The Great Sending, Chapter 30
STUDY 30: God’s Mission Partnerships
pp. 163-165
Reference: Acts 5:42-6:7
Acts 5:42-6:7
The Choosing of the Seven
Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom.
– Acts 6:3
42 Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.
6:1 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. 2 So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. 3 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 4 and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.”
5 This proposal pleased the whole group. They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit; also Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas from Antioch, a convert to Judaism. 6 They presented these men to the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them.
7 So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.
Reverand Dr. Jon Diefenthaler
The text of Acts 5:42-6:7 emphasizes that the task of carrying forward God’s saving mission to our world is a team effort, one that involves divine and human partnerships. The divine partner is, of course, the Holy Spirit. This is the reason Jesus urged the disciples in Acts 1 not to “leave Jerusalem,” but to “wait for the gift [of the Holy Spirit] my Father promised.” The rest of this same book of the Bible makes it plain that the mission of the first Christian church was Spirit-directed (for example, see Acts 8:39-40, 16:6-10, and 21:10-11). It also tells us that the apostles “never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ” (Acts 5:42). The Holy Spirit had emboldened them (for example, see Acts 4:8 and 4:31).
At all times, this same Spirit functioned as the “Comforter,” providing the first Christians with encouragement to keep pursuing the mission to which they had been called. (See, for example, Acts 9:31.) As a result, their numbers kept increasing.
When the need arose for human partnerships to manage the
“daily distribution of food” for the growing number of widows in the first Christian community, the apostles called for the people to choose seven men from among themselves who were known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. Recognizing that this was God’s mission rather than their mission, they chose the seven with intention: not through a contest or a politically charged election, but with prayer and the laying on of hands.
Among those chosen was Stephen, who was later martyred for arguing at great length before the Jewish Sanhedrin that Jesus was the Messiah God had promised them in the Old Testament (see Acts 7). In Acts 8, another of the “seven,” namely Philip, entered center-stage. Philip’s work likewise began as one whose assignment was akin to waiting on tables. But he soon became an evangelist who, in Acts 8:6, proclaimed the Christ in Samaria.
While not explicitly stated, Luke shows us that the proclaimers of the Gospel God most desires are those who possess a servant’s heart. Perhaps the greatest proclaimers of the gospel are those who know first-hand what it means to “wait on tables.”
Questions to ponder with yourself and others
- In what ways do you or your congregation seek to team up with the Holy Spirit in your mission outreach efforts?
- How does your congregation go about selecting its mission leaders? Compare the way your congregation selects its mission leaders to the way the apostles selected their mission leaders in the text. How do the methods differ, and which is most effective?
- What does this text suggest about the relationship between mission efforts that focus on people's physical needs and evangelism?
Prayer
O God our Father, we thank you that when it comes to carrying your mission in our broken world, we are not on our own. Open our hearts, therefore, to your gift of the Holy Spirit, through whom you promise to provide us direction, strength, and encouragement we so desperately need to bear witness to the good news that Jesus brings to all our neighbors in this world. By that same Spirit, help us to identify and consecrate additional leaders “full of the Spirit and wisdom,” and above all, with the servant’s heart that Stephen, Philip, and their companions in Acts 6 possessed. We pray that our witness to the gospel may expand and be expressed through our actions and attention to the needs of others. In his name we pray. Amen.