An Workplace of Service
It is a perennial query that is a crucial one. Each church, virtually and functionally, has to come back down on a place. You’re both going to put in girls into the workplace of deacon—or not. I respect folks and arguments on each side. I believe there’s room for each conclusions inside the kingdom of God. Personally, I do suppose that the workplace of deacon is open to certified sisters, and that has the whole lot to do with what I perceive the workplace of deacon to be.
I don’t perceive that workplace, biblically, to be an workplace of authority and oversight. I perceive it to be an workplace of service. Due to this fact, I don’t see a 1 Timothy 2:12 equal for the workplace of deacon. In 1 Timothy 2:12, Paul tells Timothy, “I don’t allow a girl to show or train authority over a person.” I perceive that to be forbidding the workplace and performance of elder to girls. And but in the case of deacons, we don’t encounter verses like that within the New Testomony.
We do have verses like, “obey your leaders and undergo them” (Heb. 13:17). We don’t have a verse that claims, “obey your deacons and undergo them.” We do have 1 Peter 5:5 that claims “be topic to the elders.” We don’t have “be topic to the deacons.” So I believe it’s a special type of workplace altogether.
Now, will some pure affect in management accrue to a deacon serving effectively? Sure. I believe that’s inescapable. As folks have stated earlier than, deacons lead by serving, and elders serve by main. I do suppose there’s one thing to that distinction. And but right here’s one other huge distinction: deacons will not be serving or exercising any measure of management over the entire congregation in the best way that elders are. Often a deacon is given oversight over a specific side of church life, which is restricted in scope and in authority, whereas elders have been entrusted to look after the entire flock, and they’ll reply to God for the non secular welfare of each sheep for whom Christ died and entrusted to their care. (Heb. 13:17)
In Deacons: How They Serve and Strengthen the Church, Matt Smethurst makes the case that deacons are mannequin servants who rise to fulfill tangible wants in congregational life.
And the very last thing I’ll say on this, and once more, I respect individuals who differ with me on this, however believing that Christ installs girls into the workplace of deacon and that church buildings must is by no means a capitulation to modern-day feminism. You may look all through church historical past—all the best way from Spurgeon to Calvin and all the way down to the church fathers—and see that even when it hasn’t all the time been a majority place, it has all the time been a authentic place of understanding there to be each deacons and deaconesses as official workplace holders inside the family of God.
I do perceive from 1 Timothy 3:11 for Paul to be referring to not deacons’ wives however to girls deacons. However even when that’s not what he’s doing there, which I believe it’s, I believe there are different texts, comparable to Roman 16:1, referring to Phoebe. I don’t suppose she’s merely a courier or a patron or a typically servant-hearted particular person; I believe she’s an office-holder in that specific native church. And within the appendix of my e-book, Deacons, I give the most effective argument I can for ladies deacons and the most effective argument I can in opposition to girls deacons. And finally, I go away it to the reader to make the most effective judgment they will in gentle of God’s phrase.
Matt Smethurst is the writer of Deacons: How They Serve and Strengthen the Church.
