Acts 6:2-5

THE DEACONATE

2-5. God is a great Organizer. Hence He has given the New Testament Church a simple, perfect and beautiful organization. The bishop is the leader of the holiness band [for such were all of the Apostolic churches], while the deacon has charge of all the temporal interests of the church in every respect, and the eldership, originally in Israel consisting of seventy, instituted by Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, when he visited the children of Israel in the wilderness, and transferred by the apostles into the Christian dispensation. Spiritual seniority constitutes the basis of the New Testament eldership, which is a judicatory body having charge of the general interest of the church. Hence the church is not a democracy, but has an organized government. The deaconate is prominent among the Baptists, who give that office its Scriptural attitude. If they would only adhere to first principles and invest none with the deaconate unless they are “full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom,” Acts 6:3. The Presbyterians give prominence to the eldership, honoring the New Testament in that office. If they would only see that none serve as elders except those who are filled with the Holy Ghost. If the Holiness Movement does not glorify God by coming back to first principles, and revealing to the world New Testament simplicity, she will forfeit her crown, and God will give it to another. This we can not afford to do. As it is very doubtful whether any of the great reformations have ever reached primary truth and institutionality since the Constantinian apostasy, it becomes the more imperative that we divest ourselves of every weight and run for the prize set before us. How strange that every church in Christendom does not gladly drop all of her human inventions and come back to first principles! since an awful woe is pronounced against both addition and subtraction. The popular churches are burdened to death with institutions of their own creation, alien from the Bible, and, in many cases, antagonistical to it. These grieve the Holy Spirit away and turn them over to the enemy. The New Testament is plain on all doctrines and institutions.

We need nothing else. Human creeds and institutions divide the people of God, build up warring sects, grieve the Holy Spirit, alienate the people from God, and do a world of mischief, which the Judgment Day can alone reveal. So long as the apostolic church professed and preached entire sanctification she had neither creeds nor schisms. There are always green pastures somewhere in the Church of God, whither the sheep may go, eat and be filled and lie down by the still waters. Human creeds and institutions are the devil's fences dividing up Emmanuel's laud, shutting up many poor sheep in dry and desolate pastures, where they starve to death in piles. God has raised up the Holiness Movement to knock down the devil's fences and lead all of the sheep to the green pastures and still waters, where they may prosper and glorify God.