Biblical Eldership Church Leadership

Paul ’s Letters to the Churches

confirms that there were elders in the churches of Macedonia (Eu rope), not just in Asia Minor and Palestine as Acts records. The most likely reason Paul mentions the overseers and deacons in his opening salutation is that they had a special part in initiating and organizing the church’s financial contribution to him. Perhaps a letter, signed “the overseers and deacons,” accompanied the offering. For example, in the letter to the churches of the Gentiles from Jerusalem, the apostles and elders (representing the whole church in Jerusalem) wrote: “The apostles and the brethren who are elders, to the brethren in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia who are from the Gentiles, greetings” (Acts 15 :23). If the Philippian overseers and deacons followed the same practice, then Paul acknowledges their special part. Of course, there may have been other reasons for greeting the church officials in this manner, but this seems to be the most obvious. Paul’s usage of the terms overseers and deacons indicates a gen erally accepted recognition of official designations for church lead ership positions (offices). Some commentators, however (usually those who reject Luke’s record of Paul’s appointment of elders), claim that the terms overseers and deacons are used functionally to designate all the people who supervise and serve the local church. They deny that Paul is referring to specific church offices. They support this view by the absence of the definite article before the terms overseers and deacons. But the absence of the definite ar ticle in Greek is insufficient reason to assign a purely functional sense to these terms. The context itself makes the terms definite. If Paul wanted to speak generally, he would not have used the noun forms as he did. He would most likely have used the participial forms, overseeing and serving. The nouns episkopos and, to a lesser extent, diakonos were recog nized, official designations in Greek society. Ernest Best, former pro fessor of biblical criticism at the University of Glasgow, makes this point emphatically clear: I say “officials” because episkopos at any rate could not have been used in any other way than as a designation of an office. . .. A first century Greek could not have used it in a purely functional sense without suggesting that the person who exercised oversight held “official” status. There is also some, though less, evidence that diakonos was used in the same way. The fact that one was

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