The Hands and Feet

Second in the Mission Administration series. The wider frame is in Waiting on Tables.

I want to take the argument from the first article and make it concrete.

The argument was that the parachurch is the church on mission, the church sent. I bounded the claim. I named the failure modes. I made the case from Peter and from Paul. I closed with one example from my own life. The case stands at altitude. What it has not yet done is land on the ground.

That is the work of this article. The point of the first article was to say what the relationship between the church and the parachurch is. The point of this article is to say what the relationship looks like when it is working. I want to write it for three audiences at once. The parachurch leader who is willing to consider that her organization is not the gospel center of the universe. The local church elder whose pew has a parachurch staff member sitting in it on Sunday and who has never thought about that member differently than the IT consultant or the schoolteacher. And the parachurch worker himself, who has lived in the orphaning so long he has stopped imagining the alternative.

I will write for each of them in turn. None of what follows is novel. Most of it is the recovery of practices the early church and the Reformed tradition once knew how to do. The diaconal renewals of Geneva in the 1540s, the revival of mercy ministry in the 19th-century Scottish church, the relief structures the Dutch Reformed built across two continents — the precedents exist. What is novel is the proposal that we do them again, deliberately, for an entire sector that has grown up outside them.

What it asks of the parachurch as an institution.

The parachurch is an institution. She has a board, a budget, a staff, a strategy, a theology of her own work, an HR policy, a donor base, a brand. Every one of those is downstream of the question I am asking. Either the parachurch is the church sent or she is something else. The institutional choices that follow from those two answers are very different.

Start with the board. If the parachurch is the church sent, the board is not a body of credentialed donors and operators who happen to like the mission. The board is the structure through which the parachurch holds herself accountable to something larger than herself. Which means the board has to include people who can ask the theological questions, not only the operational ones. A board chair who knows the difference between an audit committee and a session is a different kind of board chair than one who only knows the first. Most parachurch boards do not have this and do not see why they would need it. The change starts here. Recruit board members who carry pastoral and theological weight, not just professional weight. Build governance committees that include theologically trained members of churches your organization works alongside. Make the doctrinal commitments of the organization explicit and reviewable, not buried in an appendix. There are templates worth consulting — Reformed denominations have historically structured mission boards in ways that hold them accountable to the gathered church, and the patterns are recoverable for any tradition that wants to use them.

Then hiring. The first article made the point that Acts 6 asked for men full of the Spirit and wisdom, not men with MBAs. The point holds at the staff level and it holds especially at the executive level. The CEO, the CFO, the COO, the chief development officer, the chief technology officer — these are the people through whom the organization actually does her work, day by day. The first thing a search committee should ask about any of them is not whether they can scale a $40M operation but whether their walk with Christ is in order, whether they are members of a local church, whether their elders speak well of them. If those questions are not the first questions, the organization has already decided what kind of institution she is. She is an enterprise that happens to do Christian work. She is not the church sent.

Then leadership formation. This is the place the parachurch sector has most fully imported the assumptions of the secular nonprofit world. We have executive coaching. We have leadership cohorts. We have advanced degrees and continuing education. What we do not have, in most organizations, is anything resembling pastoral formation for the people leading the organization. The CEO of a missionary care fund has, in many cases, no one shepherding her soul through the actual decisions of her actual work. Her pastor knows her on Sunday. Her board knows her on Tuesday. Nobody is integrating the two. This is the gap. The recovery is for the parachurch to insist that her executives be in covenanted relationship with elders who know what they do, not only what they confess. That is not a perk. It is governance.

Then the relationship to the local church. The parachurch has to stop competing with the local church for the attention, energy, and money of the Christians she serves. That is the first thing. The second is harder. The parachurch has to actively magnify the local church in everything she does. Her fundraising appeals should mention the local church. Her staff should be expected to attend, join, serve, and tithe to a local church, and her HR policies should treat that expectation seriously. Her communications should not subtly suggest that the parachurch’s work is the more urgent work. The parachurch should look, from the outside, like an organization whose self-understanding is that she serves the church, not that the church serves her. Most parachurches do not look like that today. The reframe is not cosmetic. It runs all the way down to the budget.

Then financial transparency. I want to frame this carefully because it can land as accusation when it is meant as invitation. If the parachurch is the church sent, the people who send her share, in some real sense, in what she does with what they give her. That sharing is not a regulatory matter — the IRS already has its forms — but a covenantal one. The parachurch that chooses transparency is choosing to be what she is. The board chair knowing the CEO’s salary without filing a public records request. The local church that commissions a staff member knowing the basic contours of the staff member’s compensation and the organization’s reserves. The major donor able to see how her gift moved through the system. This is not externally imposed. It is consistent with being the church on mission and the parachurch can choose it, gradually, in whatever ways her board determines is wise. I am not asking parachurches to publish their books on the internet. I am asking them to walk back the opacity culture by degrees, in the direction of being who they say they are.

I could go on. Every functional area of the organization — strategy, communications, technology, programs — has implications under this framework. The general pattern is the same. Stop building the parachurch on the secular nonprofit template. Start building her on the church template, modified for institutional scale and donor-funded operations. The two templates produce very different organizations.

One more note before I move on. The interdenominational parachurch is a special case. The organization whose staff come from twenty traditions and whose explicit operating commitment is theological breadth across evangelical churches cannot simply submit herself to any single tradition. Her doctrinal commitments are, by design, broader than any single confession. Most of what I have said above still applies, but the relationship between this kind of organization and her staff’s local churches is harder. The staff member who works for a deliberately broad interdenominational ministry has to think more carefully about what kind of local church she belongs to, what theological commitments she can hold with her elders that her parachurch employer may not hold, and how to be a member of two communities whose theological centers do not coincide. I do not think the difficulty makes the relationship impossible. I do think it makes it more demanding, and worth naming so that the reader is not asked to apply the framework woodenly in cases where it requires more discernment.

What it asks of the local church.

This side gets less press, partly because the people who tend to write articles like this one are themselves inside the parachurch sector, and partly because the changes are subtler and harder to operationalize than the parachurch’s side. The local church does not need a new strategic plan. She needs a different posture toward members of her congregation she has not been paying attention to.

Start with knowing who they are. Most pastors and elder boards do not have a list of the parachurch staff who are members of their congregation. They have a list of the missionaries they support. The two are different lists, and the missionary list is usually shorter and better-maintained. The parachurch staff member shows up on Sunday in jeans and ushers when needed and may be on the prayer team or on a serving rotation, and his elders cannot tell you what he does for a living any more specifically than that he works at a Christian organization. That has to change. The first move is administrative. The session pulls the membership rolls, asks who works for parachurch organizations, and starts a separate care relationship for those members.

Then prayer. Public, by name, from the pulpit. The way you pray for missionaries. The reasoning is exactly the same. These are people you have sent. The fact that you sent them across town to an office building rather than across the world to a foreign field does not change what they are. The administrator at the relief agency, the COO of the campus ministry, the digital director at the publishing house — these people are doing work the apostles laid hands on the seven for. They deserve the prayer of the body the way the missionary on the ground in Africa does. Most do not get it. The reasoning is rarely articulated; the silence is usually just because nobody has thought of them as needing it.

Then commissioning. Formal. Public. On a Sunday morning. With the laying on of hands. This is the act of the church Acts 6 records for the seven, and I want to underline that the act was not symbolic in Acts 6 and should not be reduced to symbol now. The apostles laid hands on the seven. The seven went out under authority they had not held before the apostles’ hands were on them. The church gave something through that act. The recovery of the act gives something now too. The parachurch staff member who has been commissioned by her local church is not the same as the parachurch staff member who has not. She bears authority she did not bear before, and the body that sent her bears a responsibility it did not bear before. The act is not unilateral, either. It is a tri-party recognition: the worker who asks to be sent, the local church that recognizes the call and sends, and the parachurch organization that receives the worker back as a sent member of someone else’s body. All three have to consent to the relationship for it to hold.

Then pastoral cadence. Not just prayer and commissioning at the front end but ongoing care all the way through. Once a quarter, the elder responsible for the parachurch member of the flock should sit down with him and ask about the work. Not as small talk. As pastoral care. What decisions are weighing on you. What are the spiritual pressures of your role this quarter. How is your soul. What are the temptations that come with what you do. What does your wife say about how you are. Where do you need the elders to pray. If the parachurch staff member is doing the work I am saying he is doing — the church’s work, with all the spiritual weight that comes with it — then he needs this pastoral care the way the pastor of the church needs it. Most do not get it. The local church has tacitly accepted that the parachurch employer is responsible for the staff member’s soul. That is a category mistake. The parachurch employs him. His local church is what he belongs to.

Then accountability in the other direction. The local church receives back. The staff member who has been sent gets to bring his work into the life of the body. He reports. He shares the burdens. He celebrates the fruit. He asks for prayer. He sometimes brings hard questions about the parachurch’s choices to the elders, and the elders sometimes ask hard questions of him in return. This is the discipline of the body. Most parachurch staff have not experienced it because their churches have not offered it. The fix is small in scope and large in effect.

I will name one thing that gets in the way more than the others. Theological alignment. The parachurch is often interdenominational by design, and her staff come from many traditions. The local church and the parachurch may differ on baptism, eldership, women in leadership, eschatology, the sacraments. The differences can become reasons not to enter the relationship at all. They should not. The relationship I am describing does not require the local church to endorse every position the parachurch holds. It requires the local church to send and shepherd one of her members who happens to work for the parachurch. That is a smaller ask than full doctrinal alignment, and it can be honored across most evangelical traditions without much friction. There is a threshold below which the relationship becomes untenable — if the parachurch is teaching what the local church considers heresy, or operating in ways the local church regards as morally compromised, the staff member has a vocational question to wrestle, not a relational accommodation to make. Most parachurch / local-church pairs are nowhere near that threshold. But it exists, and pretending it does not would be dishonest.

What it asks of the parachurch worker.

This is the part I find hardest to write because it is the part I have lived.

If you are the parachurch staff member reading this, the question I am putting in front of you is whether you are willing to receive the framework. Most of the people I know in your position have, by long habit, organized their working life around the parachurch employer and their spiritual life around the local church and never tried to integrate the two. The integration is the work. It is uncomfortable. It is also the recovery.

It starts with being a member of a local church. Not in the loose sense of attending most Sundays. In the formal sense of having joined, being known by elders, being accountable to a body. If you are not, then the framework I am describing has nowhere to put you. The parachurch alone cannot stand in for the local church and was not designed to. Pick a local church. Join it. Be known.

Finding the right one is not always simple. I want to acknowledge that openly. In some places — particularly in dense urban contexts or in church-poor regions — the local church options range from overwhelmed to absent. The eldership may not exist in any meaningful New Testament sense. The pastor may be doing the work of three people and have no bandwidth for the kind of relationship this framework requires. Finding a faithful, healthy, eldered local church is itself sometimes a real obstacle. I am not asking you to manufacture a church. I am asking you to do the work of finding one and joining it, even if that means driving farther, settling for less programming, or being the person who shows up and stays for the long haul of a congregation that is itself in recovery. The work of finding the church to belong to is part of the recovery, not a precondition you wait to be met before beginning.

Then it asks you to bring your work into the church. Not as a curiosity or a side interest. As the thing the elders shepherd. Ask your elders for a meeting in the next thirty days about your work. Bring something specific. The major decisions on your desk. The pressures you are under. The temptations that come with your role. The places you have been compromising and the places you have been resisting. The questions you cannot answer alone. Tell them what you are actually doing, what it is costing, what is at stake. If you have nothing concrete to bring, you have not yet done the work of seeing your own vocation seriously enough for the meeting to be useful. The agenda is half the meeting. Bring one.

Then it asks you to bring the church into your work. Be the staff member who talks about the church in board meetings. Who refuses the language of competition between her and the parachurch. Who advocates for the parachurch to magnify the local church in everything she does. Who pushes the organization toward financial transparency, toward governance reform, toward the small daily practices that say: this is the church’s work, not ours.

Then it asks you to refuse the orphan posture. I named this in the first article and I will name it again here because it is the part most easily missed. You are not orphaned by the church if you have not asked to be received by her. The orphan posture has often been self-imposed by parachurch staff members who never asked their elders to see them, send them, commission them, shepherd them. They concluded the church did not have the categories. In many cases the church does have the categories; the staff member never asked. Ask.

A note on the friction.

I want to be honest that none of this is easy.

The parachurch resists. Boards are slow. Theologically formed members are hard to recruit. Hiring for spiritual character is uncomfortable when the operational pressures are real. Magnifying the local church feels like surrendering competitive ground in the donor market.

The local church resists. Pastors are busy. Most have never been asked to commission a non-missionary. Most have not built the categories. The thought of treating the COO of a relief agency like a sent missionary feels strange because the categories of sent and commissioned have been narrowed in modern practice to the foreign field.

The worker resists. The orphan posture is comfortable in its own way. Asking your elders to know your work means letting them speak into it. Letting them speak into it means you might have to change it.

Nothing about this is automatic. Nothing about it is fast. The recovery is one parachurch organization at a time, one local church at a time, one staff member at a time. There are no movements I can point you to. There are pockets, and the pockets are growing, but the recovery is largely individual and largely slow.

That does not absolve us of the work. The first article named the orphaning. This article is naming the work of coming home. The next article will go deeper on the office itself — what it means to recover the diaconal office for a 21st-century church, what it asks of the local church’s deacons, what kind of spiritual formation it requires.

For now, the move I want each reader to take from this article is small and concrete. The parachurch leader takes one of the institutional changes — the board, the hiring, the formation, the relationship to the local church, the transparency — and starts there. The elder identifies the parachurch staff members in his congregation by name and asks at his next session meeting how the body is shepherding them. The staff member asks his elders for a meeting in the next thirty days about his work, and brings a real agenda.

None of those is the whole recovery. All of them are the first step into it.

Underneath every step is the doulos posture from the first article. The worker remembers he is a slave of one Lord. The parachurch remembers she is a body sent, not a brand built. The local church remembers her members are sent ones, not consumers of programming. The founder-self goes under. The body comes up.

— Brandon Harvath