This post is part of a series entitled, “A Comprehensive Church-Based Widows Ministry“.
The New Testament makes it clear that the church regarded successfully ministering to its widows as of the highest importance (James 1:27). There are several ways we see this emphasis.
Ministry to widows appears very early in the historical narrative of the church and is mentioned several times (i.e., Acts 2, 4, 6). Meeting the needs of its widows is listed as one of the first great achievements of the church (Acts 4:34).
The New Testament dedicates long passages that give explicit instruction on how to minister to widows (Acts 6, 1 Timothy 5). The early church spent a good portion of its financial resources on ministry to widows (Acts 2, 4).
And Acts credits the rapid spread of the gospel to the church’s success in this area (Acts 2:47; 6:7). Indeed, the church knew that not meeting the needs of its widows would hinder the gospel (Titus 3:14).
But the clearest evidence of how important the church regarded this ministry to its widows was the quality and status of the leadership it appointed to care for them.
The first “deacons,” as they came to be called, are described in Acts 6:1-6 as “men full of the Spirit and wisdom” who were ordained to the office by the laying on of the apostles’ hands.
Later, in 1 Timothy 3:8-13, Paul gives us a long list of qualifications for deacons and even for their wives (or possibly deaconesses).
According to the New Testament, then, the sole purpose of deacons is to minister to widows in the church and are to be of the highest character.
How the Church has Ignored the Original Function of Deacons
It has been two thousand years since the founding of the church and since then the church has wandered far and wide from its original focus on widows. In its place, the church has come to focus on families, especially on children. After all, the rationale goes, “children are our future.”
Huge portions of a church’s budget go to Christian education and youth ministry, while nothing is budgeted for widows. Staff, programing, and buildings are all primarily centered around marriage and family ministries.
The function of the office of deacon mirrors this trend in churches. Rather than focus only on widows, deacons can have a huge spectrum of responsibilities, from church administration, to programing, to building maintenance.
Consequently, while the church may give lip service to its deacons serving their widows, instead their widows often just get lost in the shuffle.
No wonder widows in churches across America feel ignored and abandoned by their church.
Restore the Biblical Focus and Function of Deacons
The apostles knew they were doing a poor job ministering to their widows. That is why they appointed seven men with sterling character to take over the ministry. For those seven men — those first seven deacons — making sure all the widows in their church were having their pressing needs equally met became their sole focus.
Like the apostles, the church today is also doing a poor job ministering to its widows. The solution to this problem is the same as it was two thousand years ago: make meeting the pressing needs of widows in the church the sole function of deacons.
And then, having done that, train deacons in the scriptural emphasis on widows and why it is so important to address their needs so that the church can say, “There is no needy person among us.”
One way to train our deacons to minister to widows is to give them a membership to Meeting to Meet Needs. With that membership they will learn about the three types of pressing needs every church experiences, how to address the long term needs of widows, and how the love of Christ meets those needs.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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