Spiritual Organization

Acts 6:1-7

This morning we come in our study to the sixth chapter of Acts.  And the message that I think is important as a basis for understanding proper organization within the church.  Somebody once said Christians become very unchristian when they get organized.  And I think in great measure that statement can be true.  I suppose it has to do with who the Christians are and how well organized they get, but there's been a long running kind of debate about whether the church is to be organized or not and I think it's kind of reached a focus in our current age.  There seems to be not only the super church well organized, well staffed and run like a very efficient corporation, but there seems to be the kind of underground operation that we read about today with little home Bible studies and emphasizing the life of the body, etc. etc. and these basically are the two poles to which people go in determining the degree of church organization.

Some would contend that the church should have absolutely no formal organization.  It should not own a building, it should not have a piece of property, it should not have anybody who is responsible for any particular functions.  Everyone just kind of moves around freely within the body of Christ connected corporately to themselves and to Christ who is the head.  And I heard one say that anything that is organized is not of God.  Anything that is a system is not of God, which is a little difficult to support.  God is so organized that the sun keeps coming up all the time, or however you want to express it.  The earth keeps revolving, if you're a scientist.  That everything goes on all the time like it ought it.  We shoot men up into space and we figure they'll land somewhere in the ocean, and guess what, they do because everything is the way it ought to be.  God is extremely well organized.

So organized is God that your body actually operates year after year without you pushing any particular sides or making anything do what it ought to do.  You are very well organized.  The microcosm, the macrocosm, every dimension of God's world is organized.  And so to say that anything that is a system is not of God is to misconstrue the very nature of God, which is the absolute epitome of being organized.  Not only that, if you read anything about the Old Testament you'll find out that the Old Testament was ordained by God and it's a system from beginning to end. 

On the other hand there are some people who say that the church is totally an organization, that it must be run like a business, that it must develop complex organizational charts with all kinds of boards and committees and sub committees and branches and little boxes of this and that all over everywhere and some that I've seen need a scientist to decipher.  That everybody should have a job description of three or four pages of portfolio of functions and operations that everybody should fit into all of the programs that are prescribed and ordained by the executive committees of that church.  That everything should be a detailed structure and then the Holy Spirit should be told to operate within the frames and boxes created by the system.  And as you can see that's just as bad as the other extreme.

To create an organization and then tell the Holy Spirit what to do is just as foolish as to tell the Holy Spirit what to do and not give Him any structure to help Him to do it through people in a smooth functioning way.  Now both extremes are wrong.  I believe the New Testament church is an organism.  Don't have a question about that.  You know I believe that.  And I believe that the life of the body is its connection to Christ and its organic unity to itself.  I believe that.  But I also believe that the church has to be organized.  I also believe that we must be here at 8:30 and 10:10 or we're not going to be able to function rightly within the framework of the body because this is the time we get taught, you see.  There are certain things that must occur organizationally.

So both extremes are wrong.  To say that the church is only an organism and cannot be organized is wrong.  To say that the church is strictly and organization and shouldn't be a functioning flowing kind of living thing is wrong.  And both extremes get into great trouble.

Now the early church was an organism but is was an organized organism.  All organisms that do what they ought to do are organized.  To be organized simply means that something functions in an ordered sequence, and the apostle Paul writing to the Corinthians said this:  "Let all things be done decently and," what, "and in order."  It's obvious that we can't do everything at the whim of everybody that wants to do it.  There's got to be an organization within the organism.  It's a good thing your body functions in that way.  It's a good thing that the organism is organized.

Now the early church as we come in Chapter six needs to get a little bit better organized.  They are a functioning organism.  Man they are the most functioning organism that history has ever seen.  They are one body absolutely devastating the world.  Their effect is unbelievable.  They have had a colossal effect upon the Jewish community in Jerusalem.  They have astounded people with the miracles and the wonders and the signs that have been going on.  Multitudes have been coming to Jesus Christ.  Fantastic love exists.  The community of believers is sharing in all things.  And there's a beautiful kind of relationship is everywhere.  It's a beautifully functioning organism.  But you know what?  The Spirit of God knows that it needs to get organized and the crisis comes in Chapter six and we find the beginnings of the organization of the church here.

Now let me give you a little idea here to start off with that will be kind of a pervading thought and I want you to get it.  Biblical church organization always accommodates ministries that the Spirit has already begun.  Now if we follow this through the Scripture we find this.  Biblical church organization accommodates what the Spirit is doing.  Biblical church organization doesn't say let's organize this and now Holy Spirit that's what we've developed you go do it.  That's making the Spirit of God fit your box and your mold and that isn't the way it is in Scripture.  In Scripture the flow of the church takes place.  The church begins to live and breathe and move and develop ministries and then the church moves in and puts a frame around it so that it can function smoothly. 

But all biblical church organization appears to be accommodating what the Spirit of God is already doing.  And we believe that here at Grace Church, don't we?  We believe that it's not up to us to stand up here and organize all kinds of things and push everybody into it, but rather to see what it is the saints are doing and then to put a frame around it to help them do it effectively.

Now the early church had begun to evangelize and they were really moving in evangelism.  Exciting things were happening, but they came to a point where they needed to get a little bit better structure in order to make their evangelism more effective. 

Now in our church we've been teaching on evangelism and some of you have become excited and many of you have come to me or to one of our other pastors and you've said, "You know this emphasis on evangelism has really gotten me excited boy.  When are we going to get going on this thing?"  Well, we've been preaching it and now we've got a couple dozen people who are ringing the phone saying, "When are we going to get this thing going?"  And so now what we're doing is praying and asking God to show us what kind of frame to put around that which the Spirit of God has already set in motion.  That's biblical church organization.  It's accommodating the Spirit of God in a smooth flowing kind of structure so that what people want to do in the energy of the Spirit can be done smoothly and to the best benefit.  That's what I see as the correct organization.

Now keep that in your mind.  That in itself is a great principle and you ought not to forget it.  The church must accommodate what the Spirit is doing, not make the Spirit accommodate what the committee decided ought to be done. 

Now this early church, we can see this pattern in the early church because they have begun to get organized.  Little by little they weren't just a freewheeling crew roaming around doing nothing and nobody had any responsibility and nothing in terms of organization.  Let me show you why I know they were beginning to get organized.  First of all a couple of times it tells us how many believers there were.  Three thousand and five thousand, which meant somebody was taking count.  Somebody must have been responsible to know who was in the believer's fellowship in order that they might know their membership and meet the needs of their membership.  That was important. 

It is also important that they had certain places and certain times to meet together for public worship, prayer, and the study of the word.  And apparently they had such times and somebody was setting those times and somebody was having a place where they all came together.  All of that was basic organization.  A person said to me one time, "You have a church and you have all those buildings.  Why do you have all those buildings?  It's a terrible waste of money, all those buildings."  Well I said, "The Lord keeps sending us these people and we just keep putting walls around them.  And we have all these chairs because people when they sit down they're much more able to listen."  He said, "Why do you have all that carpet?"  Well because it's cheaper than having linoleum because if you have linoleum you have to pick up the chairs and wax the floor.

You see there's some simple things.  Somebody said, "Boy, churches spend millions of dollars."  Well this building as you see it now seats about 1,200 people, cost about $170,000.  That's about as cheaply as it can possibly be done.  Four walls and that's about it, but we accommodate what we feel God is doing.  And I feel this is what church organization, church structure is all about.

Now this early church began to accommodate the spirit of God.  They met the first day of every week.  It says in Act 2, they broke bread from house to house.  They must have had some organized way of going around to the various houses and the people were telling where they were going to be at what time.  Money and goods were being collected and distributed.  Things were held in common.  Everybody's need was being met.  Somebody was organizing this whole thing.

So little by little as the Spirit of God began to flow through the life of the body, the body accommodated what the Spirit of God was doing by framing it within some structures.  Now that's biblical church organization and you see that way you're never imposing on the Spirit of God.  That's why I don't believe for a minute that my job is to develop programs, invent all kinds of schemes and then go find people to do them.  My commitment is to just keep teaching the word and when a bunch of people want to do something, give them a frame to do it in.

All right so it's obvious then that the church had begun to get organized.  Now organization is never an end in itself.  When you can't come and say, "Well we've got our program boy we're rolling."  That isn't, your program isn't the issue. 

Now the early organization was pretty simple.  The apostles taught, the apostles ruled and everybody else carried out what they said.  But the church began to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and they began to face some real problems organizationally.  And we come to the first organizational crisis in Chapter six of Acts.  And necessity again becomes the mother of invention.  Now this is important.  The church always added to its organization only as its life and growth demanded it, only to frame the ministries going on, and watch this, to eliminate problems existing.  And I think that's what organization is all about.  If you've got a problem maybe you need to organize to eliminate the problem.

Some people said about a year ago here that we had, that our whole adult area was kind of a problem, so we moved in and tried to set up a structure that would meet the problem, to organize what God wanted to do in that area.  And as I say the recent evangelistic emphasis in the book of Acts has gotten people excited is giving birth right now in my mind and in the mind of the other pastors to a structure that's going to be exciting and we'll be sharing it with you pretty soon.  But it's already begun to be developed by the Spirit of God as people are getting excited about sharing Christ and saying how do I do it.  Show me which way to do, to go, what's the pattern?  And we would not impose some dreamed up structure on the body unless we sensed that the body is moving in that way under the energy of the Spirit.

Now necessity then prevails and organization results.  Let's look at this text, verses 1 through 7 as the Spirit gives us time this morning, considering four things that appear here in the first spiritual organizational meeting.  First of all, the reason, and that is the basis, which they needed to get organized.  What was the reason for organization?

Secondly, the requirements.  If you've got an organization all that means is that you have certain people doing certain things.  And what were the requirements for the people?  That's the next thing.

The third thing is the roster.  Who were the people chosen?  Fourthly, the results.  What happens when the church begins to get organized to accommodate the Spirit?  Does it help?  We'll see those four things.

First of all let's look at the reason.  Why did they need to get organized?  Why couldn't they just flow like they'd been flowing?  Well watch, verse one and you'll see several aspects.

"And in those days when the number of disciples was multiplied."  Stop there.  Now there's your first problem.  You've got too many people for the apostles to handle all the work.  You say how many?  Well I don't really know, but I would venture a conservative guess at 30,000 at least, between 20 and 30 thousand. Now that's a large congregation.  I wouldn't begin to try to unload on you the administrative problems and responsibilities of just 2,000 like this. 

But you can imagine trying to handle a congregation that small, not only when you were handling their spiritual needs, but disseminating all their physical needs and caring for the poor and the widows and everybody else.  Talk about a monstrosity.  And here were the twelve apostles stuck with most of that.  It was large.  It was terrifically large.  It had grown so fast and you know one of the problems with fast growth, as we have discovered, is that you never get time to adjust to anything.  You wake up one morning and you've got all of this huge thing and you haven't been able to grow with it, you know? 

And here they are a couple of months old with 20,000 - 30,000 people and they haven't adjusted to the growth at all and now they're faced slam bang against a fantastic problem.  Too many people in the church and what makes the problem worse is they're not done yet.  They're going to add them as fast as they can add them. 

And just handling the care of the believers is a great problem, making sure that the poor people get the food they need, and making sure somebody's collecting all that, which is placed in the hands of those apostles and distributed, making sure that somebody provides elements for the Lord's table, and somebody figures out how many people are going to be there so nobody comes and there are not elements enough for them, making sure that the baptism is cared for, the details of having towels to dry the people off, and making sure the ponds got water in 'em, or whatever is going on they had to organize it. 

And so many people!  They had to be sure that when a meeting was going on over here the people knew about it and somebody was responsible to be the teacher at that meeting. And if they were having a street meeting or if they were going to be preaching down at the courtyard of the temple who was going to be doing the preaching and who was going to be there to do the follow up?  They had all of that to take care of.

And you can imagine that the apostle, all twelve of them, were running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to keep this thing together.  In addition to that, which makes it all the more exciting was, they had accomplished number one of the four-fold goal that Christ had given them when he said, "You shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the world." They had already filled Jerusalem with their doctrine, right, Chapter 5:28?   They had already done that.  They were ready to move out now to Judea, Samaria, and the world.  They were on the threshold of Gentile evangelism. 

Now in order to get that thing going they had to get some kind of organization, some kind of structure as a basis from which they could move out.  And their evangelism had already been going. They're such a picture of our church, it's unbelievable to me.  Our church all along many of you have been reproducing and many of you are new Christians and been won to Christ by other friends and we've been doing evangelism and moving along and all of a sudden we're right now on the threshold, I believe, of a great evangelism explosion.  We're saying now that before we can really do that we need to frame some things so that we can really begin to function in smooth fashion and accomplish what God would have us to accomplish in an orderly way.

But they were on the verge of such an evangelistic explosion, in fact Chapter six introduces Stephen to us.  Stephen appears in the next chapter and following on Stephen's heels is Paul and Paul began evangelization of the Gentiles.  So we're right on the threshold of that whole movement.  And before the church can really be effective in the world it's got to make sure that it's handling itself properly.  And I've said this to you many times and continue to say it and will continue to say it, the church that is effective in evangelism is the church that is one, that is united.  And this is what they had to deal with.  So the very  fact of their size and the fact that they were on the threshold of Gentile evangelism, I think was very important in the forming of this basic structure.

And it's also interesting, I think, that as soon as you get on the threshold of something big Satan begins to work.  Believe me, this is so.  I'm not telling you that out of a textbook.  I'm telling you that out of every days experience in my life.  As soon as you begin to do something for God Satan moves in to mess up. 

Now Satan approaches the church from one of three ways, two of three ways, or all three ways.  Let me give you the three tactics Satan uses.  They're general but they're the same.  They've been the same ever since the early church.  Number one persecution.  Satan uses the attack against the church of persecuting the saints.  You know whether it's the emotional persecution of being ostracized from your society, or whether you're looked down on as some kind of a religious nut, or whatever it is, the mental and emotional persecution or even physical abuse, Satan attempts to get the Christians to lose their nerve, you see, in the world and chicken out of the battle.  And so much of the ministry is spent trying to get the saints excited and committed and bold and get 'em back out in the world with nerve enough to communicate Christ.  And brother that battle never ends. You've always got some saints lingering in the shadows who never get into the battle.  You've always got a whole gob of them sitting on the bench.  You know the travelin