What Do Elders and Deacons Do in a Church for Pastoral Care?

By Jacob Gerber — a pastor and the founder of Shepherding Tools.

An up-front summary of this article:

• Jesus appointed elders and deacons to continue different aspects of his own ministry in his church.
• Elders and deacons have distinct roles, but their roles overlap in many situations in the normal shepherding care in a church.
• The pastor is an elder, but he also has a specific role within the life of the church.
• Shepherding districts (or groups) help to make sure that every member has a primary point of contact, receiving ministries of word and deed as needed and appropriate.
• It helps to have a shared system for keeping track of records of pastoral care in a church.

And here is the longer version:

What do elders and deacons do in a church?

Ministry in the church is not a solo, lone ranger activity. Rather, in the polity that Jesus established for his church, he assigned elders and deacons to serve alongside one another. To the elders, Jesus has assigned the ministry of the word. To the deacons, Jesus has assigned the ministry of deed.

How do the roles of elders and deacons differ in the church?

In his earthly ministry, Jesus balanced ministry of the word (teaching and preaching) with ministry of deed (feeding, healing, casting out demons). Our Lord Jesus "contains in Himself, by way of eminency, all the offices in His Church" (PCA BCO, Preface), so that elders and deacons are not operating autonomously but only exercising his gifts.

We see this distinction between ministries of word and deed most clearly in Acts 6, where the apostles insisted that they must not give up the preaching of the word of God or prayer in order to engage in the deed ministry of serving tables (Acts 6:2–4). Yet, to ensure that the necessary deed ministry was accomplished, deacons were elected, ordained, and installed to minister to the needs of the congregation.

Within a modern church context, elders and deacons work together to care for different aspects of the people under their care. Elders engage in preaching, teaching, discipleship, and shepherding, seeking to cultivate fruit from the preached word. Deacons engage in caring for the bodily, financial, and other temporal needs of people.

How do the roles of elders and deacons overlap in the church?

Sometimes, the ministries of elders and deacons overlap in important ways. For example, if a man loses his job, the deacons may need to be involved to help the man find another job and perhaps to help pay bills or take care of other needs while he is searching for other employment. Elders, however, may need to encourage him to trust the Lord as he and his family go through a difficult time of crisis. Both elders and deacons need to be fervent in prayer.

The same may be true when someone suffers a difficult medical challenge. Elders should visit the sick, whether in hospitals or homes, to read the Scripture and to pray with them. Deacons may need to help arrange for home maintenance, to help pay unexpected hospital bills, or to assist with other tasks, errands, or needs (e.g., feeding pets; cutting grass; taking people to doctors' appointments).

In these cases, elders and deacons minister to the same people facing the same needs, but they care for different aspects of need for those in crisis.

How do shepherding districts work in a church?

Shepherding districts (or groups) divide the congregation into smaller groups, with individual officers assigned as the primary point of contact for those groups. These groups may be divided in a number of ways. In some churches, the division is geographic, where districts are arranged according to who lives where. Other churches divide their shepherding groups according to small group membership, especially if there is a high enrollment in small groups, and if those groups are each overseen by a different elder.

In our church, we divide the whole congregation alphabetically into districts so that each district has roughly the same number of people. More, we assign one elder and one deacon to each district, so that the same elder/deacon team can work together to care for the needs of the people in their district. Or, when there are urgent matters where we need to contact everyone in the church (e.g., weather-related church cancellations), each elder/deacon team can tag-team to call through their districts quickly and efficiently.

I will write more about the function of districts, how to divide the church into districts, and what healthy rhythms look like within those districts in future articles.

How do pastors share the workload with elders and deacons?

How pastors share the workload with elders and deacons will look different from church to church. In a previous church, I took a shepherding group alongside the other elders; however, my group was exclusively the families of the elders themselves. Then, one elder (and later, another pastor) had me assigned in their group. Beyond the elders' families, I generally cared for every member in the congregation.

My current church is a bit larger, and we have more elders. So, it would be difficult for me to shepherd the elders' families well along with the rest of the congregation. Instead, our elder-deacon teams do the majority of the regular, week-to-week care and communication with their districts. Then, I am freed to step in to care directly with those in crisis, whether with urgent shepherding needs (discipline cases, pastoral counseling) or physical distress (hospitalizations, shut-ins).

I learned a helpful analogy for this division of labor when I sat with my father in the ICU for several weeks after his double-lung transplant. Our family got to know his daily nurses fairly well. They were in several times per day over long, 12-hour shifts, and they usually only had a few patients under their care each day. They took care of all the immediate needs, including administering medication, monitoring his vitals, and doing anything he needed to get more comfortable as he was recovering. When they took a lunch break, they usually let us know they were going to be gone and told us who would be there if we had needs in the meantime.

The doctors also worked hard, but they had a different role. They were clearly moving through a larger number of patients than the nurses had, but that meant that they visited each patient less often. When they did, however, they gave specialized instructions that the nurses would implement. The best doctors, I should note, worked closely with nurses to understand what had been going on with the patient. Also, when there was a true emergency, all available doctors and nurses dropped whatever they are doing to go to the need. And throughout this process, my father's chart was regularly checked and updated.

In my current, medium-sized church, this model has worked fairly well, adapted to pastoral ministry. It is a fairly straightforward implementation of the plan Jethro helped Moses to implement in Exodus 18. Our elders and deacons function somewhat analogously to the nurses, where they are generalists working with a smaller group of people. As pastor, I function a bit more like the doctor, where I am working with the whole congregation, but over a slower period of time. Then, when emergencies arise, we all go to where the need is.

Who in a church should be able to see pastoral care records?

We use Shepherding Tracker to track contacts from our pastoral care. This system allows us to record what we are doing so that everyone can see a shared record. But, at the same time, we have the ability to restrict the visibility of some information only to the groups who need to see it. For private counseling sessions with someone, I can restrict the visibility of my notes to "Only me." For shepherding that I am doing on behalf of a case in which the whole session is involved, I can widen the visibility of notes to "Pastors and elders." But, for medical crises (where word and deed ministries are both needed), I can further widen the visibility of notes to "All officers."

Recently, I was reviewing the Activity feed of Shepherding Tracker and saw a note entered by a deacon that one of our members was in the hospital. Both this lady and her husband are modest people; they don't make a fuss, so they hadn't reached out to tell anyone that she was in the hospital. But, because the deacon wrote down notes from his call to their family, I was able to stumble upon it. From there, the district elder and I were able to mobilize by sending the need to the prayer chain and caring for her while she was in the hospital. That happened only because we had a shared system to coordinate information like that.

Additionally, an elderly man recently caught me before the morning worship service to let me know that he would be moving in two weeks to an assisted living facility. After talking with him, I recorded that note and checked the box to alert his elder and deacon. They received an email immediately to alert them to exactly what was happening. The man had some specific needs for getting ready to move, and our deacon was able to coordinate that work right away.

To go back to the hospital room as I waited with my father, it was interesting to me how every individual who came in to care for my father in one way or another checked the "chart" (the log of what had already happened) before doing anything. It didn't matter whether the person was a nurse, doctor, or whatever—every medical professional wanted to make sure he or she knew exactly where my father's care plan had advanced before taking any further step.

How can we get started in coordinating shepherding care at our church this week?

Here's a simple plan that you could start implementing today.

• Identify someone you haven't talked with for a while.
• Call that person and explain, "You're on my list to check in with this week. How are things going?"
• After listening and asking any follow-up questions, move toward a simple question: "How can I pray for you?"
• Write down the high points of the conversation and the prayer requests.

That's it—and it goes further than we think it will. Many conversations will turn up responses like, "Everything is great...we're very blessed...pray for the continued growth of our family." That's fine.

But, there will also be conversations that surface significant issues. That's the point to schedule the home visit (or the lunch, or the coffee, or the visit in your study at church) to walk through those issues in an appropriately longer and face-to-face setting (2 John 12; 3 John 13–14).

FAQ

What work should elders focus on?

Elders should avoid getting bogged down in deed ministry, but should devote themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4).

What work should deacons focus on?

Deacons should devote themselves to deed ministry. This frees the elders to devote themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word. By deed ministries, the deacons also care for real spiritual needs, but through addressing temporal needs. Jesus also cared for physical needs when he fed people, healed people, and cast out demons.

What work should the pastor focus on?

Regardless of church size, the pastor should move toward the hardest cases. That is, he should specialize in crisis care, whether crises of spiritual needs or other kinds of major life crises. In the past, my district included the elders' families, but I think it's a little better to fold those households into the regular districts and let fellow elders care for them. That keeps the pastor free for everybody.

What should elders, deacons, and pastors write down in the record?

Every individual should write down whatever he does so that others know what has already happened. Shepherding care is much more effective when we can integrate our own work with the work of the other officers.

Our church uses Shepherding Tracker to coordinate everything I have discussed in this article: division of shepherding districts, coordination of care, and logging pastoral contacts. With our single, shared system, we are able to make sure that every person in our care receives thoughtful, appropriate, and shared ministry. You can try Shepherding Tracker for free for up to five users.