The Responsibilities of a Deacon

Well, good morning, everyone. It is good to be here again and see all of the familiar faces and, yeah, a lot of happy memories from here. And good to be back. We're going to be talking this morning about deacons. I understand you're going to be ordaining a deacon in the weeks to come. So, yeah, we'll just be talking a little bit on the subject today.

When the New Testament church was just a few weeks, maybe a few months old, a problem arose, which was in the church, they were every day feeding the widows. And the church there in Jerusalem, you had people from these were Jews, but they were from other countries and they spoke Greek.

And then the ones who were native of Jerusalem, most of them would have spoken probably Aramaic. And because of the language difficulty, the Greek-speaking Christians felt like their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution. So you had a problem come up. Now, it's not at all surprising that a problem came up.

To me, it's more surprising that this was the only issue that we read about and that it was on a subject that was probably fairly easy to take care of. Now, the reason I say that, if you can picture the church in Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost, it was 120 adults. So a little bigger than the group here today, but it would be something about this size, just a little bit bigger.

And then that same day, it was increased by 3,000 people. Now, imagine, Harvey and Wendell, you're leading this church and suddenly 3,000 people have joined, baby Christians, and you're going to absorb them in. And then just in a few more weeks, you have it grows to 5,000. And every day, you're having new people come in. I can't even imagine trying to shepherd a flock like that. And so this is the only problem that comes up. It tells me that the apostles were pretty amazing leaders. A lot of people think, "Oh, yeah, the apostles, they were these dumbheads and they didn't know what to do."

To be able to handle a situation like that so smoothly and that that's the only issue we read about, it tells us these apostles, Jesus, He didn't make any mistake when He picked them. He picked men who were not only full of the Holy Spirit but very competent. And they did an amazing job that, I mean, I know us as elders in our congregation, there's no way we could handle that kind of thing. We would just go nuts trying to deal with that.

So the problem came up and the apostles could have easily dealt with it, but they realized, "Okay, our responsibility is to be teaching the Word, to be spending hours in prayer on behalf of the congregation." They were also doing a lot of the witnessing out in the temple and other places. And it's not going to be good if, okay, we take time away from that shepherding in order to take care of a more administrative problem of handling this food. So they told the congregation, they called the whole congregation together, which if this is 5,000 people or so, rather remarkable because they were all unified who they wanted to select. They said, "Select seven men full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom."

So these were godly men and also wise men who could take care of this problem. And you all know the story. So they ordained seven men. Stephen is the one who maybe stands out, Stephen and Philip among those seven.

And the congregation picked them and the apostles ordained them and seems to have taken care of the problem. We don't read anything more about it. So they chose well. Now, these men are never called in the Scriptures deacons.

We often say these were the first deacons, and that's not necessarily incorrect, but the Bible doesn't actually call them deacons. In some ways, they were more like assistant apostles. I mean, because Philip, I mean, pretty soon he's going down to Samaria, preaching in Samaria. And then the Spirit leads him to where the Ethiopian eunuch is. And then we read later he's down in Caesarea where he seems to settle. So, yeah, he's not what we think of normally as a deacon. But the principle there in Acts 6, where we read about the appointment of these seven, that principle is the principle that I think deaconship is based on, that the ones who are shepherding, God doesn't want them to be taken away from that responsibility to handle things that are more administrative, that other people could handle just as well.

And it frees up then the shepherds in the church to be able to focus on their teaching, their pastoring, and to have time for praying for the flock. Let's just talk a minute about the leadership in the infant church because it changes.

It started off at the beginning, there were just the twelve apostles. That's who Jesus left in charge. And then next we have these seven men who are appointed, who are like deacons, but they're more like assistant apostles as well.

Then when we move to Acts 11, we read about prophets. So God raised up prophets in the church. And today, a lot of people out in other churches - I doubt this is what you have here in this congregation and we don't in ours - but men who call themselves prophets and carry that label.

But the ones you read about in the New Testament are what I call real prophets. It mentions Agabus. Okay, he prophesied that there was going to be a famine. And based on that prophecy, they started sending food down to Judea for the brothers there. And guess what? The famine happened.

What he prophesied happened. Later, he prophesied Paul. He said, "If you go to Jerusalem, the Jews are going to have you arrested. You're going to be bound in chains." That happened just as he predicted. So the New Testament prophets were able to foretell the future or be able to have secret knowledge that no human could otherwise have. Peter was a prophet. We think of him as just an apostle, but he was also a prophet. And he was able to discern what had happened with Ananias and Sapphira, something that was totally hidden from any human. But God revealed that knowledge to Peter. So those were the New Testament prophets. That's how things started in the beginning.

And then in Acts 13, we first see the phrase "prophets and teachers." So now it has grown. As the church is growing, now you have other people who are involved beyond the twelve, beyond the seven. There's prophets and there are teachers in the church. It doesn't go into a lot of explanation about how these people were chosen. I don't know if they were chosen. It seems like God maybe directly gave them those ministries. But this is how things worked in the infant church. If you turn in your Bibles, 1 Corinthians 12:27-29, let's just look at that for a minute.

1 Corinthians 12:27-29. And here Paul says, "Now you are the body of Christ and members individually. And God has appointed these in the church: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers." After that, and then now he goes into ministries: miracles, gifts of healing, helps, administrations, varieties of tongues.

So in the infant church, you have the apostles, you have prophets, and you have teachers. That was in its infancy. Okay, God moved on from there. It's not where He stayed. Now, in the charismatic movement today, they have decided, "No, this is what we're supposed to go back to, to the way it was at the beginning of Acts." And they ignore the rest of the New Testament. And so you have people who call themselves apostles and prophets and teachers. And somehow these prophets aren't able to get things right. There was a group back in the early '90s - they still exist, I guess, but under a different name - but they called themselves the Kansas City Prophets.

It was a big church there in Kansas City. And I was fellowshipping a lot in circles that were in touch with them, would go up there and visit them. And they were always marveling about these men. And it was interesting because I was reading some of their own literature. And these so-called prophets, this was their own admission. They said that, "We're accurate 65% of the time."

Now, if that was their own assessment, you can guess it was probably 40% of the time if they themselves are saying it's 65%. All I know was there were a lot of false prophecies. And when you're a true prophet of God, you're right 100% of the time because God is giving you knowledge. You're not sitting there guessing. I mean, that would be a horrible position. God would put us in as a congregation that, "Marvin says, he's a prophet. And okay, there's going to be whatever here, a famine. Okay, you all better collect food." And then, "Oh, I'm sorry. I got that wrong. But 65% of the time I'm right." It just can't work that way.

If you're going to get a message from God, you've got to be able to depend on that. And you could on the New Testament prophets. But that was the infant church. And God moved on. Turn in your Bible to Philippians 1, just verse 1 there of Philippians.

Okay, now we've moved on a couple decades actually from the beginning of Acts. Now you have churches established throughout the world. And we don't hear about the prophets and teachers. We hear about something else. Philippians 1:1, "Paul and Timothy, bondservants of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons."

So now in the mature church, and Paul wrote this when he was in prison in Rome in his first imprisonment. And now it's interesting. He doesn't say "to the prophet with the prophets and teachers," but he says "with the bishops and deacons." So the apostles, after the infant situation when it was governed by apostles, prophets, and teachers, it moved on to a more fixed, permanent position. And that was of bishops and deacons or elders and deacons. In the New Testament, bishops and elders are basically the same position. And the terms are used in the New Testament interchangeably. Now here in Philippians 1:1, this is the first instant in the Bible or in the New Testament where the Greek word "diakonos," which is what is translated as deacon, where it is used in that specific sense of a deacon in the church because the Greek word "diakonos" just means servant.

And so you see it all throughout the New Testament. In the Greek Old Testament, you see it throughout there. It just means servant, which tells us a lot about the ministry of a deacon. A deacon is a servant of the church. He works hard on behalf of the church.

But here it takes on a specialized meaning in the church. This is a position now of what we call deacon. And deacon, we just took it from that Greek word "diakonos" and made it into an English word. But this isn't when they're first established. They're already there. Paul is writing and he's greeting them. So they've already been put in place and this is a set thing.

Now then as we move even later to 1 Timothy, now this is Paul's second imprisonment in Rome. And it's shortly before he is to die. And again, he's not talking any longer about prophets and teachers but about bishops and deacons.

And I'm guessing you've already—Marvin has probably spoken to you on this one. So we won't read it in detail. But if you want to turn to 1 Timothy 3, let's just look at what he says there.

Now he's writing to Timothy, who is what you might call an apostolic man. He wasn't one of the twelve, but he was doing the work of an apostle or an apostolic man if you want to refer to that.

Again, not one of the twelve, but somebody who traveled and worked over different churches. So Paul and Titus was doing a similar work. And Paul was telling Titus to appoint bishops in the various churches where he was ministering. And Timothy likewise. So in 1 Timothy 3:1, we'll just read that first. It says, "This is a faithful saying: If a man desires the position of a bishop, he desires a good work." So he starts off, he gives then the qualifications of a bishop. We're not going to read those since our topic today is deacons. But yeah, he just mentions those two positions: bishop and deacon. So this is what the mature church has and what we still have today.

We've moved beyond the prophets and teachers. And we have these fixed positions. But these are men who meet specific requirements in order to be ordained. Now move down to verse 8. And we'll look at the requirements for a deacon.

It says, "Likewise, deacons must be reverent, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy for money"—this is the New King James—"holding the mystery of the faith with a pure conscience. But let those also first be tested, then let them serve as deacons, being found blameless. Likewise, their wives must be reverent, not slanderers, temperate, faithful in all things. Let deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well. For those who have served well as deacons, obtained for themselves a good standing and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus."

So those are the qualifications. And like I say, I think Marvin, you've maybe preached on that subject. So I'm not going to go over the qualifications again. We'll return to this in just a few minutes. But yeah, this isn't just anybody. When you have a deacon in the church, this is somebody who is beyond reproach, who meets a whole list of qualifications; somebody that people can respect and look to as an example.

Now this transition from the prophets and teachers to bishops and deacons, we actually read about this in probably the earliest Christian writing outside of the New Testament that we have. And this is known usually today as the Deedeke, which is the Greek word for teaching.

And it says this: "Appoint therefore for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord, men who are meek, truthful, and tested, and are not lovers of money. For they also render to you the service of prophets and teachers.

Therefore do not despise them, for they are your honored ones together with the prophets and teachers." So we don't know when this was written. Some people think maybe as early as the year 80. But it indicates a time when the churches had been used to these traveling prophets and teachers who were coming.

And it's saying, "Okay, this is transitioning now to bishops and deacons. And you're to give them the same honor and respect that you were giving these traveling prophets and teachers who were the ones who, you know, when the church was in its infancy." So it's a good historical record that things changed from that original model of prophets and teachers and apostles to fixed bishops and deacons. This is something the apostles put in place with the approval and direction, I'm sure, of the Holy Spirit.

Clement of Rome, his letter dates to the year 96. So it would have been written maybe just a year after 1 John that we were studying here this morning. And he says this: he's describing Clement was an elder in the church in Rome. And he's describing the work of the apostles. He would have known the apostles personally. He said, "And thus preaching through countries and cities, the apostles appointed the first fruits of their labors, having first tested them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who would afterwards believe."

So at the end of the ministry of the apostles, what they had put in place are bishops and deacons or elders and deacons, which is what you have here in your church and what we have in our church as well. And this is the final model that God gave us. And it's worked well for 2,000 years.

Now Harvey'd asked me to talk a bit about the responsibilities of a deacon, which is not a very easy topic for the simple reason is nowhere in the New Testament does it set forth the responsibilities of a deacon. It goes into great detail on the qualifications. But then it doesn't say, "Well, this is now the work that a deacon does."

And I think the reason for this—I think, again, the wisdom of the Holy Spirit—is that the work of the deacons has changed from century to century. It hasn't always been the same. The principle is always the same: that they are taking the work of the bishops and elders, taking work that would otherwise take away from their shepherding and teaching.

And they're carrying that workload to take the burden off of the bishops and elders. So that principle has never changed for 2,000 years. But the type of work that they have done has changed.

And that principle, we again see in Acts 6 where the apostle said, "It's not right for us to leave the ministry of the Word and prayer to be serving tables. And so let's appoint other men to do that." And it's likewise, there are so many things that a church needs to function properly that if your elders, if your bishop, if that's what they were spending their time on, they wouldn't be doing a lot of shepherding of the flock. They'd be so busy with that. So that's why God wisely gave us deacons in the church.

So as I said, this varied from century to century. There in the New Testament, like I say, the seven who did the work like deacons, even though they're not specifically called deacons, they were overlooking the food distribution. Now that wouldn't have been an easy thing. Like I say, you had at least 5,000 people there. I don't know how many widows were included in that 5,000. But I'm going to say it was in the hundreds. And yeah, to figure out, okay, how to do this. Now I don't think they sat there and personally did it because, like I say, we see Philip is traveling around later. Stephen is out preaching to the Jews, gets himself brought before the Sanhedrin.

And they end up stoning him to death. So it looks like they got something set in place. They used other people. So if all of the needs of a congregation fell just—what was not specifically shepherding, if it all fell on the deacon or even several deacons, it would overload them. And so all of us have to be involved. And the sisters as well as the brothers, there are just so many tasks that need to be done if a congregation is going to be functioning smoothly and it's going to be a blessing for people to participate. Yeah, it means there's going to be a lot of non-ordained people who are going to be carrying a lot of loads.

And that's the way God wants it.

Now I'll share a little bit about—as I said, the New Testament just gives us no description at all. We can guess they probably were making sure the widows were getting fed since that was the first issue that had come up. But it doesn't give us specific things beyond that. In the early Christian writings, again, there's no list of responsibilities of a deacon. But in the writings, they do talk about deacons quite a bit. And so we can see some of the things that deacons were doing. Now as I said, it varies between centuries. A lot of these things would not be even needs right now in our church—things involving persecution that may come up. We may be dealing in a few years.

We may be dealing 50 years from now. Who knows? But they were having to deal with it. It was a major thing in the early church. Now and none of us, I think, are—any of our churches—our church has not gone to this. And I don't think we're going to see this happen in our churches. It was actually a full-time position in the early church. The deacons were supported by the church the same way the widows and orphans were supported. It wasn't some nice salary or anything like that. But it was a full-time job. When you were a deacon, yeah, you gave up your secular job. You lived like the widows and orphans. And that was your job full-time of serving the congregation.

And every church I read about, it's always plural. They always have a number of deacons. So you can imagine in the early church, there was just a lot of care being given to the congregation that you had these full-time workers just taking care of non-shepherding items, just things like handling food. So let me just share some of these with you. Now an early writing we have, it wasn't actually put down in writing until the year 390. But it's a compilation of a lot of earlier writings. And it says this about the deacon. This is just one of the things they did: "If a poor man or one of low birth or a stranger comes upon you, whether he is young or old, and there is no place for him, the deacon will find a place for him."

So that was one of your jobs in the early church. You had a visitor come in or somebody move into your community. And yeah, there wasn't a house for him to rent. That was your job as a deacon to make sure that visitor or someone moving in, that you would find a place for him. I assume he would live with you if you didn't find a place. So that was one of the tasks that they had. Another one was taking care of the sick. Now today we have doctors. They had doctors back then. They couldn't do all the things doctors do today. They were competent in certain areas like handling wounds, a broken leg, things like that—cuts, burns.

They could handle those things, internal things that they had no clue of how to do that. I mean, they treated it with herbs and things like that and all kinds of—you read some of the treatments, they're just absolute nonsense, putting you in some kind of like a hammock and swinging you around.

And do this so many times a day. And it'll get things inside of you back and just stuff like that. If someone got better, yeah, they got the credit for it.

But yeah, we look at it today. And we know that it didn't—the cures themselves didn't heal people of things like cancer and heart disease and any kind of internal thing. But most people couldn't afford doctors. They were expensive just like they are today.

And so the deacons often were taking care of sick people. And they didn't have hospitals. So we were praying today for Brother Musser. And yeah, I mean, there were no hospitals. I mean, yeah, the people in the community had to take care of you. So that was one of the things the deacons—and not just the deacons. I mean, you had just individual Christians. Every congregation had the widows who were being supported, they were expected to be involved in ministry of this kind of ministry—visiting the sick, helping take care of the sick, that sort of thing. You had a lot of celibate men and women who just dedicated their lives to God and never married on purpose and used their years to minister to people.

In the mid-200s, there was a severe plague that hit the Roman world. And a lot of people died from it. It was probably the bubonic plague, I'm guessing. And we have an account from one of the bishops. And he talks about how the deacons in the church would just care for the sick knowing—I mean, they didn't understand where the bubonic plague came from. But they just knew you could catch it. And that most of the world, they wanted to stay away from you if you had the plague. And people in the church and the deacons just sort of stood out in this, that they would go there and take care of these sick people, often help them through it.

But often they would come down with the plague themselves as a result and die. And a number of deacons died that way.

That same work, the Apostolic Constitutions, it says this: "You who are deacons, it is your duty to visit all those who stand in need of visitation." So this would be sick people, shut in, whatever. "And tell your bishop of all those that are in affliction, for you ought to be like his soul and senses." So the deacons were the ones—some of these congregations in a city would be large. They might meet in different places. They didn't all meet necessarily in one gigantic place. But yeah, the bishops wouldn't necessarily know everyone who was sick or know of them. And so that was the job of the deacons to make sure they were the eyes and ears for the bishops and elders to let them know who was sick because the elders visited them as well.

But that was particularly on the deacons to make sure that no sick person would be overlooked, that somebody was caring for them. And again, the deacons didn't necessarily have to do it all personally. There were plenty of other people in the congregation who volunteered to do that kind of work. So that's two things we've mentioned: looking after strangers and taking care of the sick.

Another one that is not common in our circles and it's not required in the Scriptures. But it's something the deacons did in the early church. There's a number of references. Let me just drink here a second.

And this was assisting with communion. So when they celebrated communion, the bishop or one of the elders would pray over the bread and wine. But then it was actually the deacons who would serve the congregation the bread and wine.

That's not what we do in our congregation. And like I say, the Scriptures don't require that. But that seems to have been somewhat the universal practice. Justin Martyr, who was writing about the year 150, 160, and he's describing to the Romans what their services were like because the Romans were told all kinds of nonsense—Christians are killing babies in their services. And they're doing all these wicked things. So he's telling them, "Hey, this is what we do in our service. It's not anything like what you've heard."

He says, "And when the presiding minister has given thanks"—he's talking about communion—"and all the people have expressed their assent, those who are called deacons give to each of those present the bread and wine over which thanksgiving was pronounced. And to those who are absent, they carry away a portion." So the deacons in the early church, those who were not at church—I don't know if this were just people who missed church. I'm guessing it was people who missed it for a good reason. They were sick or maybe they were old and feeble and couldn't get out to be able to be at church. Then when the service was over, the deacons then—some of that blessed bread and wine—then they would take a portion to the sick ones and the ones who weren't able to be there at church.

It's a beautiful custom. Again, we don't practice it in our congregation. Maybe we will at some point. It must have taken the deacons a bit of time because they didn't have cars to drive around. And some of those cities like Rome were huge cities. And yeah, to take communion to everyone. But I think it's a wonderful practice that, yeah, if you were sick, a deacon would come and bring you communion.

Okay. So those are three things: looking after the poor and strangers, taking care of the sick, assisting with communion. The other one I've already mentioned is helping those in prison because of persecution. And that's the one that I read about most in the early church. Not necessarily it was their biggest job. But it got more attention. And it was—well, I don't know if it was more dangerous than caring for the sick. It was equally dangerous—and we put it that way.

Sometimes it was more dangerous because when a persecution would break out and Christians were arrested and in prison, they didn't just leave you. Someone would come and visit you. Now of course, in doing that, it might raise suspicion: "How come you're visiting this person? You're not a Christian yourself, are you?" Because in a lot of the persecutions, just the fact you were a Christian, you could be put to death for it. But they weren't going to just leave you to rot in prison.

For one thing, you got given food in prison. But the normal practice was your family would bring you food. If you were going to eat something other than some kind of gruel that would make you sick to your stomach to look at, hopefully you had family or friends who would bring you food. So that's why the deacons coming wouldn't just be a dead giveaway, "Oh, this is a Christian," because the guards would expect family or neighbors or friends to be bringing food to those in prison.

But anyway, this was something that kept the deacons fairly busy because all the time there was persecution breaking out. Then they'd have periods of no persecution. Then it would break out again. And so yeah, if you weren't one of the ones arrested and you were a deacon, then yeah, you would be going into the prison to visit these people. Now the elders did that too. It wasn't just the deacons. But that was one of their jobs. In fact, one of the very earliest references, Ignatius, who was a disciple of the Apostle John, the same John we were reading his letter today, he was Bishop of Antioch in Syria. And he was arrested by the Romans.

And he was taken to Rome to be put to death in the arena, which is what did happen to him. And he wrote letters as he was traveling. And he mentions in the letter that the church in Ephesus and from Antioch, he would have gone by Ephesus on his way to Rome, that they sent one of their deacons—his name was Burris—and yeah, he went out and traveled with him away, probably checked, "Is there anything you need?" Brought him food, that sort of stuff. I don't know how far he kept traveling, maybe to the next city, maybe all the way to Rome. Of course, at that point he didn't know because he was still traveling when he wrote the letter.

So that was one of the things called on when you were a deacon: help somebody maybe in that situation. Another early writing—this is like a hundred years later—a sister named Perpetua. She and another sister whose name was Felicitas, they were imprisoned. And they were both martyred. And Perpetua wrote a diary of her time in prison and what was happening there. And she mentions that two of the deacons—and she gives their names, Tertius and Pomponious—that they would come and minister to the women, visiting them, praying with them, bringing them food. And she mentions then on one occasion they gave the guards some money so that they would let these two sisters go out into—she just says a better part of the prison.

So I don't know. I guess it was terrible and less terrible were probably the different stages. But anyway, they got at least for part of the day to spend some time maybe where they were out in the sunshine or something like that. And yeah, the deacons had to arrange that by giving the guards some money and saying, "Hey, could you do a favor for me?" I mean, they couldn't let—the guards wouldn't let them go or anything like that. But they had the authority to do that.

So there we read of some actual deacons and what they did. Now in the year 250 AD, an empire-wide persecution broke out. Before that, it had just been this city and then this city. It was just here and there. And then under the Emperor Decius, yeah, he decided, "Okay, everyone needs to worship the images of the state. And those who won't, yeah, they're going to get—they're going to get put to death or imprisoned no matter where they are." And it was across the whole empire.

And so a lot of Christians got martyred. A lot got put in prison. And again, the deacons were busy visiting the ones in prison, bringing them food, praying for them. And Cyprian, who was the bishop in Carthage, he had to go underground because certainly the bishops and elders, they were definitely the targets. The Roman Empire was looking for them, the authorities to arrest them. So he had to go into hiding. Eventually, he was martyred himself. But while he was in hiding, he was still shepherding the church. But he was having to do it through letters and overseeing things that way.

And in one of his letters, he talks about the deacons, how they were visiting those in prison. And he says, "Now, you need to be careful. Don't have the same deacon go every day. It's going to make the guard suspicious. Vary it a bit. Vary it how you do that. So yeah, you yourself don't get arrested." But then in some of his letters written during that time, he mentions this deacon, that deacon who got martyred, this one. So it was a dangerous position. Why you had to be a godly man meeting those qualifications? Because being a deacon would bring you into ministries that would put your life at risk in those days.

And it may—right now it doesn't work that way. But it could happen again in the future, in the near future even. During that same persecution, another bishop, his name is Dionysius. He was the Bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, which was the second largest city of the Roman Empire. And he writes about the work of deacons. He mentions one of them; his name was Eusebius. Now this is not the famous church historian. This was another man. That was a common name in the Roman world. And he writes this about him. Eusebius was a deacon. He says, "And of Eusebius I speak as one whom the Lord strengthened from the beginning and qualified for the task of energetically fulfilling the ministry due to the confessors who are in prison."

Now the confessors, these were Christians who had been tortured. And under torture, they still confessed Christ. They would not deny Christ under torture. They were known as confessors. They weren't necessarily put to death. Then they would be known as martyrs. But if they underwent imprisonment or torture for Christ and stayed faithful, then yeah, they were known as confessors. So anyway, he was visiting them and plus other ones. He also carried out the perilous office of dressing and burying the bodies of the blessed martyrs.

So to the Jews and to the early Christians, it was like a terrible thing to not have your body buried. And I think we would look at it that way today. Now today, the government wouldn't want your body just thrown on the side of the road. But back then, that's specifically what the Romans wanted when Christians were put to death: just throw their body in the garbage dump or out alongside the road and let it just rot. And to the Christians, that was such a sacrilege to the body that God gave us. So this man, Eusebius, one of the deacons, he would go and get those bodies and bury them, prepare them, dress them for burial, and actually bury them.

And of course, he was risking his life. In fact, this is what the bishop goes on to say: "For even up to the present day, the governor does not cease to put to death in a cruel manner some of those who are brought before him while he wears others out by torture and wastes others away with imprisonment and chains. He also commands that no one shall approach them. And he makes strict scrutiny lest anyone should be seen to do so. And nevertheless, God imparts relief to the oppressed by the tender kindness and earnestness of the brethren." So the Roman governor had said, "Oh, I don't want anyone helping these Christians who are in prison and all that."

But the brothers and sisters still did that. That God opened the door, that relief got there. But they were, yeah, putting their life at risk in doing that. So what about today? Well again, we don't have a specific list of what are the responsibilities of a deacon. Our church appointed a deacon; I think it was the end of last year. And I was asked to speak there on the subject. And I made a list of, yeah, just what are our needs in the congregation, some of the things that we were doing as elders.

And I'm just going to read you the list I came up. This was for our congregation. Now your congregation is much older. I don't know. Are you 25 years, 30 years? Yeah. Yeah, more than 30 years that you've been in place. So you've got a lot of systems in place among just brothers and sisters who take care of various responsibilities. We're a much younger congregation. So we didn't have a lot of the things in place. Marvin was telling me, like, you have a food committee. You have people in charge of the building, things like that. We didn't have any of this. So this was falling, a lot of it, on us elders. And this was a list I made of things that we elders were doing or were hoping to do if we had time that I thought, well, maybe a deacon could do some of this.

So the first one was accounting, banking, paying for church expenses. That's probably in every church something that falls on the deacon. And why the elders were doing this is Justin Wadle had been our deacon. And then he was appointed an elder. And we didn't appoint a deacon at that point in time. So he was still carrying that. He was doing a lot of the work of a deacon. Okay, setting up—we celebrate communion every Sunday. So just setting that up, it doesn't take long. And we should have put something into place. But yeah, it was something my wife and I were doing every Sunday: locking the church after service. I mean, it sounds pretty simple. But yeah, we had not—and I don't know who has that responsibility in your church, if that's the deacon or not.

But somehow we had never taken care of that. So it sort of fell on the elders to make sure. I mean, we didn't want to leave the building unlocked. And so usually every Sunday it was Justin Wadle or myself. And it was like, "Okay."

Because it meant you were going to be the last one out. And you might wanted to go. And usually I let Justin be the one blessed with that responsibility. But I'd always feel guilty when I was driving home from church knowing that, okay, Justin is going to get stuck with it this week. So we thought, you know, that's something that would just take a load off of us. I mean, because yeah, you don't want the church to be left unlocked, particularly when we were renting.

The Seventh-day Adventists would have been very upset with who we were renting from. Likewise, unlocking it. Okay, who's going to make sure it's unlocked? Now I think probably all of you have keys. And now all of us have keys in our church. But originally we didn't. The Seventh-day Adventists, when we were meeting there, they didn't want us to make keys and give them out to everyone. So it meant someone had to be there. And it was usually Justin or I who would do that. And we didn't mind. But it would have been nice that, okay, this morning, Sunday, I'm running a little bit late. I know someone else will be there to open the door for everyone.

So we thought it'd be nice if someone just had that responsibility or for evening services. So those were some of the lists. When I mentioned Justin and I, Kevin Bregbill is our head elder. And yeah, he does more work than any of us. He carries an enormous load. So these were some of the things Justin and I were doing just because we felt like, yeah, Kevin already has enough on his plate. Making arrangements for the love feast twice a year. We do that twice a year. I'm not sure how often you all do that.

Sunday school superintendent. Again, a lot of churches have one. It doesn't have to be a deacon. None of these things have to be deacons doing this. But these were just some responsibilities we were handling. Actually, we weren't—none of us were handling the Sunday school. It kind of would come down to the brothers' meeting. And maybe this works with you. And it was like, who's going to teach next? And we'd all be looking around the room and, well, so-and-so hasn't taught in a while. Okay. But we didn't really have a person in charge of just seeing that that was done so we didn't have to worry about it.

Maintenance of the church building. Again, I understand you have a committee. And we had actually just appointed a committee for that. But we thought it'd just be nice as elders to not even have to think about that, that we know other brothers are handling that. Giving pre-baptismal lessons to new Christians. That's something we liked. Well, we do anyone who's getting baptized—and these are usually young people—that we go through a series of lessons with them, making sure they understand what Christianity is all about. I hate it when I hear a testimony of someone getting rebaptized. And they say, "Well, when I got baptized, I just did it because everyone else—all my friends were getting baptized. So I just got up and got baptized too.

But I didn't really know what I was doing. And I feel like I need to get rebaptized." And I'm not going to make any judgment on that issue of rebaptism. But I know in our church we will feel very terrible if somebody we've baptized later says, "Well, I didn't know what I was doing. And I need to get rebaptized." So yeah, we meet with them, go through a number of things, making sure they understand. Don't dare say ten years from now, "Oh, I didn't know what this was about." We make sure they do know what it means to be a Christian, to give your life for Christ, and to understand what baptism is and why they're getting baptized.

And that's something we'd like to do as elders. But yeah, it got where it was just a task that sometimes we realized it would be nice. There are other brothers who are very capable teachers who could handle that as well and take that load off of us, that we're not always the ones doing that. Overseeing the cleanup after fellowship meals. You guys probably already have that nicely in place. We didn't. Like I say, we were new. And so we didn't have a lot of these structures in place. We do our fellowship meals at Kevin Bregbill's house. And so we often stay till five. But people are leaving, say, beginning maybe 1:30 or 2 o'clock. And then people just slowly leave and leave.

And you can't—if you're leaving at three, you can't clean up then because there's still other people. So in the end, guess who got left with cleaning up? Well, it'd be the Bregbill family and maybe one or two people there at the end. We realized that's not very fair to them, that they've already opened up their property for us to use. And then they get stuck with having to clean up. So yeah, we have—the deacons now are in charge of that. And this was a wish: working with families on budgeting.

Our congregation is about 50% people from plain background, 50% from non-plain background. And people from non-plain background—and this could happen with those of you who are from a plain background. But particularly people from non-plain background, often they never were taught anything on how to budget money and how to handle it. And they come into church. And they've got tons of debts. And the church can help them pay off their debts. But that's not going to solve the problem. They need to understand how to budget their income so that they're not spending money they don't have, they're not going into debt, that they have money to give to the kingdom, that it's not being spent on everything else.

And we realized we need—there's families. We need to just be able to work with them. And the elders have done some of this. But yeah, it's a load to try to do that. And we realized that would be nice if someone was in charge of that. So that was one of the things on the list: someone to oversee youth activities. We don't have a youth group per se. But our young people play volleyball, do things like that. And we haven't had any issues come up or anything. But we realized it'd be nice to know there was a specific adult who is responsible for what the youth are doing. So that has been taken care of now with the deacons.