Acts 6:1-7

The First Dissension in the Church leads to the Appointment of the Seven Deacons, 1-7.

There is something very sad in the brief statement contained in the opening verses of this sixth chapter. It tells us that the curtain had fallen on the first act of the Church's history. Hitherto, during the Master's life and the first two years which succeeded the crucifixion, the story tells us of noble uninterrupted work, of persecution and death endured by the Teacher and His disciples tells us of a Church ever gathering in fresh converts, marching onwards through suffering to a sure victory; but in all and through all, it tells us of a firm and unbroken peace within, of a mutual love which, in its pure devoted unselfishness, attempted, in the general community of goods of the Jerusalem Church, a way of life afterwards found to be impracticable. But now we see the fair life rudely broken in upon, and the apostles, roused from their dream of love and peace, compelled to make arrangements for governing the community which, in obedience to their Lord's commands, they had called into existence, after the pattern of the ways of the world. It is a humiliating thought that the first great movement to organize ecclesiastical order and discipline in the Church of Christ was forced upon the apostles by this outbreak of human evil passions among the believers; the ‘murmurings' which startled the apostles from their early dreams of a Church whose members should possess all things in common, and who should be of one heart and one mind these ‘murmurings' of a few poor Jewish women, whose only offence in the eyes of the apostles' assistants in the public distribution, was, that they spoke the Greek tongue, and were ignorant of the sacred Hebrew dialects, were but the beginning of the first storm of jealousy and fury which rent the Church of Christ a storm which, as the history of the ‘Acts' advances, we find ever gathering fresh intensity, and perplexing with new issues the minds of the early leaders of Christian thought (see especially Acts 13:50; Acts 14:19; Acts 18:12; Acts 23:12; Galatians 2; and in post-apostolic literature the Clementine writings, The Homilies and Recognitions).

These records show us only too plainly how in very early times Christians were divided into at least two bitterly hostile camps.