In my previous ministry I’d usually spend some time in my membership classes looking at Acts 6. This was to provide some context about why our church had elders and deacons. If you’re unfamiliar with the passage, it describes how as the number of people following Jesus began to grow, the needs of the community began to grow as well. In response, Jesus’ original disciples, the de facto leaders of the community instructed the people to choose seven new leaders to focus on and take care of those needs, allowing the twelve to focus on prayer and “serving” the word.  Now throughout this passage the work of both the seven serving the community and the twelve serving the word is called “diaconal” work, which could be translated as “ministry” or “service”, but the name “deacon” came to be associated with the group of seven.

Although Jesus didn’t give a manual or a guidebook on what roles should be filled in a church, the early Christians came to call themselves by different titles, in some cases instructed to do so by the apostles and other leaders. Ephesians 4:11 for example lists the roles of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher and instructs the Ephesians that these roles were each the expression of spiritual gifts given to each member of the church by Christ. This is sometimes referred to as the Five-Fold Ministry model.

There’s no doubt that it’s easier for an organization to run itself by assigning jobs and titles to people. At the risk of stating the obvious, if a church has a janitor, then you are much more likely to have a clean building than churches that do not. If a church has a youth pastor, you’re much more likely to have someone overseeing and leading the youth group. So it would be foolish not to have titles, right?

Right…?

As helpful as it is to have these titles, assigning them and their accompanying duties to a single person or designated staff comes at a cost to the community.

I was on staff a church that designated its pastors to clean the church’s 30,000 square foot multipurpose building once a week together. The church had a full time custodian, but his workload had become untenable once the 2nd, larger building had been built and the head pastor suggested this arrangement as an alternative to hiring additional cleaning and maintenance staff.

And while the church did hold a well attended all-congregation church cleaning day once or twice a year, the fact was by assigning the work to a full time custodian, and designating the upkeep of the 2nd building to the pastoral staff, the church was dedicating 60 hours a week of staff pay to keeping both of its buildings in useable shape. So, at face value, there was a monetary cost to the community for this work, money that could then no longer be used for other forms of ministry.

But, more importantly, there was also a mental and spiritual cost to dividing and contracting out the work of the community in this way. Instead of being forced to do the hard community work of asking questions about how to keep up the facility together (and perhaps asking whether such a facility was truly needed in the process), giving someone a title and assigning the work to them allowed everyone else to stop thinking about the need. Not having to ask those questions meant missing out on the potential growth and maturity (and even intimacy) that figuring those things out together can eventually bring both for the body as a whole and for each individual member.

So what’s the alternative? For one, I think it begins with committing as a spiritual community to growing slowly. Assigning titles and dividing labor makes it possible to grow fast, precisely because the community doesn’t need to figure everything out together every time. But if a community recognizes the value and potential spiritual growth that comes with engaging with one another in order to figure out how to follow Christ together, then it will willingly take the time needed in order to go through this process.

What about your community? What might it look like if you had fewer titles and fewer assigned roles, and instead made it part of the rhythm of your community’s life to regularly come together to consider and share the responsibilities and dilemmas that inevitably come with doing life together? In another ministry I was a part of, we would have regular “Dinner Table Talks” as a church where all members would be invited every 6 months or so to chat about how things were going and what pain points people were feeling. And while we had plenty of titles in that church, I think those talks helped everyone feel like they had a role and a say in the life of the community. In fact, many of those who attended those Dinner Table Talks as college students and young adults are now middle aged leaders of the church.

Are we willing as communities to sacrifice speed and efficiency for the sake of being family together?