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Pastor, Be Proactive in Partnering with Parachurch Ministries
Leading a local church can be overwhelming. Just when you have the volunteer lists to fill, yet another key family announces they’ll be on an overseas holiday for six weeks. There’s a wedding to officiate, a member to visit in hospital, and child safety training to coordinate.
While pastors struggle to stay afloat in this sea of pressures and demands, parachurch organizations can seem intimidating, like circling sharks waiting to devour more of your members’ time, energy, enthusiasm, and money. Not only do these ministries seem quick to kill the little momentum you manage to generate, but they constantly bombard you with promotional emails inviting you to their prayer breakfasts and vision dinners.
How can you manage this sometimes difficult relationship between the local church and parachurch ministries? You need to understand what parachurch ministries are, consider why and when they should be prioritized, and then skillfully navigate the relationship between your local church and a parachurch partner.
What Is the Parachurch?
By parachurch, I mean organized Christian activity distinct from the institutional church. Many definitions are too narrow: they restrict the term to organizations independent of local churches, to nondenominational organizations, to formally constituted not-for-profits, or to ministries with a narrow purpose. Such definitions don’t help us recognize the full breadth of organized Christian activity outside the institutional church—Christian schools, pregnancy resource centers, homeless shelters, and campus outreach ministries, for example—and the many and various ways it may be associated with local churches and denominations.
Parachurches can be informal and independent. They can be interdenominational or nondenominational not-for-profit agencies. Or they can be a ministry governed by a local church, network of churches, or denomination. Yet all these are some form of organized Christian activity distinct from the institutional church.
As I argue in The Vine Movement, there’s a meaningful theological distinction between church and parachurch. Note, for instance, that in Matthew 18 when Jesus declares, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (v. 20), he still distinguishes between “two or three” and “the church” (vv. 16–17).
The church is an identifiable group with leaders (Acts 20:17) and a recognizable membership (1 Cor. 5:4; 11:17–20; 14:26; 1 Tim. 5:9–16) that can expel unrepentant people from its midst (1 Cor. 5:13). Contrary to the claims of missiologists Ralph Winter and Sam Metcalf, parachurches aren’t simply another mode of the church. In the Scriptures, a local church is an identifiable group that must be formalized, particularized, covenanted, or planted. It must be declared a church.
For the sake of the kingdom, we need to learn to live with a vibrant and complicated interplay between churches and parachurches.
This doesn’t make other Christian relationships and activities worthless. A ministry doesn’t have to be church to be valuable. Likewise, there’s no strong theological case to insist all parachurches should be governed by a church or denomination. For the kingdom’s sake, we need to learn to live with a vibrant and complicated interplay between churches and parachurches.
Universal Church and the Parachurch
So how should we think about parachurches? We must begin with a conviction: God’s endgame isn’t the local congregation or a denominational institution. When the Lord Jesus tells Peter, “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18), and Paul teaches that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25), the universal church is in view. The universal church’s ultimacy should be a core conviction that informs our commitment to gospel ministry beyond our particular churches, unions, or presbyteries.
One simple way this conviction finds expression is in the way we strategize. When your local church wants to reach a new group in your area or engage in charitable work, is your first impulse to start a new ministry? Instead, you should first look for a preexisting church or parachurch you can partner with.
Paul beautifully models this in Philippians. He was consistently attentive to the larger work of Christ’s kingdom, and that led him to flexible both-and thinking rather than rigid either-or thinking:
Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. (Phil. 1:15–18)
Paul is both able to recognize the pathetic motives of these vexatious colleagues and able to rejoice that the gospel is preached. What a liberating mindset.
For these reasons, neither local church ministry nor parachurch ministry is a zero-sum game. Congregation members can financially support both their local church and religious not-for-profits of their choice. College students can serve both in the church’s children’s ministry and in the local campus outreach. We get the best results when Christian leaders can negotiate, collaborate, and adjust their expectations to facilitate both-and outcomes for greater gospel influence.
How Can Pastors Navigate Relationships with Parachurch Ministries?
1. Communicate openly and honestly.
“Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses” (Prov. 27:6, NIV). Ironically, being “nice” with colleagues in gospel ministry can breed distrust, passive-aggressive behavior, and crossed wires. Much better are conversations that are kind and considerate as well as honest.
If you perceive your confessional commitments are too different from a local evangelistic organization’s, tell their ministry director the next time they reach out to you. This frees them up to focus their networking efforts elsewhere. If you’re offended by a ministry colleague, work it through rather than avoiding him. If pastoral or practical concerns arise with a congregation member who’s in deep with an interdenominational program, initiate a conversation with the relevant team leader. Emotionally immature relationships can sabotage a local gospel ecosystem. Robust communication can help it to thrive.
2. Plan proactively.
Conflict often comes about through failure to communicate about ministry programming and recruitment. Churches and parachurches play tug-of-war in recruiting zealous and gifted Christians; they tread on one another’s toes when scheduling their conferences and events.
Emotionally immature relationships can sabotage a local gospel ecosystem; robust communication can cause it to thrive.
The solution is godly self-discipline in the area of forward planning. Don’t leave it until the start of the calendar year or college year. Start planning your programs and teams early. Communicate with key stakeholders and require the same early communication from those parachurch leaders with whom you’re in partnership.
If you identify that the events your church and a local parachurch have planned are causing scheduling conflicts for church members, reach out to the parachurch leaders to broker a both-and solution. If one of your members is stretched too thin, or you’re in dire need of her service in your church, share these concerns with the leadership of the parachurch she serves.
Ministry relationships can be happier and gospel work more effective if we can all, by God’s grace, grow in these areas of conviction, character, competence, and communication.
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