The Seven Chosen for Service
Commentary 12: Acts 6:1-7
As the Church grew, it began to encounter the problems of an institution. The Jewish people had always had a great sense of responsibility for those who were less fortunate. In synagogues, there was a routine custom. Two collectors went round the market and the private houses every Friday morning and made a collection for the needy, partly in money and partly in goods. Later in the day, this was distributed. Those who were temporarily in need received enough to enable them to carry on; and those who were permanently unable to support themselves received enough for fourteen meals, that is, enough for two meals a day for the week ahead. The fund from which this distribution was made was called the Kuppah, or basket. In addition to this, a house-to-house collection was made daily for those whose needs were more pressing. This was called the Tamhui, or tray.
It is clear that the Christian Church had taken over this custom. But among the Jews themselves there was a rift. In the Christian Church, there were two kinds of Jews. There were the Jerusalem and the Palestinian Jews, who spoke Aramaic, the descendant of the ancestral language, and prided themselves that there was no foreign element in their lives. There were also Jews from foreign countries who had come up for Pentecost and made the great discovery of Christ. Many of these had been away from Palestine for generations; they had forgotten their Hebrew and spoke only Greek. The natural consequence was that the spiritually snobbish Aramaic-speaking Jews looked down on the foreign Jews. This contempt affected the daily distribution of alms, and there was a complaint that the widows of the Greek-speaking Jews were being – possibly deliberately – neglected.
The apostles' response in this matter was to call the Christians together and suggest a solution. It is significant that the apostles were not prepared simply to ignore the problem; they seem to have realized that spiritual and material concerns are so intimately related in Christian experience that one always affects the other for better or worse. Similarly, there was no attempt either to assign blame or to act in any paternalistic fashion. Rather, their suggestion was that seven men "full of the Spirit and wisdom" be chosen from among the congregation, which may mean from among the Hellenists alone, who could take responsibility in the affair. The apostles sought to give their attention exclusively "to prayer and the ministry of the word.”
The apostles laid their hands on the Seven and appointed them to be responsible for the daily distribution of food. The laying on of hands recalled Moses' commissioning of Joshua in Numbers 27:18-23, where through this act some of Moses' authority was conferred on Joshua. That is evidently what the laying on of hands was meant to symbolize here, with the apostles delegating their authority to the seven selected by the church. All seven men had Greek names; one of them was singled out as having been a Gentile convert to Judaism (that is, a "proselyte"). In the final verses we are told that many Jewish priests converted to the new faith.
Catholic teaching sees Acts—especially Acts 6—as the biblical root of the diaconate, though not yet the fully sacramental form later defined by the Church. The seven men chosen in Acts are viewed as a foundational moment of ecclesial service, prefiguring the ordained ministry of deacons. This is seen as the Church’s first structured delegation of ministry. Catholic theology sees the gesture of the laying on of hands by the apostles as a gesture, as an early form of ordination—not yet the sacrament as later defined, but a genuine conferral of ministry. The diaconate was viewed as a ministry rooted in service to the community, especially the vulnerable. The first Seven exercised a mixed ministry of charity, word, and evangelisation, which aligns closely with the modern diaconate. Vatican II (especially Lumen Gentium 29) referred directly to Acts 6 when restoring the permanent diaconate, seeing it as a return to apostolic practice. The first deacons were all male. Recent Vatican commissions (2021–2025) have concluded that the Church’s present doctrine does not permit female diaconal ordination, but the matter remains open to further theological investigation.
