Evangelical Baptist Church

This week in our second deacons meeting we decided to implement a deacons fund. Look out for shiny new cars and extravagant vacations taken by these deacons, as a compensation for everything they do! (Just don’t ask what they do.)

Not really. A deacons fund is only called such because it is administered by the deacons. After every celebration of the Lord’s Supper, we will take up an offering for those in our assembly who are hurting financially. Our three deacons will then distribute these gifts from the church in a discreet fashion.

Of course, this distribution will require some judiciousness. While we all can genuinely feel sorry for those who, because of tight funds, are forced to switch from Ventis to Talls, this probably isn’t a situation where our compassion should well up to sacrificial giving. Although if I could just share a need with you…

We have a precedent in the New Testament (and Old – but that’s a later note) for organizing ourselves in order to become efficient in giving. In fact, Paul’s collecting and administering funds for a specific need – a famine in Palestine – helps form the background for much of what is written in the NT letters.*

This famine meant suffering for believers in the region, and so Christians in Antioch, throughout Asia Minor, and beyond to eastern Europe rose up to help their brothers and sisters in Judea. A significant task in Paul’s later missionary excursions was to publicize the need brought by this famine, encourage believers to give, and administrate the charitable funds. For Paul, there was no division between the message of the Gospel and this call to giving sacrificially to the materially poor.

So we continue the Christian tradition of taking seriously our care for the needy. A deacons fund is a mechanism to ensure that genuine needs are being noticed and addressed. Financial strain of our brothers and sisters deserves our detailed attention and finest administrative efforts, not just our pity.

I will do my best to remind you the week before the Lord’s Supper of this collection for the needy. Do your best to give sacrificially. Remember the Lord, who was rich, and became poor, not because being poor is better, but so that we might become rich.

Did all this sound like so much pretty explanation? I hope not. The truth is, we have deep, searing needs in our church right now. People who are working hard, long hours and still struggling. Which brings me to my last point, to explain why I resisted having the deacons fund ‘til now.

I am concerned that we not allow this mechanism to stand in for and replace personal charity and watchfulness. It would be terrible if we would stop, on our own, inquiring into people’s lives and being generous because, ‘that’s what the deacons fund is for.’

To allow good and efficient mechanisms and processes make one lazy and cold is the old religious mistake. So keep watch over people, move quickly to meet needs, and think of the deacons fund as part of our watch-care for one another, but not the entire benefits package!

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*The other two historical factors that the NT was written in/to were: 1) the racial tensions unleashed when Jews and Gentiles came together in the church 2) the two major doctrinal threats to the early church: incipient Gnosticism and an amalgam of Christianity and Judaism. These two items are not unconnected with giving. See Acts 6, where the Jew/Gentile tension was causing some in genuine need to be overlooked. So the church organized! And Gnosticism is the highfalutin name we give to mindsets that are referred to in James and 1 John, where genuine need can remain unaddressed by those who are all the while making the pious and intellectual confession.