Alistair Begg, one of my favourite preachers who spoke daily in Chicago when I was there in May, shared a story from a pastor’s conference he held at his church last year. The theme of the conference was, from our passage today, “we will devote ourselves to the preaching of the word and to prayer”. The conference was called “Basic”. We have gotten so used to novelty in the church that a common response to this theme even from other pastors, was a rather sympathetic gesture inferring, “What, have you run out of good ideas?” Preaching and prayer just don’t seem that innovative and frankly to many, are the boring part of church.
For the first few chapters of Acts we have heard about the beginnings and growth of the early church in Jerusalem after Pentecost. This was done almost exclusively through prayer and preaching. And Satan was working hardest through the religious leaders, not to stop miracles and such, but to stop the preaching about Jesus. Now we start to see some of the growing pains and the spread of the church over the next several chapters.
Now as I’ve said, I’m trying to relate what we read about the early church with the church of today, and as I read this chapter 6, I became aware that the things they had to deal with are very similar to what we have to. As a pastor, I have learned that there are some people who feel neglected in the church, not so much anymore because they don’t have enough food, but they may have other needs (or more often desires) that a single pastor cannot possibly meet for everyone. This is often legitimate, but it also often reflects the common attitude that the church exists for us, rather than us for the church.
This early church is growing very quickly and that can be a threat to people who want lots of personal attention, but notice the apostles didn’t say, “O my goodness we better stop preaching the word, too many are being saved, we’re growing too fast”.
It’s not that the apostles thought the distribution to widows was unimportant, in fact they probably instituted this ministry because they knew Jesus command to take care of them. This is a distinction of function, not value. Feeding people was not less valuable than preaching. In fact the preaching of the word should create ministries in the body that people work toward. John Stott says if you’re a Christian, then you are as much in full time ministry as the pastor. Whether that be in the church, in your family, or at your work.
In this case in Acts we have what boils down to a language barrier, and problems with the organization of the administrative aspects of the church. The truth is even today that most churches are way behind secular organizations in terms of administrative competence.
Now it’s hard enough with a church of a hundred people, but here in Jerusalem we are now looking at a minimum of 5-10 thousand families and I guess you could say 12 pastors. Churches of that size nowadays have paid staffs of upward of 100 people, not to mention all the volunteers.
As we read today, the Hellenist widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of provisions. Remember we read in an earlier chapter that they shared everything they had so no one went without? Well the system is getting overtaxed, and chances are the apostles didn’t even know about it at first.
The Hellenists were the Jews who had been dispersed throughout the centuries and were Greek speaking, the rest of the Jews in Jerusalem would have spoken primarily Aramaic at this time, so this was likely an unintentional oversight from problems in communication and organization, which you can imagine with that many people and two different languages.
Now as far as we can tell from reading, this is the first real administrative act that the apostles had to deal with in the church, and I think it is prescriptive for churches and pastors today as we lead a body of believers.
Let me paraphrase what the apostles say when they become aware of this problem. “Ministry to the people in this church is getting too cumbersome for us and is detracting us from the roles we are called to. It is wrong for us to give up knowing and preaching the word of God to visit and distribute food to all these people. We have to devote ourselves to prayer and ministry of the word, this is our full time job, so pick out from amoung this priesthood of believers, people who have good reputations, full of the Spirit and wisdom, whom we will appoint to this ministry.”
So that’s what they did because this solution pleased everyone. Now let me point out a couple things here. First of all were these volunteers? Nope, they were chosen and appointed. Were they paid staff? Nope. It appears they were people who were willing to do what the body of believers identified and called them to do simply as members of the church. We don’t hear any of the 7 complaining about being chosen to do this work.
They were all Greek speaking, so there were some criteria other than the ones mentioned before, that suited them to the job, they had a good reputation in the church and community, and were full of the Spirit and wisdom. And as we will see, they were leaders in the church who did more than just this specific ministry.
In fact to show how important the preaching and evangelism ministry was, we see that at least two of these seven, Phillip and Stephen, were out preaching and evangelising as well. This tells me that these seven guys were probably not doing all that distribution work themselves, but developed other teams of people to help carry the load seeing as there must have been so many widows and needy people in a church that size.
So how do we practically translate this passage to our church today? Well first of all, is the paid pastor to do all of the ministry in a church? Should the pastor be doing all the visiting, all the administrative and organizational things in the church? Obviously not, clearly the primary roles for the pastor are to study, pray, preach, and equip disciples. The other things are OK as long as they don’t interfere with these primary tasks.
Now ministry of the word does not just mean preaching on Sunday morning, but it includes counselling, bible study, basically everything we do should be ministering the word of God. I am energized when someone comes to me and says, I want you to come over because I was reading the Bible and I want to know what this means and how I can apply it my life. That doesn’t happen often.
But obviously this all means that a teacher of the Word must devote much of their time to studying the Bible and prayer, if they are to minister it to people. A pastor is actually doing a disservice to his congregation if they busy themselves running around trying to please the congregation with other things that we like to call ministry just because a minister usually has to do it. The apostles are saying, it’s not right for us to deal with those distractions that people want us to do, when they take away from the work God wants us to do.
You know when Jesus says they will know you as my disciples by your love. Well, it’s very difficult to love as Jesus means when you are focussed on yourself and your carnal needs. And if we are really loving each other as a group, no one will have unmet needs. If a pastor can’t visit a person, that shouldn’t really be problem, in fact it might be more meaningful for someone who isn’t getting paid to visit them. The pastor’s prayers are no more powerful than any other believer. But if we are relying on a handful of people to ensure all needs are met, then they will often go unmet.
Now when we hear “prayer” in this passage by the way, it is not that we say a short prayer in the morning when we get up and that’s it. These people prayed for hours each day and it was hard, heart wrenching work.
But this passage also talks about how other workers and leaders are designated or delegated, and to me this speaks of two things, first that the congregation was willing to be under the authority of Spirit filled leaders who were being obedient to Christ. Secondly, that they were willing to serve the church in whatever role they were appointed to.
How does this compare with the model we have today? Well first of all unlike these early believers who with their families were completely devoted to the church and didn’t have to worry about so many external things as we read about in earlier chapters, in our culture the church is very low on our list of personal devotions. Jobs, school, children’s activities, and general busyness that we have created in our culture, make it nearly impossible to give much time and effort to the real work of the church. We’re too busy fulfilling ourselves. So we hire paid workers who have dedicated their lives to the church, to do the work.
Secondly, we are not people who want to be under authority, especially of wacky leaders in the church. A boss at our job we have to tolerate, the government we reluctantly submit to, but not those church leaders. So what we have is a volunteer system where we try to get people to help out with guilt and pleading, often filling roles that really are not suited to them.
In the original model of church, the Spirit filled church identified people with various gifts, and appointed them to various positions, which they were glad to fill because then they were doing their God appointed part in the body of Christ for the good of others, and making it function properly. Do you find yourself having a hard time knowing what God wants you to do in the body of Christ? Are you willing to have Him tell you through someone else?
Paul talks about this in Romans 12, 1 Cor 12, Eph 4 saying that we are all part of the body and have a function, and all these functions are important and build up the body in love. In Ephesians 4 he essentially says that God gave the pastors, teachers, leaders, not to do everything, but to equip all the believers for their designated work of ministry, building up the body until we all attain unity in our faith and knowledge of Jesus, that we become mature in our faith, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.
Then we won’t be as influenced by the outside world, we will grow up into Christ, with each part of the body growing healthy and full of love.
So you see here a recipe for growing in your faith that is beyond studying the Bible and prayer and so on. It is finding and putting into practice your gift that was given for the building up and health of the church. It benefits the church and it benefits you.
This fits very well with my experience. You don’t really grow much as a Christian by just reading the Bible and praying. You grow as you apply what you read and pray about, and do what God has given you to do in the church. You show me a truly mature Christian, and you can bet they have done a lot of serving of some kind in the church, or as the church out in the world. Part of the problem is that these people can get burned out because the whole body does not do as it should.
Ideally an eye shouldn’t have to be a nose and a foot too. But when the nose and foot aren’t being noses and feet, some other part has to take over, and it is not a nose or foot, so it doesn’t work very well. When one part has to be many parts that it’s not, we’re in trouble.
And I guarantee you that coming to church on Sunday mornings is not a spiritual gift. A few of the more outward gifts are at work on Sundays, but the vast majority are active outside of Sunday mornings, or at least should be. This is why even secular reports say that being a pastor is one the most stressful and high burnout jobs in the world right up there with being a firefighter. It’s why 35-40% of pastors leave ministry altogether in the first 5 years, and 60-80% don’t make it 10 years. And the main reason is because they are expected to be too many parts of the body other than that to which they were called, and they get discouraged and burnout.
It’s not much different than being asked to be a professional football, hockey and basketball player, when you are actually only a baseball player. And I see nowhere that this model of church and church leadership was supposed to be altered. Please think about this.
So from verse 8 in chapter 6, through chapter 7 we see a story of one of these chosen workers named Stephen. Notice not only is he leading and overseeing the distribution ministry, it says he was full of grace and power and was doing great wonders and signs amoung the people. We see here the principle that when God gives you a little thing to do and you are faithful, he will often give you bigger things. I asked myself why was Stephen so full of grace and power and able to do all those things? Could it be because he accepted the role that God gave him through the church and acted on it?
We see in the next few verses that because he was doing this, persecution came as we talked about last week. People tried disputing with him, but it says they could not withstand the wisdom and Spirit with which he was speaking. Again a confirmation that when we step out in faith and truly witness, God will give us the words to speak.
I love this part, let me read verses 11-15 in chapter 6…
You know that’s exactly what Jesus did through the Romans in AD 70. He destroyed the temple and changed the customs of the Law forever. So then we hear a long response to the high priest that I won’t go into detail with. Stephen is essentially just doing a massive quick review of the Old Testament, trying to help these unbelieving Jews realize that their Scriptures are talking about them.
And let’s watch what happens picking it up in verse 51…. (Video)
How much like Jesus is that? And Jesus is not sitting on his throne, he is standing up watching Stephen with great interest and pride. I want that don’t you? Not so much the stoning part, but to be that empowered by Him and have him watching you with great joy and pride, just waiting to beam your spirit up to be with him forever.
Stephen is the first recorded martyr of the church, and notice who he was. He wasn’t an apostle, he was just some guy that the church decided would be good for delivering groceries to widows, and look where it ended up. Don’t ever underestimate your role in the church even if it seems like you’re just an appendix or tail bone. But you gotta get out of your seat and be that appendix. Because if we don’t the church will not continue to thrive, as Paul says in Ephesians.
You have some time to think about this, because in the New Year I am going to preach through the book of Ephesians and I am going to offer you some practical courses on finding and using your spiritual gifts, and evangelising according to your personal make up. And I’ll tell you right now, you should have joy doing what God has given you to do.
I remember being excited and almost privileged, about taking out the garbage after a potluck shortly after we began attending our old church. That is so not me. When we are working in the church and we are not enjoying it, energized by it, we probably should be doing something else.
But that means that the person who should be doing it has to step up. God says all the parts are provided in every local church. I could create sermons and preach three times a day everyday. Yeah I would get tired, but I would love every minute of it and be energized by it while I was doing it. That is how I believe God has wired us to serve in His body, and I believe that is what he wants us to experience when we obey.
When I say working in the church, again I don’t necessarily mean things that you do in this church building. In fact most of the work of the church happens outside of the church - evangelism, providing meals, doing some kind of mission work near home or oversees, leading a bible study or small group. The list of potential ministries is endless.
But we need to always remember that the theological point the apostles are making is that the preaching of the word is the primary way that people are saved and the primary way that people grow in their faith. All these other things come out of good biblical preaching.
Now I don’t believe we are ready to implement that early church model of leadership yet, so for this year at least we will do it like we have in the past, accepting nominations for various positions (which is maybe the part similar to what we saw in Acts), we ask people if they will accept the nomination (which is probably the least biblical part), and then we have a membership vote. Unless you would prefer that me and the elders recruit and appoint people.
This coming year we have some vacancies at elder, we need a treasurer which is a very important position, and we need what we will call deacons and deaconesses from the word diakineo which literally means to serve. These people take care of the needs of people in the church when they arise.
I don’t enjoy this process of finding people to fill positions, but I wonder if we shouldn’t have to be turning people away because there is such a desire to serve in Christ’s church. Should we not have to be making up new positions because people are sensing a call to specific ministry that doesn’t currently exist? Would you be happy if I came up to you and said I think you are the perfect candidate for such and such, would that excite you and make you want to do it?
Again this is not meant to be a critique or to make anyone feel guilty, it just seems to me to be a natural result of being part of the church of Christ. That we would want to do something.
Let me just close with a passage from the book of Hebrews in chapter 5, “Although he was a son, Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.
About this we have much to say, and its hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
Are you a milk drinker or a solid food eater? One demonstrates spiritual fruit in their lives, the other doesn’t. I think that last sentence relates to Romans 12, nobody knows who wrote the book of Hebrews, but many think its Paul who also wrote the book of Romans where he says, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship (is that what you come here to do?). Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
That last part says essentially the same thing that Hebrews 5 does. Our faith is meant to be practiced, tested, and as we practice we come to know the will of God more fully, and become mature in our faith, producing more real fruit.
