Have You Not Read S2E28 - Deacon Boards

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. I'm Andrew Hudson. Joining me today are Michael Deere and David Kassin.

All right, so we have a, I guess, a follow -up question to one of our previous episodes about the roles of, well, church governance, pastors, elders, deacons.

David, you received this question. Yeah. What do you got? Well, we had an episode regarding, what do you do when a pastor has too much power?

And based upon a true story, but we expanded it to different kinds of churches as well.

In this particular church, in question where we get the impetus for this question, you basically have a single pastor and then a deacon board.

And somebody had asked me, says, well, if I could ask a follow -up question, I went, yeah, please, go ahead.

He says, what do you do when the deacons have too much power? I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, how do you handle, like, a really strong, you know, deacon board?

And then I started to ask the question, okay, what does the Bible say about deacons?

What is really the biblical role of a deacon? And the deacon board, more or less, is a modern invention.

Like, okay, so we treat some of our deacons as junior elders.

And perhaps we shouldn't. We see them as leaders in our churches.

And a lot of the qualifications for an elder also match up with deacon.

Sure. Especially when it comes to character. And that makes a lot of sense. You have shepherds, elders, who have to have high character because they're handling the

Word of God. And then you have deacons have to have high character because they're handling money.

So I think it'd be important for us to ask the question, what's the proper role of a deacon?

And how should we address an issue with deacons wielding too much power in a local congregation?

How would you address it biblically? Ultimately, I think it would be the agreed -upon goal that Christ would be seen clearly as the head of the church.

That it would be obvious and genuine. That Christ would have the authority in the church.

Now, how does that manifest? Well, the the Word is the scepter of his authority.

We should be in agreement with the Bible. The churches should be structured and organized in agreement with the

Bible. And so that's why we would be looking at the roles of deacon and elder as described in the scriptures and the role of the congregation.

So we find that it is the instruction to the whole congregation to pursue church discipline.

To say, yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am my sister's keeper. And to walk through those steps of initially privately seeking to win your brother or win your sister concerning an offense, a sin, and so on.

And if that doesn't work, then taking another person. So it'd be two or even three. And then ultimately to the whole church the issue must be rightly addressed.

So if there's a situation where somebody needs to be put outside of the church, that is not to be done by a single pastor.

That is not to be done by a handful of elders. That is not to be done by the deacon body.

That is to be done by the whole body, the whole church. It is a whole church thing. And so the elders must lead the whole church in that regard.

So that's something to remember in terms of there being that severe mercy.

The idea, of course, is still even then that the person who has been put outside the church would be won in the realization of what they've lost.

And so when you think about, you know, where the authority of the church is, it is in Christ. He is

Lord and he organizes his church in this particular way. And so if you have a situation where you have a church where there is like one pastor and their church polity is structured so that they have one pastor and then they have several deacons and then they have a congregation, then this would not be submitted to the

Lordship of Christ. That is not in agreement with what he said about how the church is to be organized. Again, now all churches recognize we're not the perfect church.

I mean, they'll say that to people seeking membership. I want you to let you know we're not perfect, okay? But we are to be sanctified.

We are to be washed with the water of Christ's Word ever more brought into conformity.

Growing into maturity. Growing into maturity. We're not making excuses here saying, well, we're not perfect and we ain't even gonna try.

That's the wrong attitude. So we should look at the biblical differences between elders and deacons and we see that there are deacons, plural, a church singular.

There are elders, plural, and a church singular. This is the manifest witness of the Scriptures.

There is a very toxic controversy within denominations about that.

Southern Baptist is one of those. I was in seminary when a lot of the major fights against having a plurality of elders in a

Southern Baptist Church was going on. The seminary I went to, they used to forbid any of their professors from being a member of a church that was

Calvinist. That debate kind of faded and the new debate was they did not allow any of their professors to be members of a church that had a plurality of elders because they consider that to be the path to liberalism and the destruction of the church.

A plurality of elders is a path to liberalism? Yes, they saw that as Presbyterianism and they had plenty of examples.

See here? See there? Yes, and there was a straw man fallacy, but they wanted to protect congregationalism at all costs.

So anyway, there is plenty of room for a plurality of elders within the congregational life. That's not a controversy in the

Scriptures. But what do you do if you have a single pastor and you have a bunch of deacons? Isn't it interesting?

Isn't it interesting that the authority would flow to a group of men in the church? Wouldn't it be better to do it rightly in the way that Christ prescribed?

But what do you do? Well, deacons are to be those who serve, they are to be reverent, they should be double -tongued, not giving too much wine, not greedy for money, holding the mystery of the faith with a pure conscience, they should be tested, they are to be husbands of one wife, ruling their children in their own house as well.

So there's some qualifications for the deacons, but what are they supposed to do? Acts chapter 6 shows us a division of labor between those who would be elders leading out in the preaching and teaching and the prayer of the prayer ministry of the church leadership in that way, and the deacons are to be concerned with the property held in common.

That which was given to the church for the for the good of the ministry. So interestingly, yes, in some cases, in some churches, the deacons are treated like sort of like junior elders.

Also in other churches who do have plurality of elders, some of the elders are treated like senior deacons.

And you've got elders doing deacon work, and you've got deacons doing elder work in other churches, and honestly, we know what

Christ prescribes is best, and over time he will unfailingly sanctify his church.

He will wash his bride with the water of his word, but if there is a local church who is in constant rebellion against him and investing in toxic structures, eventually he will put that candle out, and there won't be a church there anymore.

And there are a lot of empty buildings. I pass them all the time. Yeah, and it's like, well, what happened to that church?

You know, I guarantee you it wasn't violent persecution that put them out. It was disobedience to Christ at some level, in some fashion, in some way.

Somehow there was a failure somewhere. And now the people who were left and had to close up shop, maybe they were the faithful ones, but there was a history of disobedience somewhere that brought that to an end.

So how do you proceed, right? If you're in a church that has a single pastor and a deacon board, you know, what do you do?

Like, hang on a second, this isn't biblical. Why pastor a church like that? Like, I was the only guy.

They called me preacher. I hate preacher. I was the pastor. When I interviewed with them,

I said, why do you want a pastor? Because this is a small church, you know, and so why do you want a pastor? And they told me, because we need someone to handle the hard stuff.

You know, I was 25 and was like, well, that's interesting. Like, here's a 45 year old man, and here's a 58 year old man, and they're looking at me.

They want a pastor to handle the hard stuff. I'm 25 years old. What are you talking about? I still pastored them, but I mean, it was like, you know, but here's what...

What was happening? Were they giving homilies and teachings vocationally?

They had guys coming to fill in from a local seminary, you know, and so how they were structured, they had two deacons, and then they had a board of trustees, okay?

And there were three guys who were on the board of trustees. That sounds more like a business structure.

Yeah, so here's what... Yeah, it was in their Constitution and everything. So here's what happened. The two deacons, they were praying men, very concerned about the spiritual health of the people.

They were prone to teach. One of them led the music, and they just served the church. Now, they also, you know, they were organizing things and doing logistic things, and one of them was handling the finances of the church as well because he was a banker.

They seemed like good men. Yeah, and then the trustees, they were always concerned about the property of the church.

How do we improve it? How do we make sure that... And so I had trustees who were deacons, and I had deacons who were elders, and they didn't know it.

They didn't know it, and there was no way on God's green earth that this 25 -year -old was gonna come in and change the polity of that church.

No possible way. So what I did was I began to try to cultivate eldership in the two deacons.

I began to try to cultivate that, and I began to try to cultivate deacon -like things amongst the trustees, praying that over time that the labels would eventually be changed to confess in agreement with God what the

Spirit was doing. Right, so Ephesians 4 tells us that the Holy Spirit gives to the church everything that the church needs, including the pastors and teachers.

So as we look at those passages that deal with the distinctions between elders and deacons, we know that elders teach and rule and have that kind of spiritual authority, and you mentioned

Acts 6. There's some other passages where you have the deacons, as far as the office goes, as far as like an official deacon handles money, serves the poor, does those kinds of acts that are acts of service.

I mean, the word is diakonos, and it's translated either servant or minister through a couple different places.

You have places where Paul called himself a fellow, you know, his collage is one.

The gospel of which I, Paul, became a minister, that's diakonos. He called Timothy, who was the pastor of that church, he calls him a good servant.

Same thing. But when we read about it in 1st Timothy 3, it appears to be more of an official servant.

It appears to have an office. So this word is used as servant and minister, and so those are all the yes, but it appears to have some kind of official rendering, and it appears also, not appear, it's pretty clear, it has a narrow scope.

Yes. And it deals with giving, it deals with money, it deals with serving, serving tables in the case of giving to the poor, in other places.

So is that the correct understanding and distinction between elder and deacon? And having a deacon board at a church with one teaching elder,

I mean we should have a couple of elders, but having that deacon board, is that necessarily a bad thing?

You know, a quote -unquote board. Yeah, and again, we use the term board because that's kind of our American context, but it's more biblical to talk about the elder body and the deacon body, right?

Because it is recognized in that ecclesiastical language, that church language from the

Bible, that not every elder does exactly the same thing, but together we function, we serve together, and we're not, you know, vying for different positions and in contradistinction to one another, trying to say, well

I want to do that, and then you don't want to do that. Same thing with the deacon body. I was just talking to one of our deacons here the other day, encouraging him and how he is serving the deacon body by being a good communicator, and that they needed somebody to be a good communicator, and that others could do other things that he couldn't, but he was really serving the deacon body and making them more effective by being that communicative go -between for the deacon body.

And so it's good to recognize what a deacon is, first of all, and to recognize them as a body, those who are equipped by Christ for the service of his church, and so they could thrive in that role.

If you begin to invest into the deacon body, the governance, the authority of a board to run the church, that's not what they were called to do.

If deacons run the church, it will look like a business. It will feel like a business.

Why? Because they are attuned to business matters. But if elders are leading the church, then it'll look different.

It won't be about business considerations, it will be about kingdom considerations, it'll be about the advance of the gospel of Christ, that kind of thing.

So what we see in the text though, in the scriptures, is that there was a need for plurality of elders and a plurality of deacons working together as brothers, and a division of labor between the two, so that deacons do what deacons do and elders do what elders do, and they benefit from one another.

They are complimenting one another, but they're not getting in each other's way or trying to take over the things that the others are doing.

Elders should be leading the deacons, showing through the scriptures, exhorting them to serve, and deacons are to be stirring up everybody, including the elders in the church, to service, organizing that, providing for that, so on.

And so there is a happy collaboration between the two bodies that is a true blessing to the church.

Now if you don't have that, how do you promote that? Well number one, Ephesians 4 again, the Holy Spirit sovereignly grants to the church all that the church needs.

So you have to pray, you have to pray and ask God to provide, and trust that he will. And you need to, if you're a member of a church and there's like one pastor and there's a deacon board, okay, then you need to both pray and then exhort and encourage those who are in leadership concerning these biblical models.

It's not something where you bring the Bible in and say, look here, you all are doing wrong and you all should resign.

Okay, you should encourage the pastor and say, if I happen to come across somebody in the church who has a desire and a gifting for teaching, what would you suggest we do to encourage that man?

Right? Because I'm, you're praying for him, right? You're praying for rain. So get out your umbrella. Okay.

You're praying for another teaching leader, elder kind of person to be in this church.

So you need to talk to the pastor. What do I do? Okay. Begin to plant those seeds, begin to talk about those things.

There's no way that I as a 25 year old could have changed the polity of Liberty Baptist church, but God has his ways.

And the week after I was gone, the man who is still their pastor stepped in and he has a lot of wisdom.

I mean, silver hair. Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he led the church through those final steps and led them into a biblical polity where the deacons became the elders and the trustees became the deacons.

He did that. And I was able to come back for the ordination services and all of that. I couldn't have done it, but he did it.

You know what? And they're still working on that. Yeah. Our history of our church was one in which there was one pastor, one elder, and he ran the church and the deacons better do what he tells them to do.

Well, in this sense, you have, you have elders, you have an elder who was leading, but he didn't have anybody to help him.

And you didn't have a deacon body doing what deacons did, but still it wasn't a biblical model.

His name was Harry Boydson. He himself saw that preaching expositionally through the book of Acts, reading about how

Paul appointed elders, plural in each church, singular. And he realized we don't have that model.

So he started it and it wasn't great. It wasn't robust. It wasn't wonderful, but he started it.

And then God continues to work that forward. Christ continues to sanctify the body till today.

Our elder body is far much more stronger, far more biblical than it used to be because Jesus is doing that.

Christ is doing that. And our deacons are better than they were, you know, years ago when

I, when I first came. Why? Because Christ is sanctifying the body. Christ is building that up. So it's a long -term thing.

It's not something where you see that things are out of alignment and you have to snap your fingers and throw the lever.

Yeah, it's not something you can do overnight. Christ doesn't do it overnight. We sure can't, you know, but we need to be heading that direction.

So if there's a church that is, you know, if this church is a situation where it has an unbiblical polity and it is zealously committed to the unbiblical polity no matter what, you may need to find a different church.

That sounds like people who are replacing the Word of God for man -made tradition. Say, hey, this is, this is the way that this church has been for for 80 years.

Yeah, no creed but culture. Yeah. Our culture, that's the only creed we need is the culture we've built here.

Yeah. You know, then that, then you're in trouble. So if you are part of that congregation where it's always been that way, that's, that's a difficult battleship to, you know, to turn around.

Yes. Without a doubt. You could also be in the situation where you had a healthier model, multiple elders, a deacon board that does deacon things, and people have started to leave.

You're in, you're in a controversy, like in this church. You've got one elder left, a deacon board, and you got some kind of issue with the head pastor.

You know, it's like, it's, it's so natural for us in the United States in modern time. Well, we would go to our deacon board.

They're, they're leaders in the church. We just, we think along those lines. Sure. From what you just said, we actually don't, don't do that.

The deacon board or the deacon body is made up of good men. It's like, okay, let's go talk to these guys, not because they're deacons, but because they're older and mature and Christians of high character.

Okay, great. But it's not, and we had talked about this as far as the church discipline goes, you have, go to person one -on -one, then two to three, bring elders, and then you tell, tell it to the deacon body?

No. You tell it to the congregation. The deacon body isn't the next step. They have a specific role, but they are part of the congregation at that point.

So if you have a deacon board that has a lot of power, it's quite possibly you're in a church that has unbiblical polity.

And if you have a deacon body that is doing deacon things and is very robust, but you still have only one pastor, okay, that's only one elder, okay, but at least you have a deacon body that's doing deacon stuff, and they're not acting as junior elders.

So you could also have that possible example, and I don't know where you, if you're listening to this, where you fall in that spectrum.

But you have to start with the distinction between the elder and the deacon, and make sure that one, the men filling those roles are staying in those lanes because they complement each other so well.

They're not blurring those, and I think you made a really good point that you have a plurality of elders and a plurality of deacons.

To add a little bit of mix into there, larger churches tend to be structured at corporate entities, and you have people with the title of pastor, like facilities pastor.

You know, how do you shepherd those toilets, brother? I don't really know. Or administrative pastor.

This guy, he's just running, you know, he's running the Excel spreadsheets for the church, and running the office, keeping those secretaries hopping, and you know, making sure that the, you know, the mother's daycare thing keeps going.

Business, baby, business. Yeah, he's doing everything that a very high level deacon should be doing, but he's got the name pastor on him.

And maybe some of the other churches are like, we need a more biblical polity, we're gonna call you an elder now. Hang on a second, he's doing deacon work.

And again, good work, important work. Hey, this is great. And maybe he should be paid for it, even though he's a deacon.

There's nothing wrong with that in the Bible. So call him a deacon, he's a deacon. He should not be somebody who is like holding spiritual authority, spiritual leadership in that sense.

Is he a godly man? Great. A good example in the church? Great. But he's not a pastor.

And so there's confusion about that. And so in a situation you have a whole bunch of staff, and they're called something other than pastor, they're called something other than deacon, and nobody knows what it is.

You know, let's get biblical about it. Let's be very clear so that we're following Christ, and we know where those lines are.

Also, in smaller churches, the reason why you have, you know, the deacons have like this, they're the ones who stay there a long time, right?

They're the locals, they're the backbone, they're the steady on of the church. Pastors come and go, especially smaller churches.

Pastors are there just for a little while, and then they move on. A seminary primes young pastors for burnout, right?

Because they go to, they go to large cities in a urban context to go to a seminary where everybody, all the professors there, go to larger churches, city churches.

All the books and textbooks you read are written by people who go to larger churches, city churches, and then you go out to some sort of rural context to pastor your first church, and it blows up, and you call them unbiblical.

But what just happened was was culture shock, and you have no idea how to love people from a rural context and how they operate.

And you look at the deacons, and you're like, you know, they're the problem. You know, they're just stubborn, and they don't want to follow Jesus, and there's not a spiritual drop of anything in them.

And you write them all off. This happened time and time and time again. But when you get in there, and you begin to learn the people there, begin to love them for who they are.

I don't care if they have, you know, possum brains with their eggs in the morning. You love them, and you eat the possum brain eggs in the morning, and you have that black coffee that, you know, you can't hardly stir because it's so thick.

You go be with them, and you love those people, and shepherd those people. Titus had to shepherd Cretans, for goodness sake.

You can shepherd country folk. And when you get in there, you're gonna find that the elders, the deacons who are there, some of them have just given so much time and money to the church just trying to help it keep going, all right?

And they're gonna be deacons. And then you have some deacons there that they're godly men. They pray the most. They've been teaching

Sunday school for 20, 25 years. When there was no pastor, and so -and -so's mother died, they're the ones who were there.

Hello to your elders, okay? And you're not gonna get there overnight, but you have to get to know the people, and love them, and discover who is who according to how the spirit is operating.

And then begin to promote those distinctives until finally we can put the labels on that the spirit already has.

Yeah. Where would we be without him? Yeah, spirit among us. It's amazing. All right, thank you for addressing that with the word.

What media have you been consuming that you'd like to talk about? Okay, I like, this is a book

I've went through more than once, all dog -eared and underlined, so on and so forth. It's called Dominion and Dynasty, A Theology of the

Hebrew Bible by Stephen Dempster. What he does is he goes through the Old Testament as it was organized in the

Jewish Bible. So the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Kethuvim, the Law, the

Prophets, and the Writings. And you'll even hear this mentioned in the New Testament, the

Moses and the Prophets and the Writings, or the Psalms. And very interestingly, the way in which the

Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible is organized tells a very important story.

And what I love about Stephen Dempster's work in this is showing how it tells a purposefully incomplete story and sets everything up for a resolution in one who was promised

Messiah. So I really, really love his book. Good stuff. I have, actually on the recommendation of my teenager,

I have been reading a Star Wars book. I know that's... Star Wars, you nerd. I know,

I know. Just kidding. It's true. It's totally true. And some people will listen to this and say, you know, don't like the genre or sci -fi and certainly don't like what it has become.

Many years ago, the writer Timothy Zahn did a series of books, and this first one is called

Heir to the Empire. And I'm actually going over the 20th anniversary edition, and I'm doing the audio book.

It's read by Mark Thompson. What I love about it has sound effects, it has different voices. It's like listening to a radio drama.

And like yourself, I commute often for work, so I listen to a lot of things. And high -quality art, high -quality writing, poetry, people who make excellent cars, beautiful paintings, or really good narratives.

We should be thanking God for beautiful music, thanking

God for beautiful paintings, and thanking God that he has gifted people with storytelling.

And with any content, obviously, you always filter it through the scriptures. I mean, Christ is our lens.

But in this particular case, Timothy Zahn, I think, is an amazing writer. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and I am thankful to my teenager for introducing me to him.

Speaking of nerding, I'm gonna go non -spiritual book. So I'm in a software engineering course, and I've been learning about, up until now, object oriented programming.

But there's other paradigms. Recently, I was learning, or have been learning, about functional programming, specifically through the use of a language derived from Erlang called

Elixir. So I'm reading a book about using Elixir for really big things. You called me a nerd.

I know, I know, I know, that was tongue -in -cheek, right? It was, it was built to do big things.

I want to learn to do big things. There are a lot of big things to be done.

There are a lot of big things to be done here. So that's what I've been getting into. One day,

I'll be building projects with it, knowing about object oriented programming and functional programming. So there, there's always something to learn.

God's great creation that he has made, sometimes it's the beauty of art, sometimes it's the beauty of mathematics.

Thank God for both. Michael, what are you thankful for? I'm thankful for prospects, for expectations, for hope, for having things on the horizon that are good, that are noble to work for, knowing that our labor is not in vain, because Christ is risen from the dead.

So that planning things, expecting good things to come, anticipating things is all well and good, that it's not, it's not hopeless.

And I'm so thankful that because Christ is risen from the dead, I can do things like plan for a family vacation, and talk about what our, our summer session

Sunday school classes are going to be about. And think about the, the future years and decades of this church, and how we can do things now that will matter then.

Amen. I have been off work for a couple of days, thinking about basically three days in a row, where I was off and just got to do work in the yard.

And I have been thankful for good weather. It's been sunny, you know, sometimes partly cloudy, and, and it was just nice to get out into the dirt.

And I was pulling out plants, and, and, and putting things, you know, relocating stuff, and tearing out thorny bushes, and cutting stuff back.

And, and my, my wife was out with a giant hedge trimmer, and just, just, just slicing stuff.

It was, I wish I got it on film, because it was, it was fantastic. She was just tearing it up, and, and she really didn't, it did a nice job.

But, you know, I was doing two to three hours of this outdoor, kind of manual, dirty labor.

It was great, because so much of what I've done is, is, is intangible. It's spreadsheets, it's staff meetings, it's, it's emails, and, and it's, it's nothing that you can see.

But I come back to the house, and I can see just the, the work that has been done, and beautifying the property, and, you know, taking out old stuff, putting in new stuff.

And you take a, take a shower after all of that, and you get all the grime, and stuff, and you just feel really satisfied.

And, and, and we were made for work. It's good. And after a day of that, and you see what you've created, you just, you're satisfied.

So I'm, I'm very thankful for the work, and the time off, sharing that with Amy as well, and just creating something with our hands.

It was great. I'm thankful to God for my wife. I know on previous podcasts, we've talked about complementarianism, not in a goal in of, in of itself.

But my wife does compliment me. And, and by that, I'm not saying good, good things about me. That's, that's not

I'm thankful for. Compliment, right? I, I tend to be very introspective. I, I do a lot of thinking.

I do a lot of planning, mind type things. My wife, I thank God for her love of gardening.

I thank God for her love of getting out to the trail, sometimes dragging me to get out to the trail.

It's all great things, spending time outside with, with her, our children.

The other day, she recently had a birthday. She wanted to get tennis rackets for the family. So we went out and played tennis.

I haven't played tennis in 10, maybe 20 years. I mean, a long time.

But of course, I pretended like I knew exactly what I was doing, right? But it was, it was a wonderful time.

And if it wasn't for her wanting that for the family, we wouldn't have done that. I thank God for her. I thank for the, thank

God for the way he made her. It's an amazing thing to, to be truly united to your wife.

You're, you're one flesh. I'm thankful to God for that. And that wraps it up for today.

We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read.