Audio Transcript:

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

Thank you for joining us today. This is episode 244. Today, we begin a new series, talking about the church and the parachurch.

Oh, what great confusion abounds about the nature of the church and what can be appropriately called a Christian ministry. The word “Christian” is thrown on the front of just about anything to justify it. Christians want to do all sorts of things in the name of Jesus and call it a Christian activity, and they garner up a holy zeal for doing that work because it is quote-unquote, “God’s work.” There are Christian businesses, Christian universities, Christian restaurants, Christian movies, Christian death metal music, Christian accounting firms, think of just about anything and add the word Christian to it, and it probably exists.

But we are warned by Jesus, who says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7:21–23) The most shocking thing about what Jesus says here is that people do good deeds and they do it in Jesus’ name, yet that is not what Jesus is looking for. Just doing good works and saying that they are Christian is not enough.

The problem is exasperated when you consider it from a historical perspective. The number of parachurch ministries has exploded in the last hundred years and even more so in the last 50 years. The landscape of Christian fill-in-the-blank just about anything is a relatively historical anomaly.

The problem is theological. Not only are we essentially self-sanctifying our activities, but we also make them untouchable. If God has asked someone to do something, then who can say otherwise? It’s a matter of authority. And, practically speaking, we are denying the authority of scripture. We look to our inner sense of God’s calling rather than discern from scripture what our priority should be. As Jesus says, we miss him. We do things in Jesus’ name, but we forget that Jesus has spoken directly to us in his word. We ignore the intimate knowledge of Jesus we have in his word, and we fail to submit to the living Head of the church, through the means that he has given us.

And this is true about missionaries and missions agencies, too. Self-appointment, because of an inward sense of God’s calling, is the most predominate means of beginning a ministry. It’s the libertarian volunteerism that is so prevalent today, especially in the West. It’s expressive individualism in a Christian costume. The ministry excuse has been used by Christians for a long time to justify laziness, the misuse of church funds, tax evasion, dishonesty in business, vacations as missions, and much more. 

The root of all of this confusion is bad theology, and more specifically it’s a poor ecclesiology.  What are we supposed to be doing as the church? What are our priorities?  Should the church fund the youth group to go to Canada to paint a few walls in a struggling church, and then do some tourism?  Should the church run a Christian school?  How about a food bank?  Or what if a Christian has a small business, how do we know when that’s a ministry or not?  Who gets to say?  Certainly not the government, the church should say so.  And what happens if that ministry creeps away from its original charter?  How does the church rightly act as the pillar and buttress of truth? Moreover, where do we find Jesus, but in the midst of the local church? The local church is the place where Christ’s Headship is exercised. Many people do many things in Jesus’ name, but because they are completely disconnected from the church, then Jesus doesn’t know them.

Many questions need to be answered here.  What are the essential ministries of the church which distinguish it from all other ministry?  What is a parachurch ministry and how does the church relate to it?  What is Christian vocation, and when would it be considered a ministry to or for the church?  Who can be a part of a ministry?  How does the exclusivity of membership in a ministry relate to the inclusive nature of the church?  These questions and many more need to be answered. 

The reason for the confusion is a poor understanding of what a church is, and the fact that so many Christians predominately think of the body of Christ in terms of the universal church. And, maybe even more fundamental to this is a misunderstanding of the gospel as the power of God for salvation. If we don’t see our utter dependence on God to save us and our utter powerlessness to save ourselves, then our understanding of the gospel will be man-centered, and we will focus more on our good works. This man-centered gospel will be revealed in ministries that downplay the necessity of the proclamation of the finished substitutionary work of Christ on the cross and resurrection. Furthermore, a man-centered gospel will tend to downplay our dependence on a local body of believers.

Listen to how people talk about their salvation. We tend to speak of the gospel in simply individualistic terms. Jesus saved me. Rather than thinking about Jesus saving his bride, his body, the church. Rather, we should think: Jesus saved us. When we are saved, we are saved into the family of God. When we are baptized, we are called by Jesus’ name into a specific fellowship of believers. A faulty understanding of the gospel is going to lead to a faulty understanding of the church and of ministry in general.

It is my belief that a large percentage of what goes on as Christian ministry has very little about it that makes it Christian. So, what makes an activity a Christian ministry? Who gets to say so? Well, this is the purpose of the church. The church, and by church I almost always mean a local church, the church gets to decide what it means to be a Christian and the church identifies who a Christian is. And the reason that so many activities fail to truly be Christian is that the church is not in view in that activity. They are not really thinking about where the church is. In fact, that’s my number one evaluative tool for Christian ministries. Simply ask, “where is the local church?” Far too often the local church is despised and scoffed at. It’s seen as inefficient, ineffective, behind the times, or unattractive. And the implication underneath that is the fact that the church is full of old people and children, and not fully comprised of young professionals and college students.

But here’s the rub. Yes, we should have a priority on the church, but not everything that Christians do should be considered as part of what the church does. If the church does everything, then it also loses its distinctiveness and we miss God’s rather narrow purposes for it. The church is not everything, and God has called individuals to respond to him in faith in everything they do. All of life is to be lived for God as a living sacrifice. For the individual Christian, there is a sense in which everything is ministry. Ministry, therefore, could most broadly be called anything that a Christian does in worshipful obedience to God and love for others.

But, when there is confusion about what the church does, and what individual Christians do, and what parachurch organizations do, and how those are all necessarily different, then they all suffer. The church, the ministry, and the individual suffer. Nowhere is this more evident than in missions. There is a good book that highlights this called, “When everything is missions.”

The path forward for us then is in seeking clarity about the church and the parachurch. There are a few things that a church and only a church can do. And God has so designed the church for these all important functions, that all believers must prioritize them. And when churches start to do more than these functions, they start to water down their importance. And when parachurch ministries try to do the things that churches are designed to do, they also contribute to the confusion.

In the next several episodes, I want to enumerate four different categories of ministry and define each of them. Those four categories are: essential ministries, support ministries, personal ministries, and vocation as ministry. If you think of those four categories as vertical columns, I then like to think of 3 bars that cross over between them, where a bar can include two or more categories. Those three bars are the church, the parachurch, and then the interchurch, meaning where churches work together. And in our later episodes I will detail which categories each of those bars include. If you go to the episode webpage for this podcast on propempo.com, you can find posted there a graphic that illustrates these categories.

Definitions are vitally important because we need to know what God’s intentions are for the church and for the individual Christian. And as we work out these definitions in the coming episodes, I want us to keep the priority of the church in mind. Churches will benefit as they gain clarity about what they must do and what they are permitted to do. And my intention in giving these distinctions is to see a movement in them toward those essential ministries of a church. There are some things that you cannot find anywhere else except in a local church. And no matter what the Christian is doing, whether he or she is doing their job or involved in a parachurch ministry, no matter what they are doing, we should be moving in ministry toward the essential elements of the church. As disciples are made, regardless of the context, they must be gathered together in a church. This is the movement of all ministries, toward the establishment and growth of healthy churches all over the world.

This is the heartbeat of the Missions on Point podcast, and the book by the same name, and Propempo as a church engagement ministry, and MissioSERVE Alliance as a missionary sending agency. Global missions must be centered in the church as both the beginning and end of missions. I hope you will stay tuned in the coming weeks to think more deeply, critically, and biblically about the church and parachurch ministries. And I hope we can eliminate some of the confusion out there. And I hope that you and your church are built up because of it.

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.