Why does the church need structure?

Today, we’re actually having a little bit of a different type of service. I’m super grateful to be able to introduce such an amazing moment in the history of our church. In about 30 minutes or so, we’re going to appoint and acknowledge from among this wonderful congregation, deacons to serve our community. I don’t know what you know about deacons, but here’s a simple explanation. Deacons serve in a given responsibility needed to fulfill the work of the church. But maybe a better definition is this, deacons fit into the wonderful, Holy Spirit inspired structure of the church. I’ll tell you where they fit as we talk a little bit more, but I just wanted to make a moment, a note here that I am well aware that many people in our society today reject the idea of structure in the church. They reject the idea of what they consider to be institutionalized religion. I get that because some people have endured leadership or have dealt with structures that have created oppressive systems and propagated a lot of evil things. I can understand why someone would say, I don’t really want to be engaged in an institutionalized religion, but I’d like to take a moment to explain why biblical structure exists.

Then also explain a little bit about what biblical structure is. And then I’d like to take some time to explain how we adopt and model it in the Broward Church. So if that sounds like a thrilling Sunday morning, well, then Amen. But I promise I’ll try to make it a little bit exciting for you. As we begin, we first have to understand that the Church is an organism. It’s an organism. Human institutions create organizations. God created an organism. Here’s an explanation. The Church is a living… The church is a living? Yes. The church is a living organism of people connected to God through union with Jesus Christ. In this, we share a common, in common eternal life. We share in common the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Bible says Christ lives in us. We share in common the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. We are all growing, the Bible says, from one degree of glory to the next. And we’re all on our journey together. We share in common similar convictions. We are, as the Bible says, one in mind and one in thought. But those convictions and the way we express those convictions in the world take different shape depending upon our unique giftings and also from generation to generation and culture to culture and all of that.

So we might be tempted to think that because we are an organism, which means that we’re free flowing, we move from one thing to another thing and we’re organic, we might think we need to run away from being organized at all. And here’s what we see. From the earliest moments of the church, we learned the church is an organism, but it’s an organism that requires organization. And we learned that from the very beginning of the church. Let me lay the groundwork because we’re going to be in Acts 6 in just a moment. The church is massive by Acts 6. It’s numbering in the tens of thousands. Acts 1 is the beginning of the church, and the church had about 120 people who were basically hiding in an upper room. By the end of Chapter 2, they’ve baptized 3,000 people, so the church is growing relatively rapidly. People are coming in, people are being converted, people are being baptized. Two chapters after that, another 5,000 men, not including women, are added to the roles of the church. We get to Acts 6, and we’re talking a year later, maybe two years later, and they go from 120 to 10,000.

That is explosive church growth. Let’s pray for that here in the Broward Church. Maybe not. Maybe not. I don’t even know if I want that. The early church met every single day. They met in the temple square. They met at least twice a week for public worship and for public prayer and the preaching of the gospel. This is that 10,000 member church. They’re meeting every single day. They assembled on Sunday, that’s the Lord’s Day for Communion. They continued to be baptized. They continued, the Bible says, to break bread from home to home. Why do I say all this? Because all of these things, baptizing people, meeting 10,000 people from home to home, making bread, sharing bread requires some oversight. You would think that’s true, right? Someone had to plan it, right? Someone had to bake the bread. Someone had to figure out where are these 10,000 people going? What house are you going to and what house are you going to? And why are you going there and why are you not going there? They had to deal with answering all the complicated questions that were coming from people who had just converted from Judaism into Christianity.

And what made this even more complicated is this, that the church, when it was born, began on the day of Pentecost, which means that this fledgling church didn’t just have Jews from Jerusalem. It had Jews from what they call the diaspora all over the Mediterranean. Those people got baptized, and then when they got baptized, they just stayed in the town. Imagine this. Imagine the war in the Ukraine. We have Ukrainian who are moving here, and we have 2,000 new Ukrainians in our congregation. They have no job, they have no home. That would complicate our church a little bit. Would you agree? No house, no home, no job, no money at all. Act 2 tells us that the church, because of this, would sell what they had and bring the sale of all they had and lay it at the feet of the Apostles so that when they met, they could pass out the money to these immigrants who had come in. Again, all of this requires some oversight. You’re like, No, I don’t want any oversight. I just want it to be natural. I want things to be the distribution of money and food just to be easy.

Teaching from brand new people to understand Christianity from the framework of the Old Testament, that required some work. And so it didn’t take too long after the church’s birth for there to be a complicated set of conditions that had to be met. Again, a large number of people, people being added to the church every single day, people being baptized, people having to have the Lord’s Supper, people meeting from house to house, people needing to teach the truth of God, people needing to explain the meaning of the Old Testament as fulfilled by Jesus Christ. And all I’m saying and all I’m trying to explain is this, from the very beginning, the church demanded structure. Okay, important point here. The church does not exist to serve the structure. The structure, the church doesn’t exist to serve the structure. The structure exists to support the church. Here’s what I mean. Even in Broward, I don’t understand all that’s happening here. All the ministries that God is working on here, all the relationships that God has fostered, all the programs that meet people’s needs, most of the stuff I did not invent, I did not create, I didn’t even suggest.

What we’re supposed to do, what leadership is supposed to do is recognize what the Lord is doing. I feel it’s my job and the job of the elders here to watch the life of the church and support the life of the church with necessary structure. Not to come up with the structure and then try to push the structure into the Church. Does that make sense? I always felt like we should see what the Spirit of God does. We should see gifted people raising up, doing ministry, and then we should go on behind them and go, Okay, what support do you need? What help do you need? How can we order this in such a way that honors the Church, edifies the Saints, glorifies God? This is what happened in the early church. They had an exploding church on their hands and they just watched what the Holy Spirit was doing. They began to shape a structure to fill in the work, sorry, to fill in the gaps of the place where the church was in need. That’s pretty amazing. I want you to notice something. What it required is this. When pressure comes, things need to tighten up.

This is my lovely assistant. This is also my wife. I’ve been using a lot of props lately. It’s weird, but here it is. I’m going to hold your laptop. Yeah, hold my laptop. Thank you, baby. You’re just going to hide there? All right, it sounds good. This is a non-Newtonian fluid. You ever heard of this? Non-Newtonian fluid. Kids play with this. My children were playing with it, and I got the idea that this makes total sense. This is a liquid. If you can see, it move around. You see? It’s a liquid. In fact, it’s a liquid like every other liquid that it’s pretty dense, but if you put something in it, it just sinks to the bottom. See? Bye, bye, bye. Bye, bye, bye. But what’s really cool about this liquid is if you put pressure on it, it tightens up. So watch, ready? Isn’t that amazing? God is so cool. Yeah. This is the way I think about structure in the church. The life of the Church is a liquid. It moves around, it dances. It needs to fill in the gaps. The Holy Spirit needs to move it around. But then when pressure comes, when something really challenging happens, it needs to tighten up.

It needs to tighten up to protect itself. It needs to tighten up to make sure all the needs are being met. That’s what I want you to think when we think about the structure of the church. When something’s really challenging, it needs to tighten up. Bye, hammer.

Okay, Acts 6. Ministry is happening. People are coming to the Apostles. People are going from house to house, needas are being met and the pressure begins. Here’s the pressure. Are you ready? In those days, when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. So a complaint arises on the part of the Hellenistic Jews against the Hebraic Jews. So you got these two groups of people. You have the native Hebrews who live in Jerusalem, and then you have all of the other people who have come from the outside. I mentioned this already, but look, all these different places, they’re coming to Jerusalem for Pentecost. They’re immigrants. They’re immigrants. They’re all from Greek areas. And so basically, they come to Jerusalem, they’re baptized, they stay there. And there’s a distribution of food happening. And the Hebrews are getting more than the Hellenistic widows. This is really common. This would happen. One historian I read said that on Fridays, there would be a receiver of alms. He would go around from house to house, grab money, and then on Friday night, when they met for Sabbath, they would hand out the food. If you were a permanent resident, you would get 14 meals. Fourteen meals. But for whatever reason, the Hebrew Jews, Hebrew widows are getting 14. The Hellenistic are getting 11 or something like that. New Church. Structure not really there, a lot of pressure comes, some structure needs to be established. The Old King James says there’s a Murmuring that’s arising, a Murmuring. There’s something wrong. It’s not good. So what happens? They need to tighten up. So what happens with the Apostles? The Apostles say this, The 12 gathered all the disciples together and said, It is not right for us to neglect the Ministry of the Word in order to wait on tables. We’re about to see the solution, but before we see the solution, I just want to take some time on this statement. This is the Apostles’ response, and it reveals something really interesting.

See, because they were Apostles and because they had no time to train any leaders, everything fell on them. So everyone’s coming up to the Apostles going, Hey, look, this issue is here and that issue is there. And people don’t have money and people are being overlooked and people are going through difficult times. And it’s like the lawn’s not mowed and I need help with someone coming over my house and cleaning it. I had a disaster and there was a death in the family. And the Apostles are getting everything. They’re getting everything. And they’re trying to figure out how to solve the problem, but they make a really interesting statement. They said, if we take this on, we’re going to be neglecting the Ministry of the Word. It would not be right for us to do that. It would not be right for us to neglect the Ministry of the Word in order to wait on tables. Now, what does wait on tables mean? Well, it means to give out food. It could mean also to give out money. The point is, if we do this job, we are going to neglect our job. If we do this job, we’re going to neglect our job.

I think this makes a really important statement. We’re going to move into the role of the deacon in a second, but I just want to make a note about the role of the preacher. The church is primarily about the truths of God’s word. I want to make sure we’re really clear on this. It’s not the person. I’m not talking about the person who’s communicating. I’m saying it’s primarily about the truth of God. It’s about theology. It’s about the Bible, it’s about understanding the person of Jesus. The primary reason the Church exists is the preaching and the communication and the implementation of the word of God. That’s number one. It’s number one. In fact, Jesus says it this way. Listen to this, John 17, verse 3, Now this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you’ve sent. Knowing Jesus through the truths of God revealed through his word is first position in all of religion thought, religious thought, especially related to Christianity, obviously. Everything else is secondary. And you might think, Well, why? Well, it’s because the truth of Christ revealed through the word of God is where we find our motivation to do the things that we do.

Does that make sense? We serve others. That’s not the primary purpose of the Church. We serve others through the work on the understanding and the indoctrination of Jesus Christ as our Lord. Does that make sense? If we served without the understanding of Jesus Christ, our service would be just like every other service. And if we had groups that met and maybe that was the primary purpose, it would just be like every other worldly group. And if we had meetings and we sang songs and all that stuff, without Jesus Christ, it would be just like every other meeting. What separates us is our why, and our why is found in the truths of God.

So the disciples knew from the beginning that the teaching, Jesus’s teachings, God’s teachings had their primary place in the Church. And so the Apostles are like, Look, our job is very simple. We need to communicate the truths of God. Later on, they’ll say, We will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the Word. We’ll devote ourselves to the diakonoy, that’s service, attention of the Word. It’s the word we get serving from. What is he saying?

He’s basically saying the preacher is in service to the Word of God. The person communicating, that might be in your small group, that might be on stage, that might be at any level. The person communicating the truths of God is in service to the words of God. We will devote ourselves to prayer and the serving of the word of God. And because of that, we can’t do everything. We can’t do it. In fact, they’ll be overwhelmed. Nobody has the ability to do that. This is why, and I just want to make a note about this, this is why we are all warned as spiritual leaders to study and to be diligent in the way we communicate God’s Word. The Bible tells us that we should be workmen who are not put to shame, who rightly divide the Word of truth. Paul calls us and says this, to watch our life and doctrine closely. We also hear this in 1 Timothy 4, Preach the Word. Be prepared in season and out of season. Correct, rebuke, encourage with great patience and careful instruction. This is a call for ministers, for pastors, for preachers, for evangelists. It’s an idea that says, look, this requires your attention because the truth of God have their primary dominant place in the life of the Church.

This is why here in the Church, we take this very seriously. I encourage the people who stand on stage to take time with careful instruction to make sure they are preaching the Word with all authority, that they’re rightly dividing the words of truth, to make sure that they’re giving something that actually is profitable for people’s life. Okay, so back to the story. So the Church is Lord, we talked about this. There developed some friction. It needs to be addressed. And so here is the solution. First they make the statement. Here’s the solution. Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them. You go from an ineffective ministry to developing an effective core of ministers. What’s the problem? The problem is this problem that we’re dealing with didn’t have any structure to fix it. So the Apostles say, Hey, choose seven people from among you, we’ll give it to them. Two qualifications or three qualifications, I want you to know. One, they are from among you. From among you. What does that mean? It means we don’t call a professional from the outside. The people who are actually dealing with the problem need to be right here. But the church is only 12, we’ll figure it out. They’ll figure out the person who can deal with the problem. Someone from among you, not outside help, not some person who wrote a book. We deal with it from the inside. Number two, people who are spiritual. That means they think first about God and his kingdom. And the third thing is that they’re wise, which means that they know what they’re doing. You say, Well, I’m an expert. My follow up question will be, Well, are you spiritual? You say, Well, I’m spiritual. And I would say, Well, do you know what you’re doing? Those two things need to work together. It’s like, Well, that brother is very spiritual, but does he know how to do it? No idea. Well, why would we choose that person? Does that make sense? It’s the way it functions. So it’s among you, spiritual, and someone who is wise. I want to make a little quick note here. This means that the Apostles are telling you to think about those you choose to oversee the jobs of the congregation.

Which means you should be thinking about the people in this community. Are the people who are in leadership, are they affirmed as being spiritual and wise? You should think about that. Don’t get all judgey, like, Oh, that one brother. But you should be thinking about it. Here’s two quick points. One is it’s good for you to consider how leaders are doing spiritually. You should be thinking about that. Hey, how’s my community group leader? Is he doing well spiritually? How are the preachers doing? How are our elders doing? How are our deacons doing? How are the people volunteering Kingdom kids doing? And the people who serve in the hospitality team and the people who serve the parking team. How are they doing spiritually? You should be thinking about how people are doing. And if something’s wrong, you should address it. You should do it with honor and respect and giving somebody dignity for the work that they do. But you should still address it. And here’s the second point. Be grace filled in your assessment. Jesus says in the sermon of the Mount, you should not be trying to remove the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye when you have a plank coming out of your own eye.

This brother is really struggling with whatever. It’s like, so are you. Figure it out and then come back and deal with it. By the way, it’s hard work to be in the public eye all the time. Sometimes it’s an unbearable burden to carry. So consider them as you also attempt to correct them. Both those things are true. Amen. Okay. All right. So they need to be wise. They need to be marked by wisdom. They need to sound judgment. And then the task is going to be given over to them. What’s the task? The task is getting food and getting money in the right hands on equal basis. It’s a new layer of organization for a brand new religion. What role are these people playing? What do we call these people? Are they elders? Are they deacons? They’re actually not called anything. That just tells you how basic the church was. They haven’t even developed all the structures, all the beautiful structures we see later on in 1 Timothy and Titus. It’s like they haven’t even developed it yet. They’re just servants. They’re just servants. And it’s where we get our models from, but really they don’t have any names yet.

Okay, so who are these people? This proposal pleased the whole group. I just want to make a little note about this. It pleased them to hear this, Hey, we are going to preach. We need you to take care of this problem. And the group said, That makes sense. That makes sense. It’s interesting. I think because we have, we struggle sometimes with the laity clergy separation. I think sometimes we think that if you’re on staff or if you’re like the leadership, you should do everything. And I want us to learn to be pleased by all of us participating and working together. We should be excited about that. We should be like, oh, Tony can’t do that. The elders can’t do that. Staff can’t do that. I can do that. Because those guys need to work on whatever they’re working on. And everyone should say, That pleases me. Right now, I would imagine that all of us would be tempted to say, That causes me to struggle. But I hope that we can move towards a better direction there. Anyway, they chose Steven, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip Procarus, Nicanor, Timon, Paranas, and Nicholas from Antioch, a convert to Judaism.

John Brush gave me the pronunciation of all these names. Totally didn’t nail it, but whatever. Everybody’s happy with this idea. These are the seven guys they pick. And if you want to hear a little factoid that’s fascinating, all seven of the names and all seven of the people selected, they were all Greek. Think about this. We live in a day where we want to be like, Well, let’s get two from this group and two from this group, and they’ll figure it out. Now, they realized one group is being overlooked. Let’s elevate that group a little bit and let them take care of the needs. Kind of an intense idea. I wish we could talk more about it. They presented these men to the Apostles who prayed and laid their hands on them. This is a traditional way of affirming. It’s basically when you put your hands on somebody, you’re visibly saying, I am with you. I am with you. The Apostles are going, They have our blessing. They are with us in one and spirit. And then they send them off. And you know what’s really interesting? We never hear about this particular issue ever again.

Do you know why? Because they took care of it. Because they took care of it. We see other issues that demand some structure, but this particular issue, they get an A plus. So yes, does the church have to be organized? Yeah, it does. Of course it does. Does it have to be organized to carry out effective Ministry? Of course it does. Do the people in that organization, what qualities do they have to have? They have to be among us. They have to be qualified by being spiritual, qualified by being wise. They have to have a gifting. It has to be organized. It has to be. That’s just what happens. It does. But here’s the thing about the organization. It doesn’t need to be complicated. You don’t have to have voting blocks and different people who do all these different things. It doesn’t need to look like one of the national committees. It doesn’t have to have 80 people saying what they… A high level of trust removes a lot of that stuff. But when it’s under stress, it’s some structures needed to make sure things are in place and people are protected. Preachers need to preach and sustain the life of the church.

And then coming behind them, we have to have faithful, gifted, dedicated people who are concerned with various kinds of ministries to do the work. And we empower them, we enable them, we support them, and then we hand the responsibility over to them. Does that make sense? To them. Does that make sense? I want to tell you a little bit about our model here, and then we’ll move on. I’ve mentioned this before, but we separate our church into two categories structurally. There’s the legal and the financial. Legal and financial, that’s led by our admin staff with Mary Hatterway at the head, and it’s overseen by our board of directors, people who are from among you, men and women chosen who have been affirmed to serve and to lead. That’s one side. They deal with making sure we are above board with everything related to the government and everything related to our finances and everything is related to legal and insurance and all that stuff. Then there’s the other side, which we now call the Ecclesiastical Ministry. That’s like the church, like what the church does, the work of the church. In that group, you have the elders and you have myself along with our wives, and we oversee all of the ministries and the programs in the church.

I get the amazing honor of being the primary preacher here. We call it the evangelist, but that’s just one of the biblical roles we chosen to highlight. We have some amazing Bible teachers, people like Joe and Phil and Al and all these other guys who haven’t necessarily been appointed yet, but we’re working on moving towards that. We have young up and coming preachers who love to communicate, who are under the staff, who also I get a chance to oversee. Under that core group, we have our community group leaders who lead individual small groups of groups between six and 26. Shouldn’t be that big, but Amen, the Lord is good. I just want to take a moment. If you’re a community group leader, could you just stand up for a second? Stand up, please. Stand up. Yes. These men and women, this is where life in our church actually happens. They oversee it. They oversee it. Mike Degree and the elders helped them narrow down their scope and work hard on raising up the people in their groups. Anyway, that’s the structure. It’s legal and financial and then Ecclesiastical. We have the core group that’s what we call it, that really oversees the programs of the church.

Really, the most dominant program in the church are community groups. We have a bunch of other amazing things. And today, we get a chance to appoint and then re acknowledge our deacons who serve to oversee some really important programs in the Church. Our process in selecting these deacons, it was exactly like Acts 6. A need went up. We brought it before you, and you chose these people. You did. All of you. There was a spreadsheet. You chose the people. The elders reviewed their candidacy, made sure they were spiritual and wise. Today, the elders get a chance to appoint them, and then the responsibility will be handed over to them. I’m so excited that we get a chance to be a church that is not only a free flowing organism, but something that has some structure to protect the life of the church. Let’s watch a video. This is going to be a quick announcement of the people who are being appointed today.