1 Corinthians 12:5

But there exists in the Church a second kind of Divine manifestations; charges, namely, or ministries, διακονίαι. This word denotes, not like the preceding, inward aptitudes, but external offices, with which certain individuals are put in charge. There are different kinds of them; some may be related to the whole Church, like the apostolate or the office of evangelist (missionary); others to a particular community, and that either with a view to the spiritual life, as the episcopate, or with a view to different kinds of temporal helps, such as the numerous branches of the diaconate; under these offices even there must have existed functions of an inferior order relating to those material services which were called for by the holding of assemblies and of the agapae, etc. What was the relation of these charges to the gifts? Probably certain of them, the highest, rested on a spiritual gift which the community had recognised and ordained to a regular function; others, the inferior ones, were mere offices committed to individuals by the Church.

As there are gifts which, by their very nature, cannot become the basis of an office (speaking in tongues or prophecy, for example), and others which may easily be transformed into a regular function (the gift of teaching, for example), so there are also offices of a wholly external kind, management of material affairs, for example, which are scarcely related to any gift, while others, like the apostolate, have for their foundation a special gift or a whole combination of gifts. These varied offices have, like the gifts, their principle of unity; but this principle is, so to speak, before, not behind them. As the various gifts rest on one and the same principle, the Spirit, so the offices tend to one and the same end, the Lord, by whose authority and for whose service they act. To connect the two propositions of this verse, instead of δέ, but, Paul here says καί, and, no doubt to join this second principle of unity to the preceding, the Spirit, mentioned 1 Corinthians 12:4.