Mission Administration

Writing Mission Administration

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Three pieces, written to be read in order. They make the case that administration is ministry — that this work is the historic vocation of the diaconate — and that the recovery of that office, in the twenty-first century, is mutual between the local church and the parachurch. More writing is in preparation. Subscribers receive new pieces first.

The foundational article

Waiting on Tables

By Brandon Harvath · 26 min read

The parachurch is not adjacent to the church. She is the church in dispersion, doing the same Lord’s work in a place the local church cannot reach. This piece introduces the parachurch as the church in another shape, her operational work as deacon ministry at industrial scale, and names the orphaning of that work, by the church and by the parachurch herself, that has to end. The foundational manifesto from which everything else on this site flows.

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The playbook

The Hands and Feet

By Brandon Harvath

What the recovery looks like in working order. The parachurch is the church’s hands and feet at industrial scale, the church gathered around an operational task. This piece works through what the recovery asks of the parachurch as an institution, what it asks of the local church, and what it asks of the worker who lives the vocation day after day.

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The office itself

The Recovery of the Diaconal Office

By Brandon Harvath

Acts 6. Calvin’s Geneva. The case for recovering the office of deacon for the twenty-first-century church. This is the most theologically dense piece in the foundational series, working through what it would actually take to recover the diaconal office for the people doing the operational work of global ministry today — and why that recovery is mutual between the local church and the parachurch.

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A companion series

A related body of writing on the conditions under which mission-driven institutions actually flourish — a companion to the diaconal argument here:

Four essays

The Flourishing Series

A four-part series

A series on what it actually takes for a mission-driven organization to flourish — the disciplines of clarity, alignment, trust, and steady leadership over time. A companion to the diaconal argument, naming the drift that recovery has to address.

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