Video Transcript: Introduction to Local Church Deacons

Introduction – Church Deacons

Abigail Dominiak:
Well, hello, I am Abigail Dominiak.

Bruce Ballast:
I’m Bruce Ballast, and we’re here on a course on Deacon Servants of the Church.

Introducing Ourselves

Abigail:
Yeah, so we are going to be talking about deacons, and we want to begin by introducing ourselves and what we’re doing in this course. So, Abigail, why don’t you go first?

All right, sounds good. So I am Abigail Dominiak, as I said, and I actually work here at Christian Leaders as the Executive Vice President. And so I kind of feel like this area of deacons is a special interest to me because I grew up as a pastor’s kid, and so that was always an important area. The leadership that my dad, as a pastor, would have with a deacon and elder, and we would always, you know, be having deacon and elders over to our house and connecting with their families, and just kind of observed it in that way.

And then now as an adult, I, you know, got a chance to study it a little bit through my master courses, and now being a professor here at Christian Leaders. So it’s kind of fun to be in this topic and kind of have the perspective of, you know, my generation. But I would say that I’m also excited to learn a lot from you, and have a lot more expertise in this area than me.

Bruce:
We’ll see about that. My name is Bruce Ballast, if you didn’t catch that. I have been in ministry a long, long, long time. I served three churches: one year in the Grand Rapids area—Grand Rapids, Michigan, south of there a little bit. And then I spent 23 years in Southern California. And the last 11 years of my active ministry is in the church here in Grand Haven, Michigan.

And I’ve always been curious about how the church works. And when I first got in ministry, I realized I knew nothing about that, really. I mean, seminary didn’t teach me some of the essentials. And so I went on to study. I have a Doctor of Ministry degree with a focus in church growth from Fuller Seminary in Southern California. But part of my passion became the role of deacons, and some of that will come out as we talk in this process, because I found that deacons are essential to a healthy outreach of a church.

The deacon role is vitally important, and so we want to share that with you. We want to look at how you can function as a deacon. In fact, that’s what this course is about.

Who This Course Is For

Bruce:
In fact, let’s look at, you know, who this course might be for. That’s the next step.

Abigail:
Yeah, so at least to kind of introduce ourselves, we’ve talked a little bit about even, you know, here at CLI, we have a lot of people that even come that, you know, maybe are serving already as deacons or asked to be a deacon, which kind of brings up what this slide says, where it’s like, maybe even children asked to be a deacon. That could be why this course is really interesting to you.

Bruce:
You may be a church leader. That’s where I was when I began to look at the various aspects of the office of deacon. You may be looking at the office of deacon now and say, maybe we’ve got to restructure or replan things. And it was a—it was a banner day when I just took deacons on a retreat in the church I served in California and set a new course for them. And wow, I’ll share more of those stories later on.

Abigail:
Or maybe you just want to learn more about this topic. And again, that’s what’s awesome about pursuing Institute, is these courses are completely free. They’re accessible to anybody. And so maybe this has an interest to you because you just want to learn more about it. Maybe you’ve previously served as a deacon. Maybe you have interest to, you know, pursue that. Or maybe you’re a pastor of a church who is really trying to learn more about this. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of reasons where someone might want to take this course and just learn more about the deacon role.

What Is a Deacon?

Bruce:
Yeah. So what is a deacon? You know, it’s a name that we bear. We kind of batter it about a little bit. If you grew up in a tradition… Some traditions about deacon are different. Some churches are run by the board of deacons and don’t have elders. Some churches, the role of deacon is a preparation toward ordination as a priest. In the Anglican tradition.

We’re actually approaching this from a point of view—you’ll see a lot of Scripture in this course, that’s where we start our look at deacons. But we’re also going to be looking at the perspective of the more Presbyterian Reformed aspects, where deacons are one part of the ruling aspect of ministry, that there are elders, pastors, and deacons. Pastors are teaching elders. And there will be a companion course called Elders in this series of courses that we’re going to do. So stay tuned for that.

But that’s what we’re trying to do. We want to have you end this course understanding how the role of deacon can make a difference in your life, probably, or your church. So yeah, join us on this journey.

Deacons in the Bible

Bruce:
So what is a deacon? A little bit more about what the Bible says.

Abigail:
Yeah, the word deacon appears 29 times in the New Testament. The Greek word is diakonos, and it’s mostly translated as “servant” or “minister.” And that’s a fascinating thing in itself, that—29 times. So it can’t all be about the office of deacon. In fact, we’re just going to walk through some of those places where you see it.

It’s, first of all, seen in all believers: “The greatest among you shall be your servant [deacon]. Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” That’s an interesting concept in Matthew 23, that it’s all believers are called to be deacons.

Here’s another passage where we see this reference: Everyone sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant [the deacon] of all.

So again, it’s a reference to all Christians. All Christians are called to be deacons. We’re not going to look at all 29 verses, but here’s some other ones: Whoever serves [or deacons] me, Jesus is saying in John 12, must follow me. And where I am, my servant [the deacon] also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves [or deacons] me.

Bruce:
Yeah, you try to see that theme again and again, that importance of the call to be a servant.

Jesus as the Ultimate Deacon

Bruce:
So here is a quote from a book that I’ll be referencing occasionally: Above all, Christian believers are those who walk in the footsteps of the ultimate deacon, the suffering servant who came not to be deaconed, but to deacon, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).

Yeah, this is where we are—that we are all deacons. We are all called upon to take the attitude of a deacon.

I’ll tell you a story about one man who impressed this on me. I was serving as the senior pastor of a large and growing church, and we, once a year, had all the officers, the elders, everybody come for a retreat, and pastors who were on staff. And so we did a Saturday thing where we’d start in the morning and go to afternoon, and then, you know, just be setting the vision for the next year, looking at the budget for the next year.

And on this particular day, I was very glad, because we had had an opening for a director of operations. And it was somebody who was responsible for making sure the building was in shape, somebody who was responsible for seeing that procedures for hiring and dealing with employees were in good condition, and looking at the finances, working with a finance committee. So—important position.

I was thrilled when we had a guy apply who had been the director in his working life of two divisions of an international corporation. And I thought, this is great. Who would have that in a church? And it’s a part-time position, but he was retired and was looking for something to engage his life.

Well, after our Saturday retreat, I headed out—one of the first ones out of the building—because I had to preach in the morning and I’d forgotten something. So I come back, the place is empty, except for this guy who is vacuuming the room where we had eaten lunch. And it was a big room.

And I went to him: “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this. I mean, you’re used to having people ask you what should be done, right? We—we pay people to clean the room. In fact, we got two people coming this afternoon, and it is their job to make sure the place looks good on Sunday morning.”

And he turned to me and said, “Yeah, so that’s true,” he says. “But two things: in my life, I’ve chosen to be a servant wherever I can and whenever I can. And secondly, I was just thinking about how thrilled they’re going to be when they walk into this place and they don’t have to vacuum this room.”

And that struck my heart, because I was running away. I wasn’t going to touch that job of vacuuming, cleaning, dusting, wiping tables, etc. That’s the attitude Scripture calls us to.

Now, he was not an official officer. He wasn’t an official deacon. But he was somebody who said, “I’m going to take the role of servant,” and modeled that. And those words come back to me so many times. It just is, yeah—powerful for me.

All Christians Are Called to Serve

Bruce:
And so this is our call: you are a deacon. And that’s where we are.

So this is going to be a course about elders and deacons. The elders will be in a separate course in the local church, and this is one where we want you to be equipped to be a deacon in your church now.

A deacon—that may not mean that you are officially in an ordained role of deacon. But you are called, as we’ve seen, to be a deacon: a servant, serving wherever you are, whatever place you hold in the church. This is your calling. And we’re going to be looking at the fact that this is a vital calling for the church.

The Church’s Challenge Today

Bruce:
I grieve—I’ll just share with you one statistic. This—we’re recording this late in 2024 in November. And I was reading, preparing for another course and a series of messages I was doing for a church I was preaching in at the time about the state of the church in the United States. And I know you aren’t all there, but since the year 2000, 40 million people have left the church in America. Forty million.

Recently preaching at a church, I shared that statistic, and then I came down from the pulpit onto the floor, and I just said, “What reasons have you heard that people have left and maybe left your church?” And it was one of those moments in preaching where you say, that wasn’t too smart—because nobody responded.

So I had to share the surveys. Our number one reason is judgmentalism: that they sense in the church. They don’t sense our love. They don’t sense our servanthood. They don’t see the good things that the church does. They see that we judge people and we automatically rank certain people down under us, and we treat them as such.

Hypocrisy was number two. And that is that we say one thing, but we do another.

And wow, what other reasons have you heard?

Abigail:
I think those two are some huge ones I’ve heard. And like, even understanding all the others even go back to like—this course really is for everyone, because being a deacon and having a servanthood, I think, is one of the hugest ways to combat these reasons that the church is leaving.

And we’re going to talk about that more. But why the early church spread so much is because they had such an attitude of servanthood and giving. And like even in Jesus’ time—like hypocrisy. I mean, that is being confronted by Jesus again and again. The disciples even judging each other: Matthew is a tax collector, someone else is a fisherman. You know, it’s like—that has continually been an issue that needs to be combated.

I think there’s a lot going on, and just culture is really trying to push a secular narrative. You know, I think that’s there. I had a really good friend who was kind of raised in church and went off to college, and basically ended up at the end of college saying, “Yes, I don’t think I believe anymore.”

Bruce:
Yeah, that happens. And then there’s people who’ve been hurt by the church. So many stories. And I’ve heard them as I go around now as a separate preacher consultant. And the number of stories about people who’ve been damaged by the church, and as a result, have rejected the church.

Now it’s interesting—but they don’t often reject Jesus. But they reject his body, which is the church.

So those are the kind of things we’re going to be exploring with you. And we invite you along in this adventure. And it’ll be a good one.

So—looking forward to seeing you next time.