I like organization, so much so that I can procrastinate some more important task for quite awhile as I clean off my desk, arrange flies in my fly box, or delete unused files and icons from my computer desktop. So I enjoy reading about how the first church got organized to better accomplish its mission.
The move to organize food distribution to the poor in Acts 6:1-17 was driven by irritation and discomfort, like when on a much lesser scale I get fed up with all that clutter on my screen. The irritation for the church is described the complaining of one group against another in verse 1, “Hellenists” griping against “Hebrews” “because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.”
The Hellenists were Jewish Christians from the “diaspora,” Jews generally living outside of Palestine. Their main language was Greek. The Hebrews were Jews from in and around Jerusalem, Judea, etc. and their main language was Aramaic. The neglect was a matter of language and culture bias, a disregard for Jews considered to be in some degree second-class because of their lack of facility with the “native tongue,” although even Aramaic was not the classic Hebrew of Old Testament times.
As we face times in which we are being urged to discriminate and build barriers based on culture and language, it is crucial to see that from the beginning the church structured itself to address those biases and break down those barriers. So the “ordination” of the first deacons was all from the less advantaged group, the Hellenists, as we can tell from their Greek names. The organization deliberately put marginalized people in positions of leadership.
And the leadership of the deacons was not limited to “waiting on tables,” work which verse 2 might give the impression is less significant than the work which the apostles did. But the stories of the first two deacons, Stephen and Philip, in the subsequent chapters make it quite clear that they did significant “spiritual work” as well as supervising the food distribution.
Let us at all levels of church life, from small groups to denominations, get organized in the manner portrayed here, putting unexpected people into leadership and letting the Holy Spirit cross the barriers which keep us apart.
The result of such organization is obvious in verse 7, “The word of God continued to spread; the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.” That last result regarding priests might look like an inroad into an upper class in Jewish society, but the number of priests in first century Israel meant that many of them were in poverty. The availability of food and support distributed fairly may have enticed many of them into the fold. What may we learn from this?