In early Adventism, according to the Ellen G. White Writings, Complete Published Edition, the word “deacon(s)” was recorded fifteen times. Only four of these recordings related to their ministry in the early Seventh-day Adventist Church. The word “deaconess(es)” was recorded eighteen times, of which only three related to their ministry in the church.
The first area concerning the deacons pertained to the kind of wine that they should use in the Lord’s Supper. The following statement is a critique of the book Prophetess of Health that was published in the Review and Herald, April 16, 1867. The issue was what Ellen White meant when she said that she approved of a “little domestic wine.” Here is the response: “Domestic wine occasionally referred to by Ellen White and in the Review and Herald, we would understand to be the juice of the grape pressed out and at first free from fermentation. James White counseled in 1867: ‘Know what you use. Let the deacons obtain the cultivated grape, see the wine made, and secure from the air to keep it from fermenting as much as possible.’”1 This statement indicates that the deacons in the early Seventhday Adventist Church were responsible for supplying the wine used in the communion service. That they were instructed to use unfermented grape juice for this ordinance may also imply that they were to abstain from fermented wine, as were the deacons of the first-century Christian church (1 Tim 3:8).
The second area relating to the deacons’ ministry in the early Seventh-day Adventist Church pertained to their responsibility in handling the tithe. In the following letter, the issue was that the Battle Creek church needed additional persons—a clerk and a treasurer— other than the deacons to look after the tithe. Ellen White agreed with the Battle Creek church’s decision to use a portion of their tithes to pay their clerk and treasurer for the services they rendered. That practice was also adopted by other large churches. The treasurer was also referred to as a “tithe collector.” C. F. McVagh, president of the Southern Union Conference, wrote a letter to W. C. White on October 24, 1912, to get verification that Ellen White approved of this practice. W. C. White’s response was, In the olden days, when the Battle Creek church was growing, it was found that unless the work of collecting the tithe was followed up regularly that the amount received was very much less than if the matter were followed up in a businesslike way by a collector who made the work his regular duty. We also found that this work demanded more time than it was right for us to ask any one, two, or three of the deacons to give to the matter, and it was thought by the church council that it would be good policy, and for the best interests of the tithe payers, and for the best interests of the conference, to have a good collector chosen and employed and paid a reasonable amount for his time. This plan, with the reasons therefore, was placed before Father and Mother, and received their hearty approval.2
This next statement also dealt with the responsibility of the deacons in relationship to the tithe. The purpose of this statement was to clarify where the storehouse is. The statement reads as follows:
A fair reading of Ellen White’s statement leads un-questionably to the conclusion that, in her mind, the church treasury was the store house of Malachi 3. She used the words “treasury” and “storehouse” as synonyms when she wrote, “If all the tithes were brought into the storehouse, God’s treasury would not be empty.” Concerning the church treasury, she stated: “Many presidents of state conferences do not attend to that which is their work–to see that the elders and deacons of the churches do their work in the churches, by seeing that a faithful tithe is brought into the treasury.”3
It can be concluded from these two sources that the deacons in the early Seventh-day Adventist Church were responsible for encouraging members to return a faithful tithe, and for collecting the tithe from the members. Sometime before the death of James White in 1881, after the deacons collected the tithe in the larger churches, specifically at Battle Creek, they turned the tithe over to the treasurer or tithe collector of the church. However, according to the letter W. C. White wrote to C. F. McVagh, the smaller churches did not follow the practice of hiring a treasurer. Therefore, the implication is that the deacons collected the tithe and served as treasurer in the smaller churches.
1 Ellen G. White Writings, Complete Published Edition 2005, Ellen G. White Estate Research Documents Full Text Search, s.v. “deacons” (Silver Spring, MD: Ellen G. White Estate, 2006), CD-ROM.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
Vincent E. White Sr., DMin, is a retired pastor and author of The TwentyFirst Century Deacon and Deaconess: Reflecting the Biblical Model, The Twenty-First Century Deacon and Deaconess: Reflecting the Biblical Model Workbook, and Problem Solvers and Soul Winners: A Handbook for Deacons and Deaconesses.
