Emmanuel Evangelical Church Chippenham

From 15^th September 2005:

In this session we will continue to consider what the Bible has to say about the role of Deacons.

Background

Church has an eternal, international, regional and local expression. Here, we are part of EECC.

Last time we saw that the word ‘Deacon’ comes from the Greek term ‘Diakonos’ = ‘servant or minister’. We saw in fact that it is translated only 3 times as ‘Deacon’, 7 as ‘minister’, and 19 as ‘servant’ or ‘servants’ or ‘helper’, with a whole variety of people in the NT who could be said to be ‘deaconing’, from women (Matthew 27:55)  to angels (Mark 4:11) to table waiters (John 2:5) to the Lord Jesus himself! (Mark 10:45).

Deacons

This week we’re going to consider what the Bible has to say about specific tasks that Deacons undertake.

There are clearly distinctive tasks of deaconing to which the New Testament seems to draw specific attention and mark out. We saw looking at Acts 6:1-7 that while the apostles were ‘deaconing’ in their ministry of the Word and prayer, the men chosen by the church to solve the ‘problem’ which had occurred were ‘deaconing’ (serving) in a very different sense.

This week we’re going to look again at Acts 6:1-7.

1. Write down what kind of service the men chosen were called to do.

2. Why were these tasks important enough for men to be set aside to fulfil them?

3. How did the task of service fulfilled by these men relate to the apostles?