One Puritan minister, Richard Baxter, is a favourite of mine to read. A long time ago I gave a biographical sermon on his work in Kidderminster, thinking about the way that his diaconate was organized for the sake of gospel ministry. Baxter has this quote: O happy church of Christ, were the labourers but able and faithful, and proportioned in number to the number of souls (The Practical Works of Richard Baxter, Vol 4, 1838, p. 378). I think that we see this in the early church as they began with seven. They didn't begin with one, but they began with a larger number. Many congregations don't have seven deacons! But what Baxter is arguing for is that you look out on the congregation and you say, How many souls are there? And then you look into the neighbourhood and you say, How much service could be done there? And then that is the desire: To have deacons that can work among that number without being worn out. He doesn't give a magic number, but we could say maybe one deacon per ten souls. Imagine if each deacon only had ten souls that they were focused on, and the diaconate was large enough to give ministry in that regard.

Years later after Mr. Baxter, Thomas Chalmers, who was a Free Church of Scotland minister, would carry on this idea of diaconal ministry divided into numbers. There would be deacons in charge of areas of ministry, and that would be ministry that was inside. So you would have deacons that were organized only for temporary needs within the church (i.e. who are those that are poor and may need food or may need housing?). And then you would have other deacons that are in charge of other aspects of the work of the church. And then you would have the deacons thinking about outreach in the community. They would look at the community and they would say, Here are those that are the poor in the community – how can we as a church minister to them? Or, Here are the widows in the community – how can we as a church minister to them? The congregation divided among the deacons, and deacons looking out to serve even in the community. That is part of what we see in Acts 6:1–15 under that term manage or take care of this.¹

Nathan Eshelman