What is the place of parachurch ministries?
Should Christians participate in parachurch ministries? Does support of parachurch organizations take away from the church or does it add to it? Is the mission of the church diluted or built up by parachurch organizations?
Definitions
A few definitions are in order. A parachurch ministry is one that is not part of any church or denomination. A denomination is a collection of churches. A church is a collection of individual believers who gather together as the church.
Depending on the definition, a parachurch ministry is one that is either outside the church or beside the church. The distinction is an important one.
Types of Parachurch Ministries
There are a lot of types of parachurch ministries. They cover an entire spectrum of activities. There is some degree of overlap between the parachurch organizations and the church. There can be very little Christian witness in some of these expressions. In other examples there is a lot of Christian witness.
Good Works Parachurch Organizations
Some focus on “good works” such as food pantries and soup kitchens. Churches which are too small sometimes choose to participate in a community food pantry and share their efforts with others, Christians and perhaps even non-Christians.
How much of these good works should come with a string attached? Should someone be asked to listen to a sermon along with their free meal? Or should the meal be given without any strings?
Apologetics Parachurch Organizations
Other parachurch organizations focus on Apologetics as their ministry. Apologetics is giving a reason for the faith. While some of these apologetics ministries are not making a defense of their particular denomination it should be remembered there is no such thing as generic Christianity. Nor are there any generic Christians. Their defense of the faith is still formed by the denominational affiliation and doctrinal views of their participants.
With other parachurch organizations they may be making a defense of the denomination but it is not easy to discern that at first glance. One example of these is Alpha Omega Ministries which essentially functions as an apologetics parachurch organization for Reformed Baptists. Formally, they deny that they are a Reformed Baptist apologetics ministry, but practically that is what they are. This demonstrates the stealth nature of some parachurch organizations. They are not always what they claim to be. Anyone is good enough to send money into a parachurch – not anyone is good enough to be a part of the ministry.
But who watches these watchers? They have boards of directors that they hand select. Often, there is no effective oversight of these ministries.
Ministries targeted at Specific Groups
Some parachurches focus on a particular group, like Campus Crusade for Christ focuses on college students. These groups state that they are do not want to replace the local church but in some cases they end up doing just that for some of their participants.
Integration of these groups into the local churches in the area of the college is important. Local pastors can to reach out to these groups in order to bring students into a relationship with the local church. The local groups also need to reach out to local churches and make an effort to promote them inside the parachurch.
Lay-led Parachurch Organizations
Gideons International is a lay led organization that provides Bibles free of charge to hotels and hospital rooms. Gideon’s does not allow clergy to be a member preferring to stay lay led. They have a high degree of financial accountability and are known particularly as a group where 90 cents out of every dollar given goes directly to Bibles. They reach into most nations in the world, possibly into more nations than a single denomination could ever reach.
TV Evangelists
Another example of a parachurch group might be a television evangelist who has no local church of his own but uses the TV as his media. The televangelist may have some good work where poor children are fed and clothed. In some cases, these are legitimate works but the cost of TV time runs over a hundred million dollars per year. Most of the money that goes into these ministries is used to pay for air time to raise more money to pay for air time…
The strength is that these TV evangelists often reach into the homes of people who are shut-ins. This is often the criticism as well since they convince poor widows to send in their Social Security checks to their ministries. Financial oversight is frequently lacking in these ministries.
Ecumenical Movement as Parachurch?
An ecumenical meeting, formed for the purpose of working towards Christian unity might be said to be parachurch but since the delegates are under their respective church denominations it would not be an accurate description to call them parachurch in the way it is being identified here.
Needs Based
The common thread in all of these parachurch structures is that they are needs based. They are filling a need that the church does not seem to be meeting at the time. Does that mean that they should be permanent or only temporary institutions? By their own charters, they are doing these things because the church is not doing them.
Focus of Parachurch Organizations
Parachurch organizations are focused inside or outside the church. Some are focused on bringing people from outside the church into the church. The question here is what church? In the case of Billy Graham meetings the answer is that the people who make decisions are steered to the local churches which choose to participate in the meetings in a proportional number based on the number of volunteers from that local church.
Gift Based Ministry
It has been saved that there are people who are gifted and that these gifts are not always recognized in their local church. These people may feel a call to a particular ministry or another but not be encouraged in their local churches to pursue that ministry. Sometimes they look for a church where they can use their gifts, other times they don’t exercise the gift and yet other times they start parachurch ministries.
There have been times when the church has been at fault in not recognizing the gifts of its members.
But there have also been times when the church has discerned that the ministry is best not pursued for various reasons. Someone may have been rejected as a leader in the local church due to their immoral behavior, as an example.
Are the gifts of God given for the building up of the church or for the building up of parachurches?
Why are Parachurches not Churches?
Parachurches are not churches because they lack the marks of a church. They do not administer the sacraments such as communion and baptism. That does not mean that their CEOs are not ordained. In fact, for them to receive minister’s tax deductions they are often ordained either in a friendly denomination that they are loosely affiliated with or by some parachurch ordination mill.
Judging Parachurch Ministries
It is tempting to judge parachurch ministries on their results. Some of them do very good things. But is this the right way to judge parachurch ministries? Clearly they are meeting a need both of those that feel a need to minister outside the church as well as for the objects of these ministries.
To say that people can only minister within the church seems to be saying that all ministry is inward not outward. But the focus ministry from inside the church can be either inside or outside the church.
There are good and bad examples of each of these types of ministry. It seems like there is another corrupt televangelist exposed in the public media every few months. The question always gets raised of how did these men and women get so corrupt? Wasn’t there any sort of oversight?
Asking the Right Questions
There are a number of questions that need to be asked about parachurch ministries:
– How long does the ministry foresee being be in existence?
– Will this ministry go away if a local church takes up the responsiblity?
– What are the financial oversights of the ministry?
– Can the 1099 be reviewed?
– What percentage of donations goes to the designated objects of the ministry?
– What is the intended relationship of the parachurch to the local churches in the community?
– Is there a contact person for local churches?
– What is the doctrinal bias of the parachurch?
– What are requirements for participation in the parachurch?
– What are the requirements for leadership in the parachurch?
– Who is on the board of the parachurch?
– Is there a statement of beliefs for the parachurch?
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