Deacons

The Noble Task of Eldering (1 Timothy 3:1)

First Timothy 3 and 1 Titus 1 are well-known passages because the describe the qualifications for church leadership. We usually fret the most over the line about “one wife” and perhaps that the leader must have well-behaved children, but there is far more here than those two more controversial points.

TimothyLike the previous section, Paul’s main concern is that the church be organized and led in a way which gives it a good reputation with outsiders. This is also true in business: good reputations are hard to build, they take time. On the other hand, it does not take much at all to destroy a good reputation and develop a bad one.

If you have ever read a restaurant review online, you know that one bad experience can lead to a terrible review and potential lost business. One cranky customer who has bad food or poor service can leave a review (anonymously) online, and scare dozens of people away. The same is true for church.  A family could visit on a Sunday when things were not quite right in the nursery, the musicians were out of tune and didn’t really know the songs, and the pastor finished his sermon on the way to church. This family leaves “unimpressed” and never comes back, but they tell their friends that they tried “that church” and it wasn’t very good.

But Paul is not talking about “church shoppers” in this text, since that sort of thing did not exist in the first century. There are people in the congregation who are leaders in a local house church who have a bad reputation with the community. Maybe they have some shady business practices, or they are quick to bring lawsuits, or maybe they are known to attend the banquets at pagan temples and fully participate in debauchery. If the leader has a bad reputation outside the church, then they bring that dishonor with them when the “desire to be an overseer.” To remedy this situation, Paul tells Timothy (and by extension, the churches) to appoint people to the office of Elder and Deacon who are qualified spiritually and morally for the task.

First Timothy 3:1 is another “trustworthy saying.” In this case it is not a theological statement, but that the person who aspires to be a leader in the church “desires a noble task.” Desiring to be a leader of a local house church is not a bad thing at all, it is a noble task, or a “good work” (v. 1).

It is possible that this line betrays a problem in Paul’s churches in Ephesus. It appears that people were not wanting to serve as leaders in the church. There are several possible reasons for this. First, perhaps the false teachers had created a situation where good people were not inclined to challenge them, the did not desire to become involved in leadership because it meant challenging these false teachers. A second possibility is that the role of overseer or elder was not considered to be a job people wanted to do – it was not considered a “noble task.” It is also possible that people who were capable and qualified did not see themselves as up to the task of leading the church, perhaps for a combination of the previous two points.

One serious problem reading this passage is that we hear words like elder and deacon and immediately think of our modern “office” of elder and deacon. This is not necessarily going to help understand Paul’s view of church leadership. If at all possible, it is best for us to bracket out modern church practice for a few minutes and try to read Paul in the context of first century Ephesus.

Acts 6 – Who were the Hellenistic Jews?

After tracking the preaching of Peter and John, Luke turns to the activities of two non-apostles, Stephen and Philip in Acts 6-8. Both are Hellenistic Jews, and neither is numbered among the Twelve. It is possible these men were not followers of Jesus before Pentecost. They may have been among the crowd who heard. Yet, Stephen is the first martyr, and his speech summarized some important theological points in the transition between Peter’s ministry in Jerusalem and Paul’s mission in Acts 13.  Philip is the evangelist who brings the Gospel to Samaria and to an Ethiopian, perhaps fulfilling the commission in Acts 1 to go to Samaria and the “ends of the earth.”

The end of Acts 5 reads like a summary statement of the first movement of the book of Acts, and the release from prison after Gamaliel’s speech marked a critical moment for the Jerusalem community. But there was more to that community than just the Jews from Jerusalem; many diaspora Jews attached themselves to the apostolic movement. The reason the apostles appoint deacons in Acts 6 is that Greek widows do not seem to be getting the same treatment as the “Hebraic Jews” (as the NIV translates 6:1). If the first five chapters concerned the Jewish community’s outreach to the Aramaic speakers in the temple. Chapters 6-8 are concerned with outreach to the Hellenistic Jewish community. This is not yet an expansion of the gospel to include Gentiles. Ethnically and theologically, the Hellenistic men are fully Jewish. We might discover that the Hellenistic Jews are more conservative on some issues than the Aramaic-speaking Jews.

This section is sometimes cited as an example of Luke creating a story to describe a smooth transfer of leadership from the Jewish followers of Jesus to the Hellenistic Jewish followers. But things are not as smooth as they appear. If Luke intended to create the image of a peaceful, unified church, he would not report complaints against the Apostles, especially if the complaint was favoritism (or worse) or mismanagement of funds collected for the poor. Hellenistic Jews

Acts 6:1 says that there was a problem between “Hebraic” and “Hellenistic” Jews. This must be explained carefully since the word “Jew” does not appear in the text (although English translations regularly include it). These are all Jews, but there seems to be a problem between the Jews who are in Jerusalem from the “outside” and those Jews who remained on “the inside.” Chapters 6-8 concern the activities of two Hellenistic Jews and their ministry outside of the circle of the apostles in Jerusalem. I suggest that Luke intentionally arranges several stories concerning Peter and John in chapters 2-4 and several stories about Stephen and Philip in chapters 6-8.

This is not necessarily a geographical division, although doubtless it often was. To be a “Hellenist” means to adopt the language and culture of the Greeks, while to be a “Hebrew” means to adopt a more traditional Jewish language and lifestyle. For Ben Witherington, language is the main issue (Acts, 240-247, for an excellent excursus on the Hellenists). On the other hand, Darrell Bock agrees more with my sketch of the Hellenists (Acts, 258-9). Language is an important issue, but it is not the only issue separating the Greeks from Judean Jews. There was a spectrum of practice, with the Qumran community on one end (extremely traditional, so the Temple was too sinful for them) and someone like Philo of Alexandria’s nephew on the other (who abandoned his Jewish heritage to join the Hellenistic government of Egypt). Most Jews, even in Jerusalem, were somewhere between these two extremes.

Aside from historical accuracy, does this view of the Hellenistic Jews matter for reading Acts?  I think it helps to understand that the community of earliest believers was far more diverse than Acts 2-5 would imply. If Peter and John represent the only form of the early followers of Jesus, then it is hard to explain the violent suppression of Stephen. This diversity is less a “development” in the earliest church but a factor present from the beginning.