All the first disciples were Jewish, of course; some of them were from Jerusalem and spoke a dialect of Hebrew as their native language, while others were from Galilee and beyond, and grew up speaking Greek. As the number of disciples grew, with more and more worship groups meeting in different homes, it came to pass that those who were followers of Jesus didn’t personally know everyone else who was also a follower of Jesus.

In particular, people in one language group didn’t know all the followers of Jesus who went to a house church where they spoke the other language. That is to say, people who spoke Hebrew didn’t know who the old ladies were in the Hellenistic house churches – that is, where people spoke Greek. And so when these Hebrew-speaking congregations started a program to make sure that impoverished widows had enough to eat, they took care of the widows they knew about: the Hebrew-speaking widows. And so in the Greek-speaking house churches “the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews, because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food” (Acts 6:1).

Right at the start, then, we’d want to notice four clear facts in this event. First, they had a daily distribution: before the church had figured out how to keep track of the whole membership, already there was a recognition that when there are people going hungry, the church needs to find a way to get food to them, and so every day people were taking food to poor widows. Second, they didn’t figure out the whole program before they began: they started distributing food, then they recognized that they didn’t have it quite right, because some people were getting left out, and they realized they needed to revise the program to work more comprehensively (6:2-6). Third, those who felt the problem most severely were fully incorporated into the answer: we can tell from their Greek names that the seven new leaders were from the Greek-speaking house churches (6:5). And fourth, the first response of the church was to complain; only after the complaint and the bad feelings did they manage to move beyond whining to address the problem successfully.

I’ve never liked whining (except sometimes when I’m the one doing it). I usually wish people would skip the whining stage, and just solve the problem and move forward. But the church includes people, in all their humanness, and when people see things they don’t like, they complain. Sometimes we get stuck at the complaint stage, and that’s pretty unpleasant. But what if we learned to see that every complaint holds the possibility of new ministry: what if we saw that when someone complains about how our program isn’t fully accomplishing the goal, that could lead to a resolution that we’ll find a way to take care of all the frail widows with no resources – no matter what group they belong to – so that they no longer have to go hungry?

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Ah Lord Jesus: when there was not enough food to go around, you broke the bread and had your people start passing it out, and thus the multitudes were fed. Give us the same vision to feed the hungry: even when it first comes to us in the form of a complaint.