pantry for the Eastern Nebraska District.
Wandera said there are 40 candidates for deaconess and home missioner in Africa, with 15 recently consecrated.
“Some of us work within the annual conferences, some of us work outside the annual conferences. My work mostly right now is empowerment for girls and women through education and health programs, and I have been doing that in Kenya,” she said. “So, when I came to the U.S., and I was like, ‘Now I'm in Nebraska, what can I continue to do?’ I had to get the foundation incorporated here in Nebraska. To help me continue doing that work. And so right now, working with the girls and women of refugee and immigrant background on issues to do with education and health here in Omaha, and also back in Kenya.”
Kilmer became interested after attending the quadrennial meeting of United Methodist Women, now United Women in Faith, in Anaheim, Calif., in 2006, where she met a leader of deaconesses.
“I said, well, I just do substitute teaching. I'm not doing anything really, you know, church-directed work, and she said, that's OK, we're about love, justice and service. And she had time to listen to my story and different things that I've done.”
Kilmer got an invitation to a discernment event at the Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville, “which was on my United Methodist bucket list.”
“As I sat there and listened to the women talk, I thought, ‘This is a fit for me, definitely.’ I don't just want to go visit people in hospitals. Junior high confirmation is, like, the bottom of my list,” she said with a laugh.
Megan Hale, executive for candidacy office of deaconess and home missioner for United Women in Faith, said the number is growing to about 278, with more than 100 entering the program since 2017.
“Before 2018, we held a few discernments events every year in person in various locations, and in 2018 we started holding virtual discernment events over Zoom,” she said. “That allowed more people to join without being able to travel. It helps eliminate some barriers to learn about it.”
Many of the deaconesses and home missioners are commissioned at their annual conference, which raises awareness, Hale said.
“To me, I feel like the more deaconesses and home missioners that we have, the more we will have because it’s more visible,” she said. “Some people say it’s the best-kept secret in the UMC. We are trying to be more visible for recruitment, and we use a lot of social media.”
The name deaconesses for females in the role have been a part of Methodist heritage since 1888, Hale said. Through the years, males have been referred to as home missioners, and at last year’s General Conference, gender-based language was removed from the references.
Out of the 278 deaconesses/home missioners, Hale said, 23 refer to themselves as the latter, and not all identify as male.
Jesi Lipp, who is nonbinary, refers to the three-word term when talking about the ministry, or abbreviating it to DHM.
Last year, Rev. Lora Andrews, pastor of Roots Church KC in Roeland Park — a startup aimed at LGBTQ+ and BIPOC populations — asked if Lipp had considered becoming a DHM.
“I, like a lot of folks in the UMC who were clergy and laity, didn’t know that deaconesses and home missioners existed,” Lipp said.
Lipp said they were on the candidacy track for clergy “for a hot second” while in high school and college.
“I fairly quickly came to the realization I’m not called to ordained ministry,” said Lipp, who is also the parliamentarian for the Great Plains Annual Conference session. “I’m called to be a layperson, and I feel very strongly about the power I have as a lay person in our church that uniquely situates me and allows me to take up things that clergy either aren’t able to or as easily able to.”
Lipp said they would ultimately become a DHM as part of their job working for a rape crisis center in Kansas City.
“The fact that the DHM order is this calling for laypeople in our church who are called to lifelong vocational ministry but are still appointed to a mission field is for me a real affirmation and empowerment for what I know to be true about my calling as a lay person and the power that’s in that,” Lipp said. “What I do isn’t going to change if I become a DHM. It was really that understanding, that affirmation of a call that I have felt very deeply in the past 15 years. That’s what really was the deciding factor for me.”
Lipp has completed the introductory course for DHM, Theology of Mission, the only in-person class. Still to come are courses in United Methodist history, UMC polity and the Old and New testaments.
“It’s not like a full master’s degree but it’s not an unsubstantial amount of education, either,” Lipp said.
A Great Plains lay delegate to the 2020/2024 General Conference, Lipp said they are targeting completing the work to be commissioned at the 2028 General Conference in Minneapolis.
“I could get it done sooner, but if I have the opportunity to do it during General Conference, I’m going to do it during General Conference,” Lipp said.
Lipp said that like themself, many United Methodists are now aware that DHM exists.
“A lot of clergy don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say ‘Deaconess-Home Missioner.’ They think I mean ‘Deacon,’” they said.
Contact David Burke, content specialist, at [email protected].