Whether large or small, modern Baptist churches continue to struggle with the role of deacon, the relationship between deacons and pastors, the function of committees within a New Testament church and the spiritual authority of paid staff other than the pastor.
Throughout the last 100 years, Baptist churches have adopted several different models of organization from the business world. As models have moved in and out of favor, however, the churches have been left with a grab bag of titles and offices not found in the New Testament. When one model is replaced by another, the churches keep all of the old organizational structure with its array of offices and titles. In this way, the deacons may be left wondering what they are supposed to do.
Baptists have always held that a New Testament church has only two offices, elder and deacon, regardless of the report of the nominating committee.
To sort out the confusion, a local church would do well to assess everything that everyone does. Regardless of the title and organizational structure, I believe one will find that everyone who has been asked to do something in a church is functioning either as a deacon or as an elder (or pastor). Most of the people on committees are functioning as deacons.
All of the committee work of churches was performed by the deacons until the business model was introduced in the early 20th century. We kept the deacon body, but assigned their function to other people in the church and gave them a different title. It is time to recognize that when a church has asked someone to perform the work of a deacon, they are a deacon. This process would reveal, however, that some of the people who perform their jobs without pay actually function as elders.
Perhaps it is time to simplify and return to the two titles in use in the early church.
In the King James Version of the Bible, the only translation used by Baptists for most of their history, the word pastor appears only one time when Paul refers to ministry gifts (Eph. 4:11). In this passage, Paul also mentions apostles, prophets, evangelists and teachers. Why then have Baptists always insisted that a New Testament church has only two offices: elder and deacon? Paul does not even mention these two offices in his list in Ephesians 4. The problem comes when we confuse a gift of ministry with an office of the church.
The ministry of the Word requires a variety of gifts of the Spirit. To edify, comfort, encourage and nurture the church in the teachings of Scripture as a guide for life, the gift of the teacher comes into play. To confront, admonish, rebuke and call the church to repentance, the gift of prophecy comes into play. To proclaim the gospel to those who do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, the gift of the evangelist comes into play.
Not all pastors have every gift, but every church has every gift necessary to fulfill the ministry God has given it as His body. Some of the greatest evangelists in America lead churches as elders but have no gift as pastors. Elders of this sort have typically gathered around them helpers, as Paul did, who can perform the works of ministry necessary to the body. The main preacher may not be the main pastor, though he may hold the title “senior pastor.” Rather than pastor, he is the overseer (called bishop in the King James Version) of other elders as well as deacons.
In larger churches, some of the staff members function according to the New Testament office of elder and some function according to the New Testament office of deacon.
The associate pastor for administration functions as a deacon. The director of children’s ministries functions in a pastoral role as an elder. In larger, modern churches, some of those who function as deacons are paid (as employees) while others are not (laity). The gift of pastoral service, however, often appears in the laity who care for one another. Confusion of roles has come in the last 150 years as churches replaced the title of elder with pastor.
Confusion about deacon, pastor roles can cause friction between the two
Pastors and deacons do not always get along. Young pastors in their first churches seem to have some unusual problems in getting along with deacons.
The young pastor is often upset because the deacons do not seem to understand that he is in charge. The deacons get upset because the young pastor thinks he is in charge. Confusion abounds as to how the pastor and deacons should relate.
Before the 20th century, Baptist pastors and deacons had a different relationship. Until the 20th century, few churches had full-time pastors. More often than not, the pastors of Baptist churches worked farms alongside the other members of the congregation. The pastor belonged to the community like all the other members of the church. The pastor and the deacons had known each other all their lives.
Before the advent of the professional pastor, pastors had standing in the community prior to their office as pastor. They were chosen as pastors because of the authority that the congregation recognized in them.
Many young pastors believe that because their title is “pastor,” they also hold the office of pastor. Churches let them believe this, because they believe it themselves. In practice, however, when churches call a young man to his first full-time pastorate, they have only called him as “preacher.”
Someone else in the church has served as pastor for years, but he holds the title of “deacon.” Pastors come and go in these churches every three years, but the old deacon remains to look after the church.
In essence, most Southern Baptist churches have always practiced the “plurality of elders” but never realized it because they no longer used the term “elder.” The pastor was an elder, but some of those who held the title of deacon actually functioned as elders too. In these cases, the titles do not actually represent the offices that people hold.
This confusion of the offices of pastor/elder and deacon was made clear to me when I went — fresh out of seminary — to serve as pastor of a church. Two of the older deacons kept the Sunday School records, and I often went by to speak to them.
Once, the subject of elders came up as we discussed our old covenant from 1833 that mentioned elders. I asked them what they thought elders were, and one said elders were old deacons who had the wisdom to advise the pastor and guide the church. In other words, the deacons recognized a plurality of elders even though the bylaws of the church said nothing about it.
The confusion of the pastor and deacon relationship had an added dimension as the 20th century progressed and churches began to add “staff members.” One looks in vain for the staff member in the New Testament. They must either be pastors or deacons. In most Baptist churches they are neither. Recovery of the New Testament model of the church involves recognizing some deacons play the role of pastor and some staff members play the role of deacon.
Southern Baptist organizational structure redefines role of deacon
A brief survey of the major works of systematic theology by influential Southern Baptist leaders illustrates the problem Southern Baptists have had since the second great awakening in terms of understanding a biblical approach to organizational church life in changing times.
John L. Dagg, president of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., 1844–1856, published his “Manual of Theology” in 1857, but he did not deal with the doctrine of the church in it.
While he wrote “A Treatise on Church Order” to deal with issues such as the offices and organization of a New Testament church, the omission of this subject from systematic theology began a tradition of discounting these issues.
Dagg’s systematic theology was replaced by the work of James P. Boyce, first president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., 1859–1888, when he published his “Abstract of Systematic Theology” in 1887. Like Dagg before him, Boyce avoided any discussion of the doctrine of the church.
Boyce’s work stood as the standard systematic text studied at Southern Seminary until E.Y. Mullins published “The Christian Religion in Its Doctrinal Expression” in 1917. Like Boyce before him, Mullins served as president of Southern Seminary (1899–1928) and omitted the doctrine of the church from his systematic theology.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the works of John L. Dagg, James P. Boyce and E. Y. Mullins had such an influence on its leaders, the churches of the SBC underwent a dramatic change in their organizational lives.
Sunday School, which had long been viewed with suspicion as a rival parachurch organization, was embraced by the churches.
Until Sunday School became the primary organizational structure of local Southern Baptist churches, the sermon by the pastor had been the primary (if not exclusive) means for teaching the Bible and Christian doctrine.
Alongside Sunday School came Baptist Training Union which became the primary means of teaching Christian doctrine.
By the middle of the 20th century, the Baptist Sunday School Board in collaboration with Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), Brotherhood and the two mission boards had developed and successfully implemented in most Southern Baptist churches an organizational plan known as the Church Base Design. This programmatic organizational model for the church also came to be called the Baptist Program. Just as the teaching ministry of the church took on a new structure that mobilized the laity of the churches to engage in the teaching ministry, the benevolence and evangelistic ministries of the church had new leadership from the WMU and the Brotherhood.
The ministry of the Word and of prayer (Acts 6:4) now involved many more people than the pastor while the other ministries involved more people than the deacons. In most cases, the new plan bypassed the pastor and deacons altogether except when deacons also happened to be involved in the new organizations.
In addition to the Baptist Program, local churches also received the encouragement to develop new committee based structures for dealing with the operation of the church.
Those routine matters of operating the churches that did not deal with the ministry of the Word and prayer had been the responsibility of the deacons.
Now new committees arose that assumed these responsibilities. In many cases, the committees reported to the deacons who became a board of directors for the church, instead of the earlier practice of the deacons reporting to the church. In time, however, the committees became independent of the deacons.
By the 1970s the Baptist Sunday School Board had developed the Deacon Family Ministry Plan intended to redefine the role of deacons as pastoral assistants who would visit the families of the church.
This plan caused great frustration for deacons in many churches and proved to be one of the great failures of Southern Baptist life. Throughout this period of colossal institutional growth, Southern Baptists continued to insist that a New Testament church has only two offices: pastors and deacons.
How can churches reconcile their practice with their belief? With large numbers of leaders nominated and elected every year to serve on committees, teach, oversee organizations and ministries of the church and otherwise function as officers of the church, the deacons developed an identity problem.
Varied deacons’ duties often lack specifics, creating confusion
Baptist deacons in many churches have been going through an identity crisis for several decades. They are not quite sure what it is they are supposed to do. For the most part, small rural churches with bivocational pastors have escaped this identity crisis, but it has hit urban and suburban deacons particularly hard. It has also been a problem regardless of the theological orientation of the church.
I have not seen or undertaken a formal study of the problem, but I have experienced it firsthand through interim pastorates, supervision of doctor of ministry students, church consultations and preaching/teaching engagements with local churches in numerous states.
Every Baptist pastor knows the offices of a New Testament church. Before making such a blanket statement, I took the precaution of polling several Baptist pastors.
Not only do they all know the offices, when they tell what they know it sounds like the recitation of something they have committed to memory. When I ask “What are the offices of a New Testament church?” the answer comes back, “The two offices of a New Testament church are pastor/elders and deacons.”
The number of offices is part of the answer established by centuries of practice. In this case, one could substitute the word tradition for the word practice.
In the first London Confession of 1644, the early English Baptists identified the offices of a church as “pastors, teachers, elders, deacons.”
In later editions of the London Confession, however, pastors and teachers are omitted. The Somerset Confession of 1656 took a much less specific approach about the offices in a church. It declares that a church may choose gifted people “for the performance of the several duties, whereunto they are called.”
While these two confessions expressed the thought of the Calvinistic Baptists, a stream of Armenian Baptists had sprung up even before the Calvinistic Baptists. Their thoughts on church offices were expressed in John Smyth’s Short Confession of Faith in 1610. These confessions speak of three offices in the church: teacher, elder and deacon.
By the time of the Second London Confession of 1677, the London Baptists had clarified what they intended in the first London Confession concerning the offices. Several terms were used interchangeably for one of the two offices. The words pastor, teacher, bishop and elder all referred to the same office.
The new confession explained that a particular church gathered and completely organized, according to the mind of Christ, consists of officers and members.
The officers are appointed by Christ and are to be chosen and set apart by the church. They are to administrate the peculiar ordinances and execute power, or duty, with which Jesus entrusts or calls them.
The confession would have great influence not only in England but throughout America as it became the model for the confessions that the Baptist churches in America adopted beginning with the Philadelphia Confession of 1742.
The New Hampshire Confession of 1833, upon which the Baptist Faith and Message of Southern Baptists in its various forms (1925, 1963, 2000) is based, retained the Second London Confession understanding of the offices of a church, describing them as “bishops or pastors and deacons.”
The 1925 Baptist Faith and Message described the offices as “bishops or elders and deacons,” but the 1963 and 2000 statements of the Baptist Faith and Message use the more current terminology of “pastors and deacons.”
It is interesting to note that while these confessions identify the officers of a New Testament church, they do not provide a job description for the offices. The failure to provide a job description does not necessarily mean that the early Baptists did not know what a pastor or deacon was supposed to do. On the contrary, it suggests that the role of deacons was so clearly understood that it did not need to be mentioned.
At the same time Baptists were first organizing in England, the Mennonite stream of the continental Anabaptists adopted the Dordrecht Confession in 1632 in which they enumerated some of the tasks of deacons and deaconesses.
This group understood the task to include the responsibilities to visit, comfort and take care of the poor, the weak, afflicted and the needy, and also to visit, comfort and take care of the widows and orphans; and further to assist in taking care of any matters in the church that properly come within their sphere, according to their ability.
In regard to the deacons, that they … may also in aid and relief of the bishops, exhort the church, … and thus assist in word and doctrine. Though the English Baptists from whom Southern Baptists descend had no formal relationship to Anabaptists such as the Mennonites, the Dordrecht Confession illustrates that baptistic groups had an understanding of what deacons were supposed to do.
When we move into the 21st century, something interesting has taken place. Though Baptists continue to affirm in their most important theological documents that a New Testament church has only two offices, pastor and deacon, one must scour the countryside to find a church that has only two offices.
Churches today have committees, councils, task teams and ministry teams, with their corresponding chairs, directors, coordinators and supervisors. The teaching ministry of the church is shared by Sunday School teachers, Royal Ambassadors and Girls in Action leaders and a stable of other people involved in curriculum-related teaching.
The confusion of deacons over their role grew throughout the 20th century as Southern Baptist churches underwent an organizational revolution.
The pragmatic revolution helped Southern Baptists become the largest Protestant group in the United States, but it occurred largely without relating the new organizational pattern to the biblical model. Thus, Southern Baptist pastors and leaders continue to say that the two offices of the New Testament church are pastor and deacon, but the local nominating committee knows better.
Greek meaning of deacon explains ‘waiter’ role
Part of the confusion for deacons in understanding the role involves their name.
This ancient office is known by a nickname. There was never a formal name such as disciple or prophet or teacher. The word deacon means nothing in English, because it is not an English word. It is a Greek word that means “waiter.”
When the first church in Jerusalem had a problem, they chose some people to solve the problem. In that case, the problem involved making sure that the foreign widows and orphans had food to eat.
The ones chosen to make sure the needy were fed were not even called deacons by Luke in Acts 6:1–6 where the origin of the office is described.
Only later in Paul’s writings do we find people called deacons who have the responsibility of solving problems and taking care of the business of the church.
Reading the passage in Acts today, it appears that the apostles appointed a committee to solve the problem. The members of the committee came to be called by their nickname of deacon.
Not only does the name of deacons cause confusion but also the manner in which they take office.
They are “ordained.” Ordination seems to set deacons apart from other members of the congregation. Something special has happened, but most Baptists are at a loss to explain what it is. The first deacons were chosen by the congregation and not by the apostles.
After they were chosen, the apostles prayed for them and blessed them in the time-honored fashion by placing their hands on them.
B.H. Carroll, founding president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, taught that a woman may be a deaconess just so long as she was not ordained. Many Baptists seem to associate the ceremony of laying on hands with the idea of ordination.
The ceremony in the eyes of many has a quasi-mystical aspect to it akin to the Catholic understanding of ordination. In the New Testament, ordination simply means to choose someone for a task. The act of choosing or electing the first deacons by the congregation was their ordination.
The congregation ordained them, and then the apostles prayed for them. Using the New Testament definition for ordination, everyone who is asked to do a job in the church is “ordained” today.
Everyone elected to serve on a committee, to work with preschoolers or in the kitchen, to teach Sunday School, to greet visitors, or to serve in any other capacity identified by the church has been ordained.
The difference between the New Testament and today is we ask them to do a job, but we do not pray for them as they do that job.
The modern mind is confused over a name like deacon, because it does not say what the person does.
Most names relate to a task; such as Sunday School teacher, WMU director, stewardship committee member, choir member. The name deacon does not describe the job. A deacon has the function of dealing with problems and responsibilities as they arise.
The responsibilities of the office change over time as the needs of the churches change. The New Testament gives qualifications for the office of deacon (1 Tim. 3:8–13), but it gives no job description.
When a need arose in the early churches that required attention, the churches chose people to handle the situation.
Deacons seemed to have functioned like committees. In the 20th century, Baptist churches dramatically increased the number of deacons in each church, but gave them a new name: committee members.
The churches retained the old deacon office, but reassigned the role of deacons to committees.
In my opinion, deacons continue in most churches the same way the House of Lords continues in England as a ceremonial legacy of a bygone day.
The irony, of course, is that most Baptist deacons serve on several committees and ministry teams as well as teaching Sunday School.
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