I think Bill Krause has edged out Dave as the head deacon!

Oh, it was close. You don’t think of Bill as having less hair than Dave, but since he’s stopped shaving his head Dave has given Bill an opportunity to take the lead and he has. I suppose Frank and Robert are pretty much tied for third, with me a distant fifth place, as the least of all.

You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? Well, I have decided that the chief deacon is the one with the least amount of hair. I pattern this after the elders, since Mo once jokingly referred to himself as the chief elder due to his age and having less hair is certainly a mark of being older, thus I reckoned the same rule should apply to deacons. Alas, with my shock of brown (albeit switching over to white) I’m not ever going to be in the running.

Now let me say this straightforward and for the record – there are no such titles as chief elder or chief deacon! I just made that up, because I wanted some silly rule I could demonstrate. A silly rule that is as good as any other silly rule. Because of course I have a point to make here. We have four points of failure to turn things upside down. Two elders, and their wives.

Personally, I think an elder MUST have a wife, in the present tense, and the past tense is not good enough. I also believe scripture teaches we must have more than one elder. I enjoyed Mike’s lesson the other night about our elders, and I appreciate them as much as anyone else does, but I also can see that if anything happens that disqualifies one of them then we lose both. By the way, I also don’t think you can have deacons without elders, so we lose all those, too. This worries me a little, and I pray about it.

See, I’ve attended places where there were “men’s business meetings” and they are awful. Since we’ve had elders here so long, many of you may not have experienced this first hand. I have seen the good and the bad, mostly the bad. You would think those who were well grounded in the bible would be the ones to nudge the rest of us along, but that is not usually the case. Things become issues to “vote” on. After all, how do we decide who’s going to hold our next meeting? If we give Mike a raise, or not, or even if we pay him for another year? What color do we paint the building, do we have cleanup days, who’s teaching the classes and when are we going to set our meeting times? All of these things and so many, many more become topics of these meetings. Some need to be unanimous. Some just need a majority, but watch out because those who end up in the minority often become unhappy.

Politics creep in, and those who are loving can be too compromising and allow bad things to happen to appease more selfish brethren, who only want things their way and will pout and threaten like children. And the fellow who was converted a week ago has an equal “vote” to the member who’s been here 20 years. What about the women, do they have a say? What about when someone comes and starts to teach error and some don’t see the harm and feel those that do are just mean spirited? Do we dim the lights and clap hands? Who are YOU to tell me no, you’re not the boss of me! I want to use the Lord’s money to buy bonds or invest it in some other way, to gain that earnest that scripture talks about, while others (correctly) want to only use it as we have example. I don’t like these song books, I want one with more happy, campy songs. The preacher offended me with what he said last week, he needs to be replaced with someone I like. You can’t withdraw from me, I’m going to withdraw from you! We need silly rules to make one silly person happy! And so it goes…

While I paint a bleak picture, it isn’t always this way. Some things do go right, just as some in the churches in our Revelation study are pointed to as being good individuals in spite of the overall nose dive direction the local assembly was taking. Having elders rocks! I don’t really have a point to make today, other than we need to pray about this, perhaps the elders or Mike preach a lesson about how to behave in an “elderless” church, and we should do what we can to avoid this “hairy” situation altogether!

Randy