Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions.

Welcome back. Thank you for taking the time to listen to Missions on Point. This is episode 247. We’re in the middle of a series about the church and the parachurch. This is the fourth episode. So far we have been laying out the problem of the confusion that exists in so many ministries and especially the problem of devaluing the local church. As you are probably well aware as you listen to Missions on Point, one of our primary convictions when it comes to doing missions, and really any ministry at all, is the priority of the local church. More specifically, before Jesus returns, this is the place in all of the earth where God intends for his people to gather together and worship him, proclaiming the gospel, and making disciples to the ends of the earth. As we saw in the second episode, the church has some core essential features given by God in his word that we must have in order to have a church. And as we consider any other ministry, we must prioritize the local church, because God is first and foremost worshipped in the church, through the church’s authoritative preaching of God’s word and discipling of believers. All ministries must prioritize this. Any other discipleship must move people toward the church, supporting its essential work, that no other institution can do. And this is why we talked about parachurch ministries last time as any ministry that would call itself a Christian ministry that is not the essential ministry of the church. We are either doing these essential ministries or we are not.

This brings us to a diagram that we have mentioned before, but I want to elaborate on a little more today, which you can find on the Propempo.com website audio transcription page for this podcast. This diagram has four columns to it, breaking down Christian ministry into four separate categories. The furthest column to the left is the essential ministries of the church. The other three columns are all parachurch ministries. Today we will talk about the second column, which I am calling support ministries. And the point that we are making here is that churches engage in both the essential and support ministries.

Support ministries, very simply defined, are ministries that directly support the church’s essential ministries. They are not themselves essential, but they support the church in accomplishing its calling from God. And since they are supporting and not essential, that means that not every church will have them. But, you might find churches very interested in doing these kinds of ministries. And that’s a very simple way to identify what this kind of ministry is, this support ministry. If this is something that not every church would be required to do by scripture, but you might find a church doing it because they see it as supportive of their primary calling by God, then that is what we would call a support ministry. Churches do not only do essential ministries, they also have many support ministries. And this is what makes every church different because different churches live in different contexts. They have different needs. They are at varying levels of maturity.

One more description is helpful here, as we are still defining support ministry, and that is the form of a ministry is also non-essential. It’s essential to worship God, but the form in one church might be a praise band, a choir in another, or an out-of-tune piano and a hymnal in another. In another area, we might think of the essential ministry of being devoted to the Apostle’s teaching. That might look like a children’s Sunday school class. That might look like a weekend seminar. It can take many forms, but it doesn’t have to look the same in every church. How we do something is also non-essential, but churches can see the organization of these ministries as supportive of the church’s essential work.

Let’s give some examples. A church in an urban city might have an evangelistic outreach program for homeless people. That’s great for its context. It supports the church’s efforts to evangelize. But it is not something that every church should do. Another church that is in a college town with a lot of foreign students might have a weekly class for learning English as a second language. Similar to the previous church, but unique because of its context. Another church might have a lot of children in it, and so they start a Christian school in the church. This supports the church’s efforts at teaching children the whole counsel of God. But there are plenty of churches out there without that many kids and they should not be starting Christian schools. Another church might have a lot of young men who are eager to pursue formal ministry, and so that church might have a pastoral training ministry within the church. Not every church, especially younger church plants, will have that kind of ministry. And we could make a never-ending list. Some churches have drug rehab programs. Some churches have a Vacation Bible School. Some churches have a classical choral orchestra performance to the glory of God. And I could go on and on. I think you get the idea.

A large part of what many churches do is non-essential. And that’s ok. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing any of these. But, there might be something wrong. There are two main potential problems here. One, churches can start to neglect their essential ministries. They can get so busy with doing these other ministries, that they forget how important the essentials are. I believe this is especially evident when churches do not partake in the Lord’s Supper very often. When Jesus, through the Apostle Paul, tells us that we have the Lord’s Supper “as often as you do this,” we are not given a specific time interval. But it’s hard to imagine that a couple of times a year is very often. The second danger is the flipside of the first one. Not only do the essentials get neglected, but the support ministries start to become essential in the eyes of many in the church. We start to claim that we have to do this or that ministry. We view our church in competition with other churches and we think we are better or worse because of a certain ministry we have. This breeds a consumeristic mentality among Christians, where congregants shop for the church that has the best youth group, or praise band, or whatever. This is the danger of how support ministry, and that which should be rightly categorized as secondary, can start to become primary in our minds. And when that happens, then we have lost sight of the whole reason we have a church in the first place. Churches are not clubs, or schools, or social service vendors.

So, what do churches primarily do? Why among all of the support ministries of the church must we vigilantly maintain the primary place of the essential ministries? Because the essential ministries are directly connected to the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. Here is the best way that I can think of to easily make this distinction. Simply ask, who is included in this ministry? If everyone in the church is included in the ministry, then it’s an essential ministry. If everyone is invited and expected to be there, then that is something that your church views as essential. But if it is optional for anyone, if the demographics are limited in any way, if only some people in the church are involved in that ministry, then it is not essential. And here’s why. The gospel is for everyone. No one is excluded. A church’s membership is defined by those who have placed their faith in Christ alone for their salvation and publicly demonstrated that in baptism. The church exists to mark off the people of God in contrast to the rest of the world. There is an exclusion. Some are in the church and some are not. Baptism and the Lord’s Table and the essential ministries of the church are meant to make that demarcation clear. But there should be no other defining lines. We don’t gather because we all like the same football team. We don’t gather because we are of the same race or social status. We don’t gather because we have any other interests and hobbies. Although, those distinctions might not be so obvious in many churches. We gather because we are in Christ together. We’re one family in God: men, women, young, old, poor, rich, Jew, Gentile, and every other ethnicity. Support ministries all have some other demographic delimiter. It could be a women’s bible study, or a fellowship of Christian musicians, or a nursing home outreach ministry. The point is that if we are limiting the membership in our group in any way, then we are not displaying the gospel, because the whole church is not included in it. The point of the gospel is that it is for all people, not just Jews, not just men, not just the wealthy, etc.. This is what makes your church so special, not your unique ministry that no other church has. What makes your church special is the thing that makes every true Christian church special: the worship of God through the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the new birth of the Holy Spirit. So, keep the gospel in mind when you start a new ministry, and be very clear about who is included in your group. That makes all the difference to whether or not what you are doing is essential or support.

There are two main benefits of thinking this way. One of the implications of what we have said so far is to combine what we have said in the previous episode and today’s. If parachurch ministries are any ministry that is non-essential to the church and support ministries, which many churches have lots of support ministries, if those are non-essential to the church, then we can see support ministries as parachurch ministries. I find this incredibly helpful for churches. As a support ministry, this is something you can do in partnership with other churches. Those churches might benefit from your support ministry too, and they don’t have to reinvent the wheel and do it themselves. Maybe your church has a good outreach to a needy demographic, like homeless people. Other churches can work together with you in that ministry. The same could be said about your Christian school, or your pastoral training ministry, or your AWANA program, or your fully orchestrated Christmas performance, and on and on. Every church doesn’t need to replicate those, and members from other churches ought to be able to participate. It’s not limited to your church membership because it’s not an essential ministry of the church. It’s not the core ministry that defines your church. And here’s a really challenging one. What about your youth group? Not everyone in your church attends your Friday night youth ministry. It is limited by its demographics. It’s helpful to think of the youth group as a parachurch support ministry. Maybe there are neighboring churches that are so small that they don’t have a youth group. Why not open it up for them to participate? This is actually really helpful in making a distinction between what is a ministry that the church is doing as the whole church and what is simply a supporting parachurch ministry.  

The second benefit to mention here is that as support ministries start to include more churches it is healthy for the church and that parachurch ministry to be run independently. As the Christian school includes children from other churches, the church and the school should start operating as different entities, with their own governing structures. Leaving them tied together can confuse their purposes. The seminary, or the women’s pregnancy ministry, or the like, will often run more effectively when they are outside of the direct oversight of the church. And in turn, your pastors and deacons become freed up to focus on the more narrow task that God has given them.

You can see how this affects global missions as well, in both the sending of missionaries and their field ministry as well. The whole church is involved in the sending of missionaries. It’s the task of the entire church. And on the field, missionaries can partake in many support works, but their focus needs to be on those essentials. You’re not actually doing church planting if you’re only involved in support ministry.

Well, we’ve gone on long enough for this episode. Thank you for sticking with me. I hope you are beginning to see the value in making these clear distinctions. Stick around for two more episodes as we continue to work out the relationship of the church to the parachurch, and especially how that effects the church’s call to obey the Great Commission.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust that you'll find more help and resources on our websites at Propempo.com and missioserve.org. We are so thankful for those who support us, enabling us to produce this podcast. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.