So, last week we looked at what elders are and what qualifies someone to be an elder. This week we are looking at what deacons are and what qualifies someone to be a deacon. I was thinking this week that these two passages operate somewhat like the lights on your car dash. A couple weeks ago we traded our old minivan in for a newer car. If you’ve seen our minivan, you know that we got our money out of that thing. It was missing the passenger door handle, it had a big dent in the front bumper, neither of the sliding doors worked when you pushed the button, and the side view mirror was literally held together by duct tape as an unnamed driver in our family hit a trash can with it going 40 miles per hour. In addition to that, the dash warning lights were lit up like a Christmas tree. So, I told the dealer about all this via text and he gave me a sight unseen trade in quote that I thought was higher than the car deserved. So I went in, hoping they wouldn’t change the quote. I was in the lobby and the dealer came in and said, “Jim, I’m trying to get the mileage on your car and I literally can’t even find it for all the warning lights on your dash. I’ve never seen this before!” So I had to show them which buttons you push to make certain warning lights go away:) And, yes, they still honored their original trade in quote. 

I say this because these two passages are like those warning lights. They are to be a dashboard of sorts to help us see if our leaders are qualified, if you might be qualified to hold one of these positions one day, and they act as a dashboard for all of us to know what God desires for us to be a healthy church. 

But, before we can get to the dashboard, we need to understand a couple things about the role of a deacon. The Bible actually gives us very little information about deacons. We have probably two descriptive passages about deacons in Acts six and Romans 16. This passage here is the only prescriptive passage in the entirety of the Bible when it comes to the office of deacon. So, my hope is to look at these passages to understand 1) what a deacon does and 2) who can serve as a deacon. 

1. What a deacon does

If you think back to last week about elders as having been given the ministry of the word, then think about deacons as having been given the ministry of deed in the church. The Greek word for deacon simply means ‘servant.’ A deacon serves in the ministry of deed. And probably the first passage that comes to mind on the topic of deacons is Acts six. Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. 2 And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, "It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. 3 Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. 4 But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. - Acts 6:1-4

Do you see what happened? Men were appointed to serve in a specific capacity so the disciples could be freed up to do the ministry of prayer and the word. And I understand that upon a cursory reading of this text, it can sound like serving tables is beneath the disciples. It can even sound like they don’t care about the suffering and vulnerable in their midst or that the ‘spiritual’ ministry is more important than the ‘practical ministry,’ but nothing could be further from the truth. 

Matt Smethurst has one of the best books on deacons that I’ve read. It’s appropriately titled “Deacons.” In it he says of Acts 6, “By prioritizing Scripture and prayer, the apostles are choosing to stay focused on the whole church’s spiritual welfare, even as they affirm the Hellenists’ physical needs. In fact, they recognize a fundamental truth: a church whose ministers are chained to the tyranny of the urgent - which so often shows up in ‘tangible problems’ - is a church removing its heart to strengthen its arm. It’s a kind of slow-motion suicide.” 

And look at the result in verse 7: And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem. But, what we can miss is the way that happened. It happened by preserving the unity of the household of God. This issue of the Hellenistic women not getting their food distribution could have been like a grenade thrown into the early church dividing the church down racial lines. But, the church saw the problem and responded masterfully to it. Now, we don’t know if these men in Acts six formally held the office of deacon, but it is pretty much unanimously agreed upon that this was at the very least a primary building block for the development of the office. 

The church needs a strategic division of labor because no one can do everything. When anyone tries to do everything, everyone loses. I’m quoting Matt again here, “The Apostles did not delegate this problem because it wasn’t important, but because it was. They could have imposed a swift, superficial solution and moved on. But, instead, they laid the groundwork for an ongoing solution and a permanent office in the church.” They knew it would need ongoing oversight and intentional leadership and wanted people to be tasked with this focus. 

Deacons are an irreplaceable gift to the church. A church without deacons serving in specific areas of material and physical need will never be truly healthy. If we do not follow God’s design for the church, the church will suffer. We will suffer when we minimize the role of deacon by either not having a robust diaconal system in place or seeing them as some kind of janitorial role. But, we will also suffer if we turn the role into pseudo-elders or some kind of second branch of congress. 

Ok, one more Matt Smetherst quote, “Biblically understood, deacons are a cavalry of servants, deputized to execute the elders’ vision by coordinating various ministries. When deacons flourish, the whole congregation wins.” Our own Kelly Simpson gave me this helpful analogy. The elder/deacon collaboration can be likened to the director of a play and the stage manager who is tasked with ensuring the vision of the director is carried out night after night. You take out the stage manager and no vision is ever executed. 

At OGC, we have 12 deacons who serve in a wide variety of ways. They oversee aspects of our facility, they meet the needs of the poor or needy as they come in, they address seasons of material needs for our members, they organize communion and baptisms, they prepare the coffee each week, they oversee special events like picnics and family nights, and so much more. The deacons are not only an integral part of what we do, but an irreplaceable gift to the church at large and OGC specifically. 

Now, we need to address the question: Who can serve as a deacon?

1. Who can serve as a deacon? 

Ok, normally, I would walk through these qualifications, but I’m going to do something different. I’m not going to walk through them because they are almost the same as those Paul covered for elders and I fleshed all ten of them out last week. We see the same general categories of self mastery, orthodoxy, tested over time, and a healthy home life. And again, Paul isn’t focused on what the deacons are to do, he’s focused on who they are to be. It’s more about character than skill. The one notable difference is teaching. The elders are to be able to teach, but that is not a qualification for the office of deacon because it is an office of service. 

Instead, I’m going to focus on why women can serve as deacons because this year we made that change in this church. I have hopefully been very clear over my past two sermons why only men can be elders, but that is not the case for deacons and I want to explain why that is primarily from this text. 

First, I want you all to open your Bibles or turn them on and go to this passage. Go to verse 11 which opens with the words ‘their wives.’ All of your Bibles have a footnote there and what does that footnote say? Women. The Greek word here can be translated either as ‘women’ or ‘wives.’ Context is going to dictate which word we use. I want to make the argument that Paul is saying ‘women’ as in “women who serve in the role of deacon are to be like this..” Why do we believe this? First, Paul does not say ‘their women,’ he just says women. If he meant ‘wives’ he would have added the possessive which would read ‘their women’ or ‘their wives,’ but the word ‘their’ is not there.

Second, of the 214 times this word is used in the New Testament, 121 of those times are translated as ‘woman’ or ‘women.’ So, over half of the time this word is used in the New Testament, it means woman, not wife. 

Third, and this is the most convincing for me, Paul gives no qualifications for the wives of an elder, so why then would he give a qualification for the wives of a deacon? If Paul were going to give qualifications for the wives of men who serve in a church office, which office would that be most relevant for? The office of service, or the office of spiritual oversight? Absolutely the office of spiritual oversight which is the office of elder. Why in the world would Paul give qualifications for deacon’s wives, but no word is mentioned about the qualifications of an elder’s wife? That makes no sense…unless Paul isn’t talking about the wife of a deacon, but instead about women who serve in this role!

Fourth, church history affirms this position. Later, the very early church would adopt the office of deaconess. At the very beginning of the second century, we have a man named Pliny the Younger writing to the Roman Emperor Trajan about how he (Pliny) tortured two female slaves called deaconesses in Bithynia to learn more about Christianity. We also have documented examples of deaconesses from the Discalia around 240 AD and the Constitutions of Apostolorum in 380 AD. So, there is clearly early precedent for female deacons in the early church. If it were not already the practice of the Apostles, it would be extremely hard to imagine that female deacons would have been adopted so early in a culture that largely did not value women’s rights. 

Fifth, the role of a deacon does not disqualify women. The office of deacon does not exercise spiritual authority. I talked three weeks ago about the difference between spiritual authority that is reserved for elders and every other kind of authority. The spiritual authority that elders have is the authority to compel a member of the church to believe and obey the gospel under threat of church discipline as given to us in Matthew 18. That’s the authority that Paul is restricting to the office of elder. No other kind of authority. The office of deacon is not given that kind of spiritual authority, so why would women not be able to hold this office? 

Sixth, the construction of the passage in Greek lends itself to seeing women as deacons and not wives of deacons. The Greek helps to make the connection between the three groups more clear. In English, we see that Elders, Deacons, and (what we would call) Deaconesses are all called “to be” of high character and ideals. But, in the Greek, the verb ‘to be’ only appears with the elders way back at the top of the passage. The verb ‘to be’ is then assumed for two more successive groups. Those groups are deacons and deaconesses. The Greek construction seems to assume that three offices are in mind here: Elders, Deacons, and Deaconesses. 

Seventh, and last, we do have the case of Phoebe in Romans 16 who does seem like she very well could have been a deacon. Now, I would not make this case if Romans 16 is all we had, but given what we have already covered, turn to Romans 16:1. “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant1 of the church at pCenchreae, 2 that you qmay welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron of many and of myself as well.” - RomansActs 16:1,2

There is another footnote next to the word ‘servant’ and what does that footnote say? Either Deacon or Deaconess. The word ‘servant’ and ‘deacon’ again are the exact same word, so we are left to the context to decide if this is the office or not. But, Paul doesn’t just say Phoebe is a servant in general. He says that she is a servant of the church at Cenchreae. It’s like the difference between saying, “Bo Bruner is such a servant” and saying, “Bo Bruner is a deacon of Orlando Grace Church.” The offices of the church are rooted in a local church and that’s exactly what Paul seems to be doing. 

This, then, raises a question. In Acts six, men were appointed and not women. Yes, but, again, that was descriptive in nature and not prescriptive. And, again, we aren’t even sure that was the formal office of deacon. We simply know that it was at least a precursor to its development. It actually makes sense to me that men would be appointed in that specific scenario because the things the widows lacked (provision, protection, and representation) were things that their husbands had formerly provided which they now needed. 

So, who can serve as a deacon? Any man or woman in the church who embodies the qualities Paul is laying out of self mastery, orthodoxy, who is tested over time, and has a healthy home life. The qualities Paul gives for elders and deacons are so similar because he cares way more about who the officers are than what specific skills they possess. That’s why there is so much overlap in qualifications, again, with the exception of teaching because that is only a qualification for elders. These marks represent the dashboard of qualifications for the office and I would argue that how we as a church see, appoint, and value the work of the deacons in the church is a mark of the dashboard of our church. It’s a mark of our health. 

And Paul says in verse 13 that  13 For rthose who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus. - 1 Tim 3:13 A deacon receives two gifts: respect and confidence. Another way to say that is that a deacon is going to get the blessing of our gratitude and respect and the blessing of greater confidence in the Savior whom they serve. 

Deaconing can feel like thankless work that no one sees, but Paul is promising the opposite. He’s promising the opposite because it is rooted in the service of the true Servant, the true Deacon, Jesus Christ. How is this? The word ‘diakonia’ from which we get our word ‘deacon’ was most commonly used to describe someone who serves tables. Just like we saw in Acts 6. In Greek culture the one being served was always considered the have more value than the one serving. But, when a debate broke out among the disciples about who would be greatest in the kingdom, what did Jesus say? 27 For who is the greater, uone who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But vI am among you as the one who serves. - Luke 22:27 

What is Jesus saying? In the words of Tim Keller, “Jesus makes the startling statement that Christian greatness is the opposite of the world’s concept of greatness.” The one who is last is first. The one who serves is greater than he who served. And no one has ever served us more than Jesus. Jesus left the glory, honor, and fame of heaven to come here because he did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but instead took on the form of a servant. He served us by taking on flesh. 

He spent his life in that flesh serving other people. Feeding them, healing them, teaching them, and praying for them. But, he didn’t stop there. He served us to death. He served us by taking his perfect life to the cross where he would be tortured and in the process receive the wrath of God that we deserve in our place and give all who believe in him his righteousness so God would see us as if we had never sinned. Through his service to us, we now have great standing before God. Not because we deserve it, but simply because he loves us. 

And I say this all the time, but it wasn’t like God the Father was mad at us and God the Son came to make God the Father not mad. God the Father loved us so much that he sent God the son to serve us so we can receive God the Spirit to bring us closer to him each day. Tim Keller, again, says, “Because we are united to Christ, every believer is a deacon who is to wash the feet of others in humble service.” And the office of deacon is built on the very message of the gospel designed to recognize those in our midst who most poignantly reflect the character of our Savior by serving out of love for others and gratitude to Christ for what he has already accomplished for them. Who serve not to be saved, but to honor the person who saved us.