Presbycast on Deacons

I was invited on the Presbycast podcast to discuss my website reformeddeacon.com.

You can listen here.

Transcript

The following is a transcript of the portion of the episode in which I was interviewed.

Brad Isbell: In the studio with me is a deacon from my own church. His name is Jeremy. Jeremy, how long have you served?

Jeremy: About three years as a deacon.

Brad Isbell: Okay, three years—so he’s not completely beaten down at this point. We also have joining us remotely Tim, who is an OPC deacon in the Carolinas. Tim, what do you want to tell us about yourself?

Tim Hopper: Well, this is the first time I’ve actually had to listen to the whole Presbycast intro music—I wasn’t able to fast-forward it—so my life has really been changed by sitting through that. Happy to be here.

Wresbyterian: Sanctification is gradual.

Tim Hopper: I’ve served as a deacon for four and a half years.

Brad Isbell: I served one term—sounds like a prison term, doesn’t it?—as a deacon before I became an elder, and we’ll talk about that. Deacons are not just junior elders. It doesn’t always have to progress that way, nor does it always. But I did put in some time as a deacon, though I didn’t serve with my pal Jeremy here. So before we forget this, Tim, tell us about some of the diaconal activities, websites, and content creation that you’ve been doing.

Tim Hopper: Yeah, I’m a man of many websites. I’ve tried to put things out there for the good of Christ’s church, really just organizing some things I would be doing myself anyway. Relevant to this show is reformeddeacon.com, which is really just a bibliography of resources on the diaconate. As I was trying to become a better deacon and looking for things to read, I started writing things down, and I’ve assembled them all into one place and provided links to the resources where I’m able to. I pray and hope that’ll be a useful resource to people. I’ve also categorized those things, so you can click on something like polity discussions or a denominational report and just see the items in that category. Another thing I’m really trying to promote is reformedconfessions.com, which is Dr. Pipa’s reading schedule for the Westminster Catechisms and Confession. You can subscribe by Twitter, Facebook, email, or just go to the website each day and get a reading, which only takes a couple of minutes. I’ve helped several hundred people read the Confession and Catechisms through each year, and I’m happy with that work, but I’d like more people to follow it. I have another website, ulsterworldly.com, which is resources on Presbyterian history—again, just collecting my own readings and also sharing some family stories. Then I have a number of Twitter accounts. I can’t list them all, but there’s a John Newton quote account, a J. Gresham Machen quote account, the Reformed Confessions account, and Pres_history for Presbyterian history. There are more, but I’ll stop for now.

Brad Isbell: Remind me at the end, and we’ll emphasize reformeddeacon.com for sure as we’re closing out.

Tim Hopper: And I’ll know from Google Analytics—if it gets more than two views per month, I’ll know we’ve done good.

Brad Isbell: The senior pastor at the church where Jeremy and I serve is, as Tim knows—because he’s invited him to do some training for deacons in his presbytery—probably one of, most people would say, a world authority on the diaconate and diaconal ministry from an old-school, ordinary-means-of-grace point of view. He’s a church historian, and ecclesiology is very important to him. So we’ve probably had exposure to some things that most people just aren’t going to get, and that’s a blessing to us; we realize not everyone has that benefit.

Wresbyterian: I’ve heard him say that he’s a little surprised that he’s regarded that way. I forget exactly how he put it, but something like, he just talks about what the Bible says about deacons, and people are impressed by the simplicity.

Tim Hopper: Well, he’s written three substantial pieces on the history and theology of the diaconate, the Reformed diaconate, so that’s more than anybody else I can think of—at least in this century.

Brad Isbell: And he became a Presbyterian through the polity he found in the New Testament. He didn’t come to it primarily through soteriology; he came to it through ecclesiology. That’s as good as any, and it’s impressive in its way.

Tim Hopper: It also makes him great at dinner-table conversation, I’ve found, at least in my own life. It’s really a winner.

Brad Isbell: So you’re going to have some training for deacons in your presbytery sometime in the future, and he’s going to attend that, I believe.

Tim Hopper: Yeah, I also serve as the chairman of our Presbytery Committee on Diaconal Ministries, which is three elders and two deacons in our presbytery, the Presbytery of the Southeast of the OPC. We’re having what I believe is our second occasional presbytery-wide diaconal gathering at our church here in Raleigh in the fall, and we’ve invited him to come speak to us. We’re very excited about that. I’ll be headed to presbytery next week and strongly encouraging our pastors and elders to go home and encourage their deacons to come attend.

Brad Isbell: And I know Jeremy has had some desire—inspired by our minister, I’m sure—to bring deacons together at the presbytery level, and I’m sure he’s interested in what you’re doing in that respect.

Jeremy: Yeah. The OPC has really had a resurgence in—well, I don’t even know if it’s a resurgence; maybe it’s for the first time—really trying to think about diaconal ministry on the presbytery and denominational level. My understanding is that in the past, the Presbytery Diaconal Committee at times was the committee you got on as a pastor if you wanted to feel like you were serving on a committee but didn’t want to have to do anything. At least for us, it’s not that anymore. We work hard to serve the diaconal needs through our presbytery and also to keep our diaconate talking to each other, helping with training and various things. At the denominational level, our Committee on Diaconal Ministries has really blossomed in recent years. We have a full-time administrator, David Nakhla, who works on behalf of the committee. He’s helping coordinate short-term missions and disaster relief through the OPC, and we just had our biennial Diaconal Summit, a denomination-wide summit, in Wheaton, Illinois, over the summer, which I attended. It’s great. We also have funds, both at the presbytery and General Assembly level, that the churches in the lower courts can go up and ask for if they have needs. I’ve been really encouraged by that, and it’s made me think more about what diaconal ministry means for us from a Presbyterian connectional polity perspective, which isn’t something I’d given a lot of thought to until recently.

Brad Isbell: One thing it brings to mind is that it’s not a stepping-stone office to becoming an elder, and it’s not a second-class office. It’s important in and of itself, and I think you’ve grasped that.

Tim Hopper: So am I wrong? I thought that if you couldn’t hack it as a deacon, they made you a ruling elder. Is that right?

Brad Isbell: Well, it has happened. So, first of all, I want to pose a question to each of you: what is a deacon? I’m going to let Jeremy go first, and he may just read me what’s in the PCA Book of Church Order—which our minister, the expert, thinks is pretty strong on deacons. Jeremy, tell me what a deacon is, because there are people out there who grew up Baptist, where the deacons were the guys who either rubber-stamped the pastor or fired him for no reason, and when they weren’t doing that, they were smoking cigarettes on the church steps. So tell me what a real deacon is.

Jeremy: Well, I believe I have seen deacons smoking cigarettes on the church steps in my years.

Wresbyterian: There’s no reason to denigrate such a fine vice as that.

Jeremy: I make no judgment on it; I’m just reporting the fact. I grew up in the home of a deacon in the Baptist church, and my father is a deacon to this day.

Brad Isbell: As is mine—I should throw that in. My dad just turned 78. He’d been at the same church for about 40 years, and they moved across town. When you’re 78, you don’t want to drive any further than you have to, so they joined a nearby Baptist church that was larger. He had no intentions of being a deacon again—which, again, is more like an elder in the Baptist church, and we’ll talk about that—but he’s back on board at 78.

Jeremy: A deacon is an office of the church. It’s an office of sympathy and service, our form of government says. So it’s part of the authority structure that Christ has provided for his bride, specifically to take care of her temporal needs.

Brad Isbell: And our form of government emphasizes that it is a spiritual office.

Jeremy: If it’s an office of the church, it must be a spiritual office.

Brad Isbell: Right. Anything else you want to say about what a deacon is and does? We’ll talk a lot more about what deacons do in a little while, but anything else before we turn it over to Tim?

Jeremy: Maybe to note that the office of deacon can be identified through all of Scripture, if you read Robinson’s The Church of God, which I know you’ve referred to, Doctor.

Brad Isbell: Yeah, that’s Stuart Robinson’s The Church of God as an Essential Element of the Gospel.

Jeremy: And then at the founding of the New Testament church, the office was broken out of the apostolic office—Acts 6, the occasion of the widows who weren’t being properly taken care of.

Brad Isbell: All right, so we did have a question about that. I put the call out for questions to our listeners, and we’ll go through more of those near the end. Someone asked, is it actually an office? There are a few who would say not really, and they don’t agree that the account of the deacons in Acts completely comports with the deacons Paul talked about in the epistles. But we don’t agree with that, and I don’t think we’re going to go into the interpretive issues there. We do believe it’s an office and always has been an office of some sort in the New Testament church. So, Tim, how do you describe it—you can use your documents or your own words—tell the listener, who could be Baptist, congregational, or in some strange situation where the church offices aren’t clear, what is a deacon?

Tim Hopper: Yeah. I do love the PCA’s section on this, and I think the OPC section, chapter 11 of our Book of Church Order, is excellent as well. It starts: the Scriptures designate the office of deacon as distinct and perpetual in the church. Deacons are called to show forth the compassion of Christ in a manifold ministry of mercy toward the saints and strangers on behalf of the church. To this end, they exercise in the fellowship of the church a recognized stewardship of care and of gifts for those in need or distress. This service is distinct from that of rule in the church.

Brad Isbell: That’s a place where our pastor and some in the PCA would differ—although in the recent debates there were many who wanted to take the element of rule completely out because they wanted to bring women into the office. Our pastor would say that deacons do have authority, because they can delegate and lead the congregation. So he’d be more comfortable saying there is some authority in the diaconate, and that a deacon has some authority as a leader over what they’ve been appointed over. In the PCA Book of Church Order—I believe it’s in the vows the congregation takes when the deacons are ordained—the people are to obey them, as long as they’re giving instruction and exhortation in their proper sphere and role.

Tim Hopper: Yeah. Maybe your pastor and I can have a fistfight, or maybe just arm-wrestle about this one when he comes out, but—

Brad Isbell: Don’t hurt him, okay?

Tim Hopper: I would say I don’t disagree that there’s a biblical appropriateness to talking about authority. But being distinct from rule in the church is recognizing what the PCA and OPC both recognize: that the diaconate is not one of the three courts of the church. The session functions as a court that has the role of the court; the diaconate does not.

Brad Isbell: Right. The deacons are a board, and they don’t have any deliberative powers or authority to make church law. It’s not going to be for you or Jeremy to decide if someone should be disciplined.

Tim Hopper: Right.

Brad Isbell: So in that respect, that’s no doubt true.

Jeremy: I believe I have seen some older outlines of the offices that do refer to the deacons’ body as a court.

Tim Hopper: That actually is a distinct thing going on in the Church of Scotland. A PCA pastor friend and I had this discussion recently, and I was looking into it. The court of deacons is not actually the same as the diaconate, if we’re thinking of the same thing.

Jeremy: I might have seen it in Calvin, but I don’t know.

Brad Isbell: I never heard of that. All right, let’s say this. I love to stir things up with the PCA. I take it both of you have been ordained by the laying on of hands.

Tim Hopper: Yes.

Brad Isbell: As you should have been. There are deacons in the PCA who never had hands laid upon them, and they were considered to have been ordained. That may seem like a small thing, but I think it’s a pretty big deal, if we see that in every case in the Bible. So let’s just get that out of the way—you guys are an ordained office. The elders and probably the deacons of the church laid their hands on you at the time of your ordination. Now let’s talk about the history of the diaconate a little bit. In the New Testament is where we learn what deacons are, who they are to be, what their qualifications should be, and what they did. In the Roman Catholic Church, over time, the office was completely misappropriated—there was a misapprehension of what the office was to be. Today in the Roman Catholic Church they have archdeacons, subdeacons, deacons; they’re basically junior priests who can do almost anything a priest can do. It’s like a guy who got married and has the gifts—they’ll make him a deacon, and he does about 90% of what a priest does. The word and the office bear no resemblance to the biblical definition, so it was quickly lost in the Roman church. As we alluded to earlier, in the Baptist church there are basically two offices historically. Now we have lots of Baptist churches with elders and deacons, and that’s good. But historically, the deacons sort of functioned as elders and also did the diaconal functions. You had one elder in the church, though—that was the pastor; he was the bishop—and the deacon board’s job was pretty much to rubber-stamp him or fire him, and they rarely seemed to exercise any sort of shepherding or spiritual function. It’s very odd, but that’s what most of us grew up with. We really owe to the Reformation and to Calvin the rediscovery of the biblical office of deacon. I was reading on Google Books an interesting piece on the history of the diaconate—this chapter actually written by a Japanese man. It said during the Reformation, the church rediscovered the diaconate as participation in the ministry of Christ. If we look at Geneva as an example, most of what the deacons did was take the alms that were collected and distribute them to the poor. Now, this brings us into the function of the diaconate today, because there are some important differences we’ve got to note. All churches in Calvin’s day were established churches. The buildings, their maintenance, even the salaries of the ministers were paid for by whom? By the city council, by the prince, by the local government. So the money the church collected didn’t have to go to all those things; it went to the care of the poor and widows. There was very little difference between the city government in Geneva and the church government. Everyone in Geneva was assumed to be a member of the church in some way, so the social welfare system was done by the deacons of the church. Some would say that should be done today—that deacons should minister to the poor indiscriminately, maybe with a priority for church members. But we need to talk about this big difference between established churches and free churches. Tim or Jeremy, if the offering you collect each week went exclusively to the poor of the community, what would happen to the church building and everything else?

Jeremy: Well, our congregation doesn’t benefit from the patronage of the city, so we wouldn’t have any money for the maintenance of the building or the ministry.

Tim Hopper: Yeah.

Brad Isbell: Right, and that’s a huge difference we have to reckon with. Some today who would want the deacons to take on a very wide social welfare role—it’s unrealistic, because of the different ways churches are funded. But we do agree that deacons are the ones to be in charge of the funds, the collection, and the use of them; it’s just that what you have to use them for is a little broader today. So let’s talk about the balance. Let’s break it into three sections: the care of the poor in the community, the care of the poor in the church—and of course in Geneva there were a lot of refugees who came for religious reasons, who were prime beneficiaries of the church—and then the church’s local needs, be that buildings, taxes, the ministers’ salaries, upkeep of buildings, all those things. Let’s talk about how that balance reveals itself today.

Jeremy: Slightly reversed—the city or the government is more likely to contribute to the maintenance of the poor.

Brad Isbell: And they’re really good at it, too, right?

Tim Hopper: They have no problems, as far as I can tell.

Brad Isbell: So we should say—Resby, you’re still with us. I’m sure you’ll want to join in on this point, because let’s just talk about the 800-pound gorilla. And we’re not talking about Harambe, Resby.

Wresbyterian: He’s beyond him. Never forget, always remember.

Brad Isbell: Yes, he’s very important to you, I know. The dominant model for diaconal ministry today is the one typified, developed, and promoted by Tim Keller in New York. That’s the model anyone who’s going to talk about deacons these days has to reckon with. But I’m not sure it’s the most biblical model, and I’m not sure it’s transplantable to every locale. So, Resby, I assume you’re familiar with the Keller way of doing diaconal work.

Wresbyterian: Yeah, and even to use the hockey term, they would seem to sort of deke around certain regulations that might otherwise be in place—referring, of course, to the ordination that’s not ordination. I think I referred to it in a previous episode, too, as distinctions that really matter, but to your standard churchgoer, they’re not going to see a distinction between why someone would be called a deke versus a deacon. All you’re doing is further minimizing and undermining the true office of deacon by distorting it almost to a point of nothing.

Brad Isbell: Yeah, and what Resby refers to is the Redeemer New York shorthand of “deeks” rather than deacon or deaconess, because they really promote a complete equality of male deacons—who, in my opinion, are not ordained, because at least in 2009, according to Keller himself, they were not ordained by the laying on of hands; they were merely commissioned—serving alongside female deaconesses who were not ordained. But it’s interesting to note, and this is another thing we should talk about later, paid staff deacons. The paid staff person who is the director of deacons at Redeemer, the last time I checked, was a female. So that’s what Resby refers to.

Jeremy: Aside from the problems and irregularities with who they assign to do deacon work, I have a vague impression that the Redeemer model of deacon work is exhausting, if we were to try to implement it in our local churches that don’t have the resources or hired staff they have. But I don’t actually know—what is their method of “deaconing,” aside from that nomenclature and office problem?

Brad Isbell: Well, they do a lot of assistance to members and non-members as well. If you look into it, if you need financial assistance—and I’m sorry, cynically I’m envisioning an underemployed web designer or graphic designer who got in over their head on some rent and needs help. I don’t think we’re dealing with starvation among their demographic. But they have an almost welfare-department-type qualification: you’re assigned someone, you get interviewed, you get counseling, they put you on a list. For all of its compassion, it sounds very governmental the way they go about it. I couldn’t find this quote this week, but I think I’ve read where Keller said he thought in the urban context diaconal ministry was like the tip of the spear—that it was their best method of outreach. Now, I don’t think we see in the Bible that diaconal work—whether because of its perceived compassion or because the diaconate is seen as egalitarian and puts forth a face of the church that says we’re inclusive and nice and men and women can do the same things—that’s my cynical take. It’s more of a marketing program. I’m sure they do good work, and I’m sure people have been helped. But when I look at the Redeemer model, it doesn’t strike me as perfectly biblical. Tim, I’m sure you’ve looked into that—you’ve probably read some of the Keller stuff on the deacon. Tell me I’m wrong, or give me your take on it.

Tim Hopper: I actually don’t have all that much insight on it. As a good Orthodox Presbyterian, I don’t pay much attention to the PCA.

Brad Isbell: Where’s my rimshot button?

Tim Hopper: Being a contrarian, maybe, I’ve found his little book Resources for Deacons, which the PCA publishes, helpful. This is from before I was born, actually—when Keller was doing his studies on deacons at Westminster Seminary, where I think he did graduate study. I’ve found helpful things in it. I haven’t even read the whole thing; it’s just a little booklet, but it has little sections on how to think through different aspects of ministry. I’m not saying I’d endorse it wholesale, but it’s been helpful to me. I actually don’t know much about the specifics of the diaconal ministry they do. I guess if I’d have one word of charity, it would be that I’d expect diaconal ministry probably to take a different shape in a small city like I live in, or rural Tennessee, versus big-city New York. They would have some impact, but I’m not very helpful on that.

Brad Isbell: Okay. I think Jeremy would tell you—without betraying any confidences—that even in a church of our size, where we might have had 200 people in our building that seats 240, in a congregation that small we have enough needs to keep the deacons busy and to keep their fund largely depleted. Am I speaking accurately?

Jeremy: That’s quite accurate. So if the Redeemer model is—sounding like a Baptist church—to use diaconal ministry primarily as an outreach method…

Brad Isbell: Well, that’s my take on it. It may not be fair.

Jeremy: If we were to do that, we couldn’t. We don’t have the resources of people or money to do much more than take care of the needs of our own congregation.

Tim Hopper: Well, I think one of the realities is, if you’re an inner-city church, you have people coming in knocking on your door all day asking for money. We’re just outside of downtown Raleigh, and we have a moderate amount of that—not a lot—but you do have to answer questions on how you deal with it. I don’t know all the answers. At our OPC Diaconal Summit this summer, we had a speaker, David Apple, who helped with the mercy ministry at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. He described the volumes of people coming and asking for help. I think that raises different questions than many of us have in our non-inner-city church situations.

Brad Isbell: Right. Now, Resby, you’ve been involved in some more Redeemer-ish type settings over the years. What have you seen of the Keller-influenced diaconal model?

Wresbyterian: Well, I like what Jeremy said about the idea that the model would be exhausting for a church any smaller than Redeemer in New York City.

Brad Isbell: And it’s largely professionalized. If you read about it, if you look at their website, it’s almost like you’re looking at the Department of Social Services. I know there’s a spiritual dimension, but it’s a big old thing.

Wresbyterian: Yeah. The church of which I’m a member particularized within the last year, even though the church is almost a decade old at this point. We were finally at a point where we could do that and expand our session. We only have one deacon. However—

Brad Isbell: And boy, are his wings tired.

Wresbyterian: Yeah. I’ll put it this way: they were tired when the church was a lot smaller, let alone now. I dare say the average income of our congregation has risen of late after some people have come in, but just being in the community where our church is located, those needs haven’t changed. If anything, they’ve stayed the same or probably gotten greater. Trying to implement anything more expansive would just absolutely drain the deacon’s fund even further. We’re lucky to be able to do what we can with it. There was a time when my family had requested some assistance from it, and we were so grateful it was available; as things turned out, we ended up not needing it, with regard to housing. But looking at expanding it any further—with some of the other churches in our presbytery that are probably smaller towns than Raleigh but similarly minded in terms of urban sprawl and rejuvenation—I just don’t see it happening in our area, not with any success without exasperating a congregation.

Brad Isbell: All right. So, Jeremy, tell me—again, no names, of course—what are some of the things you and the deacons have addressed, primarily within the congregation? What sort of assistance have you provided?

Jeremy: We have helped people buy cars. We’ve helped people with rent. We’ve helped pay for counseling.

Brad Isbell: Right. So generally it’s families, younger families…

Jeremy: Medical bills, probably—yeah, actually, recently.

Brad Isbell: So those things are going on. I’m sure there are things deacons can do for those outside the church, but I can’t see it as primary today. That’s my take. Now, Jeremy, our deacons are also involved with some of the missions we support, primarily in Peru. Tell us what the deacons have done to gather funds and what they’ve been used for down in Peru.

Jeremy: We send a team to Peru for about a week each year in recent years, and we like to include a deacon on that team. In getting to know the Presbyterian church down there, we’ve learned of needs where we can help—with flood relief through the local church there, and constructing new church buildings for the church there. Those are the two most recent things.

Brad Isbell: Yeah, we’ve helped purchase land and building material down there and supported new church plants. Our deacons—probably the result of our pastor being so wise on these things—he’s careful to include the deacons in that, and not just have a committee of the session do those things.

Jeremy: Well, and the diaconate’s even taken the lead on some of that.

Brad Isbell: Yeah, and sometimes the diaconate just—here’s the authority thing—there are lots of things they can make the decision on. They make the call. They decide how much money, where it goes, and they just do it. They don’t run it by us in the hall. I think that’s a good thing. Our deacons in the last several years have taken on a lot more responsibility in budgeting. That used to be kind of a rubber-stamp thing, where the elders and the treasurer would take care of all that, but the deacons are far more involved in that now.

Jeremy: In our defense, the treasurers are members of the diaconate.

Brad Isbell: Yeah. So, Tim, does that comport with what you all do? Does that match up?

Tim Hopper: Yeah, that’s very similar to what we’re doing. We’ve certainly made a priority of our own congregation, as I think Scripture teaches us—first to the household of faith. It’s surprising the needs you find out people have. I think in the 21st century, one of the challenges for deacons is that people often are not going destitute, but they are going into credit card debt. So thinking through how to help people when they’re in that situation, or risking getting themselves into it, is a relatively new challenge for us. Where people would have gone hungry in the past, now they’re kind of invisibly getting themselves into messes.

Brad Isbell: So there’s a counseling, teaching, and training role in economic things as well.

Tim Hopper: Absolutely. As a rule, we try to almost never provide money to someone without some aspect of that. Not that if someone comes up to us starving, it’s like, “Okay, let’s have a lesson in budgeting and then you get a cookie.” But oftentimes it’s, “We want to help you, but we need to help you not get in this situation again.”

Wresbyterian: Yeah, that’s something our church has done as well. It’s been some time since such an act was mentioned, but there were people who were in need of assistance regularly, to the point of a habit that needed to be corrected. I’m not saying that’s a vice or something, but just something like poor budgeting. We weren’t going to deny a need, but at the same time you want to encourage and strengthen that person to be able to go forth from there.

Tim Hopper: Yeah. We’ve actually made a habit of encouraging and even financially helping people to do the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University class at a local church. I don’t think any of us on our diaconate necessarily agree with Dave Ramsey at every point, but we’ve seen much fruit from people who have taken the time to go through that and think about budgeting, emergency funds, and preparing for the future. It was a huge encouragement to us recently when a young couple had a situation come up, and my first thought was, they’re going to need some financial help. Then we talked to them and they said, “Oh no, we just applied what we learned at Financial Peace University.” That’s such a blessing, and those long-term things make a big difference.

Brad Isbell: Yeah. So there is a spiritual dimension to this, and there is an outreach dimension—although I don’t think that’s primary. I like to use the word organic. Some of these things just happen, and naturally people hear about them or are thankful for the help they received, and if they can see it as coming from the hand of the Lord, that’s a great blessing to them. But that won’t always be the case. Our pastor is notorious for repeating that salvation affects our minds, our souls, and our bodies—that elders are there primarily to care for the spiritual needs of the sheep, and deacons are there to care for their bodies, their physical lives. But man is complex, and you can’t separate those two. So there are spiritual benefits from that physical ministry and service. He’ll say things like, “the whole Christ for the whole man”—we’re not just body, not just spirit, not materialists or pie-in-the-sky disembodied souls. We’re people with complex needs, and he makes much of the fact that part of the gospel is the provision in the church of gifts that God gave to the church: the officers, elders, and deacons. I don’t think you can improve upon that plan, but certainly we can get much better at how we do it.

Tim Hopper: Yeah. There’s been a number of good things written on the spiritual nature of the diaconate. A recent piece in The Ordained Servant, which is an online magazine the OPC has for church officers, just this year, was called “The Spiritual Nature of the Office of Deacon.” There’s been a lot of good caution from wise and experienced men to not just think about diaconal ministry as simply meeting a physical need, but—so often physical needs are accompanied by underlying spiritual needs. So often financial troubles are not just that there was a lack of rain this year and someone didn’t have the crops they needed to eat, but foolishness or pride or people seeking to use their money unwisely—all these things. Being able to talk to people about those spiritual matters and discern them, that’s the hard work, in my experience, of a diaconate. You can find anybody who can plunge a toilet, but someone who can sit down and talk with someone—that’s a challenge. Those are the kinds of things that led me to make this reformeddeacon.com website. I need wisdom, and I want to learn from those who have gone through these things and studied the Scriptures on them.

Brad Isbell: Well, in my opinion, there’s a spiritual benefit and nature even to some of the very material things you do in the church. From my days as a deacon, I said there’s something very spiritual about the ladies’ room at church. If the ladies come in and it’s a mess, they may transfer that disgust to all the males around, including the officers and leaders of the church, so don’t let that happen. We shut up a church about six months ago and had no water in our building, which caused significant concern. I was on the phone with the city’s emergency water line while a very handy man in our church was outside figuring out how to turn our water back on. We determined the city had installed a new water valve and just failed to turn our water on. That was kind of funny, but it proved your point that so often the work of the diaconate goes back to the foundations of the office: the deacons were there in Acts to free the elders for preaching and prayer. The broader context is we’re freeing the people to be able to sit and hear the preaching of the Word, attend to it, and prepare for it. I completely agree—so much of what we do is enabling that. If you’re in a modern building that requires air conditioning to be habitable, that’s got to work. Our deacons have also installed hearing-assistance equipment in the last year or so. I don’t know if anyone’s using it, but it’s there.

Tim Hopper: We got that fairly recently, and it has been a huge blessing to two people in our church who use it every week.

Brad Isbell: Yes, and that’s a spiritual blessing that came by physical means. So I’d contend that the spiritual nature of what the deacons do is broader than many suppose.

[The hosts swap lighthearted anecdotes about the unglamorous physical side of deacon work—a rabid skunk dispatched in the church parking lot, stink bugs, and renting a lift to replace light bulbs in a 39-foot ceiling. Tim notes his own church’s switch to LED lighting:]

Tim Hopper: Well, I have lots of people upset at me, and I told them that as soon as these bulbs die in 25 years, they can have a vote on what we replace them with.

[The hosts field a few listener questions before closing.]

Brad Isbell: So, reformeddeacon.com—any deacon should check that out. And church members or elders who love their deacons and wish they were much better, refer your friends and neighbors to that website.

Wresbyterian: Thank you to Jeremy and Tim for being with us, for contributing. I appreciate you making up for my silence during the show, but this is truly one area where I have even less expertise to speak on than normal, so I’m glad that was able to be filled in.