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Acts 6:1-7 You can read the story here if you haven’t yet: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%206%3A1-7&version=NLT

The church in its infancy was growing fast.  People from all walks of life were finding a home there.  It was always designed to be diverse.  From the earliest mention, God has wanted his people to be from every nation and language and tribe.  The church as God designed it is a beautiful thing.  It’s also complicated.  Different people do things differently.  Different cultures, different social classes, different family units are all, well, different. And differences result in problems.  I appreciate that Luke is open and honest about this.  He isn’t sugar coating life in the early church.  It was amazing.  People were joining daily.  They built a great community that cared for each other.  And still there were issues.  

But they dealt with them.  They didn’t pretend they didn’t exist. They didn’t try to figure out who was to blame, they just identified issues and dealt with them.  In this case, the 12 apostles gathered all the disciples together to figure it out.  They agreed the Greek widows were just as important to God as the Jewish ones.  They need to be provided for equally.  The apostles also knew the job they had been given by Jesus.  It was to pray and teach the message he had given them.  They didn’t want to neglect their jobs to do something else that needed to be done.  

I am so grateful for passages like this.  The disciples don’t act as though taking care of widows is less important than preaching.  It’s not about ranking jobs.  There are jobs to do, period.  For the church to be what the church was designed to be, some people had to pray, some had to preach and some had to feed those who were destitute.  The twelve apostles had their assignment.  Recognizing another job to do, they didn’t suck it up and get more done, they looked for people in the church who had talents and characteristics that enabled them to do that job well, and they gave it to them.  God doesn’t make spiritual giants who can just do every job there is because they are really good Christians.  Each person has strengths, character traits and God-given talents that enable them to do things that are needed for the church to do what the church needs to do.  Put simply, everybody has gifts that God wants them to use, and everybody is lacking gifts that they were never meant to use.  For every person in the church there is a job they absolutely should not do.  That’s ok.  God wanted us that way so that we couldn’t do this on our own, because the church is not a one man show.  

Together, the disciples select seven men who are full of the Holy Spirit and wise. These are Jesus-loving men who want to honour God by serving him and his people well.  They are given a job to do and they do it well.  Problem solved.  When the church acts like the church it functions like a church.  

We are told that the word of God spread.  The church kept growing, and interestingly, here we are told that a lot of priests became followers of Jesus.  This is something I forget sometimes.  When the early church was starting out, they didn’t see themselves as Christians and Jews.  Peter and John were Jews who believed in Jesus.  The first time Christians call themselves Christians is coming up in a few chapters in a town that wasn’t Jewish.  The Jewish priests who became disciples of Jesus wouldn’t have stopped calling themselves Jewish.  They were following the scriptures they grew up on.  They just understood that Jesus fulfilled those scriptures.  The sacrifices the priests had been offering for hundreds of years were a picture of the sacrifice that Jesus had made once and for all.  This wasn’t the destruction of their faith, it was the fulfillment of it. 

But let’s return to Stephen, one of the men who was selected to care for the Greek widows.  His contribution to this narrative is short but powerful.