Audio Transcript:

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

Thank you for joining us. This is episode 246. This is the third episode of a series about the church and parachurch ministries. In the first episode we simply laid out the problem. There is a lot of confusion about what a church is and what a parachurch ministry is. The lines are so blurred that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The greatest confusion of all comes from the popular notion that the universal church seems to take precedence in most people’s thinking. People think of being called a member of the church universal more than they think about being called a member of a church locally. The point is that God has designed local churches to fulfill a certain function. This is God’s plan. Local churches are the only place this side of eternity where a particular purpose of God’s plan is worked out for the spreading of his glory to the ends of the earth. Let me make sure you have heard my exclusive statement correctly. God has designed local churches to perform functions that no other institution can rightly perform. There are essential activities of the church that a local church and only a local church can perform. And no one else can do them. And when another institution, like a parachurch ministry, tries to start doing the things that only a church can do, then they have wrongly crossed an important distinguishing line.

Let me use an analogy here with the family and use similar language. God has designed the family to be the institution for procreation. This is the place where babies are born and children are raised. And no other scheme of man can replace it. We shouldn’t make babies in a laboratory or dissolve the nuclear family for the sake of a larger community. Schools don’t raise children. Schools and communities can help, but they are meant to support the priority of the family. Now, this doesn’t mean that orphanages should not exist. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are exceptions that prove the rule. They exist in deference to the ideal situation. But they are not a replacement and certainly not preferable. Likewise, the church is where God is worshipped, and life-long disciples are made to the ends of the earth.

But here’s the thing. There are many parachurch organizations that seem to have as their unspoken motto that they do what the church is called to do, but better. “Come here and you’ll have a better worship experience. Come here and you’ll get better discipleship. Come here and we’ll facilitate global missions better than the local church does.” But this is akin to a school saying that they can raise kids better than the family. No, there are certain things that God has designed a church to do and only the church to do, and any other institution that has adjacent functions to the church should be designed to support, serve, and supplement the church, but not supplant it. And this was the main point of the previous episode, where we listed several essentials of the church. If we can make clear what the local church essentially does, what all churches of all times and places are supposed to be doing according to God’s word, then and only then can we begin to understand the rightful place of other ministries. 

Which brings us to today’s episode. Today we want to define what a parachurch ministry is. And here is the definition that I would propose for you to chew on. A parachurch ministry is any Christian ministry that is non-essential for the church. Any activity that we do in Jesus’ name, anything good that can be tagged with the label “Christian” in front of it, calling it a Christian ministry, yet it does not rise to the level of being essential for the church, then that is what I would call a parachurch ministry. Ask yourself a simple question, must all churches of all times and all places do this particular activity? If the answer is no, if we can conceive of a church in some place in some culture that would not be doing what we are doing as a ministry, then it cannot be essential for the church. We cannot rightly claim that God has spoken to us in his timeless word a truth that is cross-cultural and absolute if it is circumstantially limited. God has told us in his word what every church must be doing. Those things are essential.

Now, this does not mean that non-essential ministries should not be done. We don’t only do the few limited things that are essential and nothing else. We should be essentialists but we should not be minimalists. We want to assert that there are lots of activities that are good for a Christian to be doing and can be rightly called a ministry, but to see them as not necessarily a ministry of the church. In fact, I would say that the vast majority of Christian activity does not fall under the essential ministries of the church.

For example, I think it’s great to have Christian schools and homeschool coops. I think there is an important role that missions agencies can play. I think there are many humanitarian efforts that are well worth our full-time employment and can be done just like giving a glass of cold water in Jesus’ name. I think that you should be having a bible study with your neighbors and coworkers. I think you should have neighborhood cookouts where you join fellow believers from other congregations and denominations and seek to use that opportunity to evangelize your neighbors. I can go on and on. But these are all parachurch ministries that are non-essential for the church.

Here are a couple of reasons why I like to use this definition of a parachurch ministry as Christian activity that is non-essential for the church.

1. First, this definition keeps us focused on the local church and what it and it alone can do. This puts the parachurch ministry in its place. The parachurch ministry serves the local church and supports its essential work, but it could never replace the church. This helps us to guard against making too much of our ministry, recognizing that it can come and go. God has not promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against your parachurch ministry. God has not told all Christians to be involved in your parachurch ministry. You can do it by faith, and other people can choose to not do your ministry in faith too. This keeps us humble. Your parachurch ministry is non-essential.
2. Second, the key positive defining feature in this definition is the label “Christian”. Parachurch ministry is doing Christian We are doing work in Jesus’ name. We draw upon Christian principles. We are seeking first the kingdom of God in all that we do. We are working out our salvation. We are living sacrifices, living all of life in worshipful devotion to God. There is nothing secular for the Christian. It’s all made sacred. Everything we do is made holy by the word of God and prayer. We receive our vocation from God in faith. We initiate Bible studies and partnerships with believers in other churches. We go out of our way to do something because we believe that’s what God would have us do. We spend our free time in ministry, and we don’t need the church to sanction it. It’s what Christians do, but it’s not what the local church in particular does.
3. The third reason I like this definition is that it shows us why missions is so important. One of the greatest dangers that any church faces is that it gets so wrapped up in its own culture that certain culturally specific activities become assumed as essential for the church. Churches very quickly find ways of operating that are effective in their culture. Maybe they find that using a PowerPoint slideshow on Sunday morning is very beneficial. But what happens when a missionary sent out from that church goes to an African tribe and they don’t have any power for their projectors there? Is having PowerPoint essential for the church? Of course not. And this analysis can be repeated hundreds of times over with the forms and methods we use. Your church doesn’t need a roof or a pulpit, because there are plenty of churches all over the world who don’t have one or the other. In this sense, global missions has a purifying effect on the church that sends missionaries. Missions is good for the sending church because we need to see how much we need churches that are different than us. Those churches in other cultures challenge us and refine us. Missions forces us to get back to the basics. Let me rephrase that. Missions done right forces us to get back to the basics. There are way too many missionary activities out there that fail to do appropriate contextualization. And the main reason for this is that missionaries are not focused on the essentials. But missions that connects a church in one culture to a church in another culture will have a purifying effect on both churches, helping them to see their similarities and differences.
4. The fourth reason I like this definition, is because it helps parachurch ministries be the best that they can be. This is really the flipside of the previous point, where I said that missions helps the church to focus. Here I want to say that the church helps parachurch ministries to focus and be the best they can be. When a parachurch ministry knows that it is not the church, and it knows what it is not doing, then it can know better what it should be doing. It can serve a certain function and hopefully not exceed that mandate.

This is the parachurch. It can be a seminary or a missions agency. It can be an orphanage or a women’s pregnancy center. It can be a church sports ministry or it can be a Bible study in your workplace. The possibilities are endless and open to much creative Christian thinking.

We’ll explore this more in the coming episodes, but first I want to give two actions that need to be taken, one for the parachurch and one for the church.

1. Number one, when thinking about its mandate and its relationship to the local church, as we have been talking about, a parachurch ministry must prioritize the local church. And the way that the parachurch ministry can prioritize the local church is in deferring to the church in the activities that the local church is intended by God to specialize in. For example, the local church is the place that God intended for Christians to primarily congregate in worship. Your parachurch ministry needs to demonstrate this, especially if you are a Christian school with regular chapel services. Likewise, as we said last week, the local church is the primary place that God intends for Christians to be discipled and make disciples. Your parachurch ministry cannot be a substitute for the variety of people you will be discipled by in the church. And of course, I need to mention that the church is God’s design for the outworking of the Great Commission. God has equipped the church to do missions in a way that is better than any mission agency, regardless of their expertise. If that thought is new to you, then go back and start listening to the Missions on Point podcast from the beginning. We talk about that a lot here.
2. Advice number two: Churches must validate Christians and Christian activity. This is really the heart of all I want to get at here. The church is the keeper of the gospel in both its doctrine and its deeds. Churches get to say whether someone is a Christian and whether their life matches their confession. Parachurch ministries must submit to this. This is more than a letter of affirmation from the pastor declaring that someone is a professing believer and member of the church. This has to do with discipline. When activity falls out of line with gospel witness, that’s the church’s purview. If a parachurch ministry sees something that would be a disciplinary matter, they must bring it to the church and defer to the church. When a church brings a member under discipline, then the parachurch should submit to the church’s authority. Churches go astray when they fail to discipline their members. Parachurches go astray when they do it instead of the church. The most a parachurch can do is fire someone, but they need so much more spiritual care which a church is perfectly designed to give.

I hope you are challenged and encouraged by thinking about parachurch ministries as any Christian activity that is non-essential for a church. There will be more details about how to work this out in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

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.