To flourish, a church not only needs a strong elder team, but a strong deacon team as well. That’s the message of Acts 6 when the apostles chose seven deacons to minister to widows who had been neglected. This division of labor is vital to the health of the local church. Even as elders are to focus on preaching and shepherding, the deacons are to meet the practical needs of the saints. 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Chad Roach, discuss the high calling of deacons, and urge younger men to aspire to this church office, as the Lord leads. Drawing from his personal experience, Chad shares how serving as a deacon has been one of the most fulfilling roles he’s ever played. When done well, the labor of deacons becomes a force multiplier of the elders’ work, something Chad has seen in action. His conclusion affirms that of Scripture—for the good of Christ’s church, more godly men should seek this noble post. 

Well, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We have Chad Roach with us today who is a deacon. He's a young deacon. Chad is an entrepreneur, a father, just a very inspiring young man that I've known since he was a kid. And I'm just so grateful that he's going to join us on this podcast.

I hope you enjoy the discussion. So Jason, you've got a young deacon in your church. Yeah, we do. Hey, one of my old interns. Yeah, that's been great.

Young family, He is married, has been married for a handful of years now. Now they just had their second baby. So it's a very young family. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, some of our interns, you know, are now in their early thirties and their deacons. I'm really, I'm so grateful and get, and, and we've got this Chad Roach. He's, he's with us right here. Chad Roach. He's a coo.

Should we call him a young deacon? Well, let's look at his beard. I don't know. He's getting older. He is getting older.

Yeah. So Chad, so you are a young deacon. Hey, I want to just start out reading some stuff out of Alexander Strauss, the New Testament Deacon, or let's see, Paul's vision for deacons. I'm just going to read 11 points, okay? Deacons are first mentioned in Paul's greeting to the church in Philippi.

Deacons are regulated by Paul's instructions. Deacons are always mentioned after overseers. Deacons are required to meet certain qualifications. Deacons are not required to teach. Deacons are required to be examined and approved by the church and its leaders.

Deacons are church office holders. Deacons is plural. Deacons' wives are required to meet specific qualifications. Deacons can gain much respect in the eyes of the church and have their faith in Christ deepened. Deacons are called diakonoi in Greek and there you have it.

So, how long ago did you become a deacon? About six years ago. So, yeah, I've got five kids now. The oldest is nine. And so, yes, truly I was a young deacon.

I was just had a couple little kids and yes, there you go. The Lord called me to be a deacon. Hey, we were talking to Gavin Beers, who's a pastor out here in North Carolina just a little while ago. And he was telling us that about 15 years ago, he heard a recording that was done at your church on the deacon. And he said it completely shifted his view of what it means to be a deacon.

I bet you you were there. Okay, so here's a fun story, Scott. So like, if you had asked me 15 years ago, hey Chad, do you think you're gonna be a deacon? I would have told you absolutely not. I felt very called not to the deacon, but to the eldership.

In fact, I remember sitting at a church and family conference back then, it was called NCFIC, right? So I remember in 2003, sitting in NCFIC conference, thinking, I know my calling for my life, it's to be an entrepreneur, it's to work in family ministry, and it's to be an elder. Like, so I like local church, that was clear. Deacon, not clear. I wasn't thinking about it.

In fact, my church actually asked me to consider becoming a deacon three different times, three different years. And I said no, every time I'm like, no, that's not it. I got a different calling. The Lord has something different for me. You know, when the time came, right?

Like maybe that time wasn't then, but like I thought I had to figure it out. I think I just wasn't very familiar with what deacons did. Yeah, exactly. And I think I wasn't very familiar with the office. And I don't think I, when I was young, like I didn't go to conferences and hear these great inspiring talks about how the church needs deacons.

I went to conferences and heard these great inspiring talks on how the church needs elders. And that's what I heard everybody talk about. So I'm like, if that's what the church needs, then I'm there. But I think actually now in retrospect, I actually think that maybe that's part of the message that has been missed out. The church needs good deacons.

So there you go. Oh, Chad, I remember those conversations with you too. And you weren't, when you were younger, a couple of comments about the struggle. I think we all actually have them on the, on the podcast today. We all brought them to, to advertise for Alexander Stroud.

Can you see who will send us a check at the end of this podcast? Or he should, anyway. We'll probably sell a bunch of his books. Just a couple of thoughts about the book. One, like his other books, but especially his Eldership Book and his Deacon Books, this is the updated one.

They are highly exegetical. They are word by word, phrase by phrase consideration of what the New Testament texts say. The second thing I want to say is when I read that book, I found the New Testament vision for what a deacon is in a local church to be so compelling that it made me want to drop everything I was doing and become a deacon. So I have a very, actually a very unusual kind of history with this. I was an elder before I was a deacon.

So for everybody out there who views this as a career path, you know, become a deacon and serve for a little while, and if you're good at that, then you become an elder. This is just not the New Testament vision of these things at all. I had been an elder for a period of time, happily an elder, but I did read the Stroup book and I did find the vision in the New Testament for servants of the local church, a servant office holders, deacons in the local church to be so compelling that it made me think, you know, I have a young family and there are ways in which I could wrap my family into Deacon work, Deacon service in a local church in a way that I'm utterly unable to as an elder. I think it would be good for me and I think it'll be good for my young family if I became a Deacon because we can work at this together. I remember the day you came to us, Jason, and said, I think I want to be a deacon.

In our elders meeting. And I said, what? And then, So you became a deacon. I was a deacon for 13 months. It was actually intended to be sort of indefinite.

We hit circumstances where it made sense for me to come back onto the elder team. But I loved those 13 months of serving the church. And it really was good for my family. And we really were able to engage at a family level. Yeah.

So Chad, what made you want to desire the office of Deacon? Yeah, I think it really came down to realizing that the church had a need for this. So where there's a call, where there's a need, and where there's a heart to step up and fill that. Alexander Stroup defines the office of deacon one way as being in a system to the others. And that's kind of how he kind of breaks down that role of being a deacon.

And I think that for someone that has a vision to see a strong and healthy local church, which is my mission. You've got to ask the question, where do you need to serve? I don't think that it was that I fundamentally thought, well, everything I desired and inspired to young girl in life to be an elder, all those were wrong. I don't actually think that. Maybe there might be a day without my change in the future.

But there was a need and there was a place for serving as a deacon in the church that I felt compelled to fill. Where there's a need, go serve, right? And so I think that that, I think the office of deacon has been overlooked. And I think that a church that does not have a healthy diaconate or a healthy group of deacons will suffer for it. And I didn't want to see our local church suffer.

And I wanted to be able to serve, and I wanted to be able to help our elders. And the church needed a deacon. And so I was glad to. And I think that in the process of those years and these years of serving as a deacon, it's changed my perception of what a deacon can do. I don't think I saw a lot of good diachronal role models, not to say none, but I don't think that there's been a lot of deacons that have really excelled in that and provided a great example.

And so I just think that my imagination was not sufficient to really think through what could a deacon do to help the elders. And I feel like it's actually been one of the most exhilarating and fulfilling things to just explore, God, what could you do in our church to make us healthier, better, better serving the body, better ministry, if we were to just have a healthy diaconate that was really healing and hard. And that's just been such a joy. You know, you exponentially increase the bandwidth of the elders. Hey, in our church, our elders, we don't do anything except the word and prayer.

And shepherding. And shepherding, yeah. And I'm loading all that up. But like, we don't have to concern ourselves for anything but that. These deacons are machines.

They take care of everything. And it's a power punch. So there's no such thing as a strong elder team existing apart from a strong Deacon team. Now that's a pretty strong statement. Why do I say that?

I say that because of Acts chapter six, what's happening in Acts chapter six. The leadership of a local church, the church in Jerusalem finds themselves spending a lot of bandwidth, time, energy, resources, handling sensitive matters in the church that need to be handled by qualified men. You just cannot handle it. This is not menial labor. This is handing off sensitive matters.

And so they're doing it themselves because it needs qualified men to do it. And they realize this is robbing from our ability to be continually devoted to prayer and the ministry of the Word and shepherding. So they asked the church to come forward with men who meet this criteria, who can handle these sensitive matters, and it allows them to focus on the primary work that God has given them. And I would say that it really takes a group of elders that also understand this and are willing to lean in to be able to experience the true benefit and blessing of that. I think even in our church where there was strong sense of the diaconate and strong teaching on the topic by the elders.

It actually experientially took the deacons kind of leaning in and saying, hey, I got that. Hey, we got this taken care of for the elders to be able to step back and go, oh, oh, they got that. I don't think most pastors and elders are used to the idea that they're going to have someone there leaning in hard at the diaconal level to be able to support the ministry work of the church and of the elders. And I would say to any deacons or aspiring deacons out there, you exercise some initiative and proactivity, and then the elders will tell you when you're doing too much. And as it turns out, that you can do a lot.

They could use a lot of help. It's going to be a long time before they tell you back down because I think a lot of times they just don't know. Pastors and elders are like entrepreneurs. They have to do everything until someone else takes over and steps up and helps to fulfill that. And so a strong initiative oriented deacon can be such a tremendous blessing and force multiplier to the elders.

Yeah. A strong deacon team actually is proactively looking for opportunities to take things off the elder's plates. And they're identifying them. And sometimes elders are spending time and they don't realize the degree to which it's making them unfocused, but a deacon might realize it before they do and say, hey, let us do that, let us handle that. I actually have a co-elder, and we've received the benefit of that many times.

I think Scott said we don't like we don't do any of that stuff. We don't in many, many categories we don't even know how it's done. It seems magically done. It's handled with zero effort on our part and it doesn't need oversight because it has oversight by qualified men who are really doing well. Okay, so Chad, I'm gonna call you a young Deacon.

Hey, tell us about your family. What's the configuration of your family? Yes. We've got five kids, three boys, two girls, ages nine to one. So we're, yeah, still in the little, little, little children's season of life.

I've been a deacon for most of our marriage. And so, you know, we've had little ones kind of alongside this entire journey. And and that's been Like Jason was saying, it actually has been sweet to be able to minister alongside with them. There are some things that I do as a deacon where my family is not involved, but there are many things where we can be involved. And that's one of the sweet joys of this office is I think Jason's right.

It's a little more accessible to family ministry. So I do get to work from home. I'm an entrepreneur and I would say that the diaconate and the work of a deacon has pretty well interwoven itself into my everyday work. I would say that, you know, two or three or four times a day, I'm going to be working on some deacon oriented item with the church, not all day for eight hours that day, but it's going to come up multiple times every single day of the week where I'm doing something that touches the office of the deacon. And that's a blessing.

It creates in the proximity of our family, the service of the local church as an everyday part of the work and the oof of who our family is. Let's talk about season of life for a minute because, you know, I have said and I have heard other people say, well, maybe he shouldn't be a deacon. It's not the right season in life. He's got a lot of little kids. He's young, you know, it's showtime at home, he's got to, you know, be really focused on raising his children and loving his wife, especially in the little years.

How have you worked through that problem? Yeah, I think that the better way to think of it is not so much season of life, because I don't really get from scripture that a man in his late 20s or early 30s, isn't in a place to be able to serve in these ways. But very practically, I know that a lot of men in our culture in their late 20s or early 30s, you know, might have trouble or difficulty actually pulling that off. And I think the question here is how much margin do you have and how much of it are you willing to give? Because if you are in a season of life where you're working 50 hours a week for your job, and then you've got all these other commitments, and you have no margin, then maybe that is the wrong season of life because it does take time to be a deacon.

So there's no question about that. But I guess from an early age, from the time I was 13, I considered service in the local church as one of the things I felt that the Lord was calling me to not exclusively. I considered my calling to be a kind of a three tiered calling entrepreneur, nonprofit ministry in the area of church and family, very similar to what you do here on this podcast, Scott, right? And local church. And it was my desire to actually plan around that.

So when I plan my business commitments, I actually plan around having margin to be able to serve in a local church. And then that service to a local church isn't extracting the time and the energy and the evening hours that otherwise must be devoted to a young family and in that season. So I guess, yeah, sure. If you're in a place where you have no margin and the only margin that you're going to be able to get to it is just going to be stealing from your family, then that could be the wrong time in life to become a deacon. But if you can plan towards that, if you can plan some time margins, some energy margin, the relational margin, even the financial margin, realize this is a little bit more of a commitment than recycling or brushing your teeth twice a day.

This is a commitment that's going to take some energy. This can be something that comes up and you're going to have to jump on it, and you're going to have to serve, and there's going to be a widow, or there's going to be an orphan, or there's going to be some need that the elders have, and you're going to need to be there, you're going to feel that calling. Be ready to get that. If the family's leaning in with you in that and what you're doing is not detracting from the family, then I think that that's a real key thing. Because I think that's where it starts to grind down and stop working, is when a deacon, in order to be able to have the energy needs for the office is detracting from this family at home.

And then it becomes a little bit of a push forward relationship. And I think we want a man and his wife to decide that for themselves, not to say, I'm guessing they're not in a season of life and so let's not even consider them. We might be surprised by the answer. They might be delighted to serve the church in that way. So they need to be self-selecting, not selected out based on what we think their season of life is.

The other thing I would say about that is for any church officer role, whether it's eldership or deacon, we always talk to the husband and wife together very early on. And we say these words, the church cannot be the mistress here. So if you don't have margin, the church is going to be the mistress and you're actually going to resent the service to the church. The wife is going to resent because she needs more from her husband. So you guys need to go away together and figure out whether the church is something that you can give this service to now, or whether the church is going to be a mistress and have that be part of what you're using to decide.

Yeah, that's, you know, it's, it's really important to balance all those kinds of things. I really, I really appreciate those perspectives. That's good. Hey, I want to talk about what makes a good deacon. Spiritual gifts.

Here's what we know about elders. Elders have different gifts, too, different inflection points. There are those who give more to preaching and teaching. There's a giftedness inflection point. But let's talk about the giftedness inflection points, the various levels and qualities of deacons.

So can I just read the text? I'm going to read out of 1 Timothy 3, 8 through 13. Paul writes, Likewise, deacons must be reverent, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy for money, holding the mystery of the faith with a pure conscience. But let these also first be tested, in other words, like the elders, let them first be tested. Then let them serve as deacons being found blameless.

Likewise, their wives must be reverent, not slanderers, temperate, faithful in all things. Let deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well. For those who have served well as deacons obtain for themselves a good standing and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus." So just starting at the end there, there's actually a great reward for faithful services. The deacon, you get a good standing among the brethren, you get great boldness in your faith, which are tremendous. Yeah, yeah.

So for context, Scott, My perspective comes from serving on a deacon group of four to five deacons. So four to five deacons in our local church. It is neat to see the plurality of gifting expressing itself. There's a gentleman on our Deacon board that's very spiritually mature, has a lot of insight. If you're going to have to sit down with a struggling family, that maybe you're helping them out, but you also need to work through various issues.

The Deacon is responsible for serving tables to some extent, working with the finances of the church. Oftentimes, you're working with a family that maybe has a very different view on receiving state funds for work and money. So, there's often an interweave of the practical issues of the deacons work with and some encouragement and accountability and checking in and kind of that side of things. So one of the brothers is very spiritually gifted and mature and just boy, if you're going to be in a tough, tense meeting, but that would be the right deacon to have there with you. Another one of the brothers that has helped service a deacon, it's just so gifted with a real practical, you know, the facility and the day-to-day logistics and answering phone calls and checking the mail and responding to issues that come up throughout the week that just need a little helping hand there.

Issues are gifted at that more practical service level. Another one of our deacons is just very inclined to prayer. And so for struggling or suffering or hurting people, what he's the most encouraging, what you don't want, you don't want me there if you really need all the hope in the world, right? You know, That's not my gift. I'm seeking to grow in it.

Boy, that's this brother's gift. He's the encouraging, exciting, just give you hope, pray for you kind of brother. So it's neat to see these gifts intertwine. I think some people have the perspective that the diaconate is strictly physical things, and therefore the gifts are just really practical or administrative. And I would just say, oh, contrary.

While the gift, while the office is not fundamentally spiritual in its orientation in the sense of word of prayer fundamentally, of spiritual wisdom and an inclination to being filled with wisdom and the Spirit of God, very much is, and if you look at the description of Stephen in Acts, he was a man filled with the Holy Spirit. This is so essential. If we have churches filled with elders filled with the Holy Spirit and deacons are just kind of practical lawn mowers, you're gonna see very much a disconnect in the spirituality of your more physical service. And that I think is so important to keep those connected. And that really struck me in Alexander Strzok's book, where in one of the places he says, you should not think of deacons as just the church janitors.

And you know, it's, it's a, it's a broader kind of ministry, and it is administrative, and it is also spiritual at the same time. Strauch's first book that this is the updated version of, but the first book was entitled New Testament Deacons, Ministers of Mercy, and it really gets to the heart of it. This is about care for God's people in the local church. And so it does have practical elements to it that help the elders not get caught up in those practical elements. But fundamentally it's about mercy ministry among the Lord's people.

Which is really interesting because the deacons that we've had over the years are tender hearted men And some of them cry kind of easy, you know. That's the minister of mercy. Well, Chad, thank you so much for talking to us about this. What a great office for the greatest institution on the planet today. And I'm just so thankful for, I'm really thankful for you and your family, your fun little family.

I can't wait to see your family. He has the, I'll just use the word that's not in the dictionary, the funnest family. Yeah, it's great. Great to have you, Chad. Thanks.

And if I could leave the listeners with one thought, if you're a young man out there, There is a great joy. What the scripture says that you, the deacons can earn themselves good standing in the face if they serve well. There is a great joy to one's family. So, you know, speaking somewhat back to the whole, oh, you got to be careful about the seasons of life, you know. You know, yeah, but you want a sweet season of life, you want a joy-filled home, you want a happy home, you know, lean into the body of Christ.

You know, get some margin for your family to lean into your local church, whether it's a deacon, whether in some other role, boy, there's a lot of joy for young families leaning into their local church. And I would just, I would put a plug to that. It's not said enough that Jesus fills our cup with joy when we serve at his table. And young men can be spiritually mature in a way that's reflected in the qualifications that I just read from 1st Timothy 3 that can absolutely be qualified and can absolutely be a blessing in this kind of service to the Church. Amen.

Well, may the deacons rise up with desire to come and serve the Church. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Chad. Thank you, Scott and Jason. What a joy.

Okay. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can be with us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com