need: the lack of something necessary, the thing lacked, or the matter that must be attended to
This is the ordinary New Testament word for need. At its core it names a gap between what someone has and what they require, and the writers use it across a natural range without ever leaving that core behind. Most often it points to the bare fact of needing something, almost always in the set phrase rendered "to have need of": the sick need a doctor, the colt's owner needs it, God already knows what we need before we ask.
From that fact of needing, the word slides easily to the concrete thing needed, especially when it turns up in the plural. Here it means real shortfalls that someone can step in and meet: a missionary's expenses, the daily wants of widows, a brother who has no food or clothing. This is where the word does much of its practical work in the letters, naming the very needs the church is told to share and supply.
In a few places the same word stretches to the matter or task that needs handling. When the apostles tell the church to pick seven men to be put in charge of "this need," they mean the business of the daily distribution. The meaning has not changed: it is still what calls for attention, only now framed as a job rather than a shortage.
The word is not theologically loaded. Its interest lies in how plainly the New Testament treats need as something to be met, by God who supplies it and by a community that shares it.