An Analogy from Acts

Some people would say that the problems experienced by autistic people in society and in the Church are the result of “structural discrimination” – it might not be due to individuals being consciously unfair, but the result is unfair because of the way that the whole system is set up.

I know that structural racism and other types of structural discrimination are controversial, so I’d rather sidestep the question and look at how the apostles handled a (vaguely) similar situation in Acts. [It’s worth adding that my thoughts are indebted to a talk by Rev Dr Kate Coleman on this passage, though she applied it to racism.]

In Acts 6:1, there was a problem in the church in Jerusalem. Almost all the Christians at that stage were ethnically Jewish, but some were “Hebraic Jews” i.e. Aramaic-speakers from Judea or Galilee, and others were “Hellenistic Jews” i.e. Greek-speakers from other parts of the ancient world. All the apostles were Hebraic Jews.

The apostles didn’t notice the problem to start with. It was the Hellenistic Jews who pointed it out, because they were the ones suffering because of it. Specifically, the church distributed food to widows in the community, but the way that it was happening meant that the Hellenistic Jewish widows were missing out.

There’s no indication at all that it was deliberate, nor is there any indication that the apostles were aware of it. Coleman describes it as “ugly, ethnocentric, xenophobic and unintentional”.

So what did the apostles do?

• They listened to the complaints
• They recognised the validity of the complaints
• They brought the complaints into the open
• They made sure that the whole church took ownership of the problem
• They proposed a bold solution involving them giving away power

They didn’t appoint a working group to look at it and give a report which they might act on in the future – they recognised that their job was prayer and ministry of the word, so they asked the church as a whole to appoint a committee to oversee food distribution and let them get on with it.

We might well aim for the food committee to be balanced – to have representation from all the different groups in the church. But the church in Acts 6 didn’t – all seven people appointed to the committee were “known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom”, and all seven had Hellenistic Jewish names.

So the very people whose community was being discriminated against, the people who had noticed the problem and complained against, were given the power, responsibility and authority to fix it.

It’s easy to miss how radical this solution was. The surrounding society had not solved the problem of Jewish – Gentile racism, or of Hellenistic – Hebraic Jewish tensions. The church did, and the result was that it grew rapidly.

I guess the analogy is fairly obvious.

The few articulate autistic people who are left in the church are saying that things are not okay for us. We aren’t thriving, except in a few pockets where things are done better than usual. We aren’t saying that it’s anyone’s fault, but we’re saying there’s a big problem here, and it’s up to the church how to respond.