I’m going to start where this question lives for me, which is somewhere in the middle of about thirty years of being a businessperson who is also a Christian. For most of those thirty years I have been told, gently and otherwise, that what I do for a living is not ministry, or really part of the church in any way; perhaps a “mission field” at best. My job is my job. My church is my church. The two meet at the door on Sunday morning, we shake hands, and then the rest of the week is mine to spend on what other people are willing to call my profession or my career or, if they are being charitable, my “calling.” But they do not usually mean by that word what the New Testament means by it. They mean a vocation in the secular sense.
I have never bought it. I want to say that plainly here at the start, because it is the seed of everything else the following pages are attempting to say. I have never bought it because the New Testament does not allow me to. Jesus, in His final prayer in John 17, asks His Father not to take His disciples out of the world but to send them into it. He says it again in John 20:
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.
— John 20:21
The Great Commission is the same thing said again with feet on it. The church is gathered on Sunday and sent on Monday, and what she does on Monday is not a different thing from what she did on Sunday. One body. One mission. One work, distributed.
This is true for every Christian and for every Christian’s vocation. It is most acutely true, in the institutional sense, for the parachurch ministry world. The missionary agency, the campus ministry, the relief organization, the seminary, the sports ministry, the translation society. These organizations are the church, sent. They are not parallel. They are not adjacent. They are the church in another shape, in another place, doing the same Lord’s work. And yet for most of the modern era the parachurch sector has lived as something close to an orphan in the larger ecosystem of Christian life. Disconnected from the body she came out of. Suspicious of denominations. Suffering a lack of covering from any real ecclesial accountability. Rarely received by the church she serves as one of her own.
I aim to introduce two ideas at altitude. The first is that the parachurch is the church. The church in dispersion, to use Peter’s language. Sent. The second is that a great deal of what the parachurch sector actually does for a living is, in biblical terms, the church’s deacon ministry, recovered for the operating conditions of the 21st century and scaled into a global institutional complex that we struggle at times to see through the lens of Acts 6.
Held together, the orphaning of the sector, by the church and by the parachurch herself, has to end. Both sides need a measure of repentance. The local church needs to recognize the parachurch as her own hands and feet, and the parachurch needs to come home to the church.
The parachurch is the church.
Paul, writing to the Corinthians, spends an entire chapter on “the body”. The body has many members but it is one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. The head cannot say to the feet, I have no need of you. He writes the chapter because the Corinthians were doing exactly that, tearing themselves apart over whose gift mattered, ranking the members, assuming that what looked least visible was least valuable. Two thousand years later we are still doing the thing he wrote that chapter to stop us from doing. We just do it institutionally now. We rank the local church above the parachurch. We rank the pastor above the layperson. We rank the proclamation ministry above the ministry of administration, mercy, hospitality, finance, technology, and operations. Worse yet, we set up private foundations and DAFs, we establish missions, visions even giving priorities and funding mechanisms without ever engaging the ecclesial church. And we tell ourselves we are not making a tier; we are simply describing how things are. Pragmatic to a fault, with self-glorification running underneath the pragmatism. That is the culture of the West for you. Paul knew that attitude. He knew it well.
I say the parachurch is part of the body. Not adjacent to it. Part of it. A man called by Christ to serve from inside global sports ministry is no less the church than the man called to serve from a pulpit. The widow who balances the books for a Bible translation agency is no less the church than the widow who teaches the women’s class on Sunday morning. Where the Lord has planted a believer to serve, He has planted the church. The man-made institutional shell does not change the spiritual fact. Let me say what I do not mean. I do not mean that the parachurch is the church in the full institutional sense, as if a sports ministry or a translation agency could stand in for the gathered congregation that ordains her elders, administers the ordinances, and exercises church discipline. Those marks belong to the local church and cannot be subcontracted. What I mean is that the parachurch is the church sent. The same body, in another shape, in another place, doing the same Lord’s work under the same Head. The parachurch staff member is a member of a local church first, and a sent extension of that body second. Not the other way around.
This “body” theology gets bigger when Peter takes it into exile. When Peter writes his first letter, he is writing to a church in dispersion. The first verse sets the address:
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the dispersion…
— 1 Peter 1:1
He is writing to the church in the form she takes when she is sent out. Scattered. Among foreigners. Often in hostile territory. Mind you, we know that they were “sent out” because 1 Peter 1:2 tells us that this was done “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood.” They were sent. By chapter two the language has lifted to the highest pitch the New Testament reaches when it talks about who the gathered believers are: a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession. And then the kicker, two verses later:
Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that … they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
— 1 Peter 2:11–12
Notice what Peter just did. He took the highest theological titles available in the new covenant and applied them to people who, by the world’s accounting, did not belong anywhere. Driven from their homes. Aliens in the cities they were living in. The displaced and dispossessed of their world. Peter calls them a royal priesthood. The dispersion is not a problem to be solved by gathering them all back into one place. The dispersion is part of what makes them what they are. The church in exile is the church in action and at work. She is no less the church for it.
This is the seedbed of an ecclesiology the modern Western Christian imagination seems to have lost. The body of Christ does not require an institutional address or steeples and large parking lots, or stadium seating and designer coffee in order to exist. She does require, in every era, the marks the New Testament gave her: elders, the ordinances, the discipline of a covenanted body. Those are not negotiable, and nothing that follows is meant to replace them. What I am pointing at is something else. The body, having been gathered under those marks, is also sent. The Christian campus minister in the locker room is the church on mission, sent from a local body that gathers her on Sunday and commissions her to the field on Monday. The Christian attorney in the courtroom is the church on mission. The Christian CFO in the office building is the church on mission. A believer in finance at a for-profit company, shaping how the company treats its people, is the church. The walls of the human institutions matter less than the body of Christ that has been sent to inhabit them. The body transcends every shell she has been planted in. The inverse is also true, and I want to call it out as directly as I can. The Christian “worker” who is not gathering on Sunday with other believers, in covenant relationship, under elders is not “the church sent.” The locker room ministry, the Tuesday-night huddle, the Wednesday-morning office — none of them is a substitute for the body gathering as the church. They are extensions of the body for those who are first members of the body. Strip away the gathered congregation and you have not recovered the New Testament church. You have left her.
But let’s go back to the parachurch ministry specifically. If the parachurch is the church, then the parachurch ought to behave like the church. She ought to exalt Christ in everything she does, not as a tagline but as an actual operating commitment. There are no line items in the church’s life that are not ministry. She ought to magnify the local church wherever she works, rather than competing with the local church for the attention, energy, and giving of the Christians she serves. The orphan dynamic does not run only one direction. Sometimes the parachurch is the orphan because the church will not receive her. Sometimes she is the orphan because she has refused to come home. Both, I believe, have to be repented of. And she ought to place herself in submission to the church wherever submission is practically possible. Denominational fragmentation makes this complicated, but the absence of a perfect option does not absolve us of the principle. Submission has to be designed with intention — in the composition of the board, in the doctrinal commitments of the organization, in whether the staff are actually engaged in their local churches, and in how the organization disposes itself toward the local church when the two have to make decisions together.
Outward structures are necessary, but they are downstream. The body has a head, and the head is Christ. The body submits to her head, or she has stopped being the body. The work of that submission begins in the heart of every believer who has been sent.
The absence of submission is so culturally invisible to us we miss it. In Western, particularly American, Christian culture we have absorbed a pattern of self-presentation that runs almost exactly opposite to the one the New Testament asks for. We lead with our titles and our company names. We lead with the position we hold and the things we have accomplished. We meet a brother at a Christian conference and the first three sentences are about what each of us does for a living and where we sit in the org chart. The church we belong to, the elders who care for our souls, the husband Christ is to His bride… These come up later if at all, sometimes only when the small talk has run dry. Repeated tens of thousands of times, the pattern produces something like Christian anarchy: a rejection, often barely conscious, of the church’s authority, and an assertion, also often barely conscious, of our own independence.
This shows up in our generation in specific places. The parachurch leader who treats his organization as if it were the gospel center of the universe. The Christian who builds a personal ministry and brand functionally separate from any local congregation’s life. The Christian start-up founder who has decided to “serve Christians” with a software product, as if the church were a market segment rather than the bride of Christ. A market to be won rather than a body he is a member of and accountable to. The would-be reformer who starts a home church not because the Lord has clearly led him to plant one, but because he has run out of patience for submission, and then tries to cement his rebellion as a return to the New Testament church model. The argument I am making in this article isn’t intended to feed those animals… It starves them. The parachurch is the church on mission only insofar as her members are first members of a gathered, ordered, submitted local body. Sever that root and what remains is not the church sent. It is a Christian who has walked away under a better-sounding name. The pattern is the same in each case. The institution becomes the identity. The accomplishment becomes the self. The head shrinks. And in His shrinking we have, without ever putting words to it, dethroned Jesus.
The New Testament has a specific corrective for this. Paul opens half a dozen of his letters by introducing himself as a doulos, a slave of Christ. Not a freelancer. Not a founder. A slave. The word in the first century did not have the residual romance the English word “servant” sometimes carries. A doulos was owned. A doulos was at the disposal of his master. The chief identity Paul wanted to convey in the new humanity Christ is creating was not apostle, not Pharisee, not Roman citizen, not theologian, not church-planter. It was doulos. There is an image in the ancient world that captures this: the under-rower in the lower deck of a Greek galley. The man who pulled the oar. The man who could not see where the ship was going, only trust that the captain on the deck above could. Paul in 2 Timothy 4 says he is being “poured out like a drink offering.” Nothing reserved. Christ in His final prayer in John 17 asked for the unity of His people, that they may be one even as the Father and the Son are one. The doulos posture is what makes that unity visible, because in a body of slaves of one Master there is no place left for the founder-self to stand on.
Her work, in very large part, is the church’s deacon ministry.
The seed text I want to focus on is Acts 6. The Jerusalem church faced its first administrative crisis. The Greek-speaking widows in the community were being overlooked in the daily food distribution. I won’t get into all of the cultural reasons why, but the apostles called the disciples together, made a proposal, and the church chose seven men full of the Spirit and wisdom to take the work on. The apostles laid hands on them and prayed. And then Luke writes the verse nobody quite knows what to do with:
So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.
— Acts 6:7
The administrative solution did not enable ministry. The administrative solution was ministry. And the result was gospel growth. Not because the food distribution preached, but because the apostles, freed by it, did. The text is careful here and so should I be. Acts 6:7 attributes the growth to the word of God spreading. The administrative work removed the friction that had been hindering the word. Both were necessary. Neither was sufficient alone. That is the pattern of complementarity I am pointing at, and it is what the modern church has lost sight of.
The linguistic point is the foundation, and most popular readings of Acts 6 miss it. The Greek verb at the heart of the passage is diakoneō, to serve. It is the verb from which we get diakonia, ministry, and diakonos, deacon. In Acts 6 it governs both activities. The apostles describe their own work as the diakonia of the word. They describe the work being handed to the seven as to diakonein the tables. Same root. Same word family. The text seems to establish a tier, but more importantly it establishes a complementarity — two distributions of the same ministry of the church, given to two different groups of people because the apostles cannot do both well at the same time. The story is not about freeing up the real ministers to do the real ministry by handing the lesser stuff to the helpers. The story is that the same gospel work has multiple shapes and they all work together to produce gospel fruit. A note on the text. Acts 6 does not, strictly speaking, name the seven as “deacons.” The Greek calls them by the work they were given, not by an office-title. The office itself appears later in the New Testament, settled and assumed, in 1 Timothy 3. The early church read the seven as the first deacons in office, and I read the text with the early church on this point. But it is worth saying plainly: Acts 6 is the seedbed of the diaconal office, not its formal institution. The institution comes later. The seedbed is enough for what I am arguing here.
I want to be careful with the language here, because deacon ministry and the church’s overarching mission work together of course. The mission, given by Christ in the Great Commission, is to make disciples of all nations. That mission falls on every member of the body. What Acts 6 calls out is something a little narrower within the mission. It names a vocational division of labor inside the body. The apostles took the ministry of the word. The seven took the ministry of tables. I do want to clarify that when I suggest that the parachurch’s work is “diaconal,” I am not trying to argue that every parachurch staff member holds the office of deacon as the New Testament names it in 1 Timothy 3. The office of deacon belongs to the local church, ordained and accountable to her elders. Office and vocation are not two points on the same spectrum. They are categorically different. The office is the church’s formal recognition of a spiritual gift, set apart by ordination, under the authority and care of the elders. The vocation is the work itself, which can be carried by anyone the Lord has gifted to carry it, in whatever institutional shell they find themselves planted in. The parachurch administrator is doing the vocation. She is not, by virtue of the parachurch employing her, holding the office. That is an important distinction and it should be held tightly. Now, I would love it if the local church would acknowledge that worker as an ordained deacon of the church, but what I am arguing is that the vocation of diaconal service, the kind of work the seven were appointed to in Jerusalem, is being done in our day at a scale the local church hasn’t been willing to reach. Frankly, in lieu of the church stepping up, the parachurch (and many other non-profit organizations) sector has seemingly stepped in. And so for now at least, the office of deacon is one thing and the vocation is another. Perhaps one day we will recognize each other in greater unity.
Interestingly, the parachurch sector houses both. Some parachurch organizations fill what is, in vocational terms, mostly word-ministry roles, like campus ministries that disciple students directly, evangelistic associations that proclaim the gospel publicly, missionaries who plant churches where they did not exist before. Calling those workers deacons perhaps stretches the category past its useful shape. Other parachurch organizations are obviously diaconal in their vocation: relief agencies, translation societies, the administrative apparatus that sends and supports the missionaries. And inside almost every parachurch organization, regardless of which side of the line its primary work falls on, there is a substantial diaconal layer doing the operational work that holds the mission together. The proverbial trellis for the vine if you will.
Notice what the apostles asked for in the seven. Not credentials or operational competence. Not previous experience in food distribution or a CPA. They asked for men full of the Spirit and wisdom. In other words, they asked for spiritual character. The work, though its medium was material, was spiritual work. You cannot serve the church’s tables faithfully without the Spirit, because you cannot make the daily judgment calls about who is favored and who is overlooked, what is sufficient and what is excess, what is a fair vendor expense and what is a creeping invoice, without the wisdom only the Spirit gives. The character of the person was the primary qualification for the work. We have lost this. The modern church and the modern parachurch both hire ministry administrators for their MBAs and their CPAs and their nonprofit references. Those things are not bad, but they are not what Acts 6 asked for. The Spirit-filled woman doing the books for the missionary care fund this morning is doing the work the apostles entrusted to Spirit-filled men in Jerusalem in the year 33. Her spiritual formation is just as relevant to her work as her credentials are.
There are other biblical figures who shape this vocation as much as the seven do. Aaron and Hur, in Exodus 17, hold up Moses’ arms while Joshua fights the Amalekites in the valley below. When Moses’ arms went down, the battle turned against Israel. When his arms stayed up, Israel prevailed. Moses could not hold them up alone, so Aaron and Hur stood on either side and held them up until sunset. The man at the front of the battle is the one whose name is sung. The two men holding up his arms are the reason there is a song. That is diaconal work in its simplest form. That is the parachurch administrator on Wednesday morning auditing the books. The pattern repeats through scripture. Joseph, an administrator in Pharaoh’s house. Daniel, an administrator in Nebuchadnezzar’s and Darius’s. Nehemiah, an administrator under Artaxerxes before he becomes a builder of walls. Erastus, “the city treasurer,” in the closing of Romans. God plants administrative servants of His purposes inside structures that are not the church at all and uses them there. The parachurch administrator inside a 21st-century nonprofit is in good biblical company, perhaps we’ve just forgotten how to say that part out loud.
Stephen and Philip are the proof that the diaconal office is not a lesser one. Stephen, became the church’s first martyr, after a sermon that fills most of Acts 7. A man appointed to serve tables stood up and preached the longest sermon recorded in Acts. Let that fact land for a moment. The very text that some readers want to use to segregate diaconal work from word ministry shows us, two chapters later, a deacon preaching with a fluency and force the apostles themselves had to step aside for. Philip, the evangelist who carries the gospel to Samaria and to the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. The seven were Spirit-filled servants whose ministry of administration sometimes flowed into further ministries of word and witness. The Reformation knew this, briefly. Calvin in Geneva organized his deacons to administer the city’s hospital, manage poor relief, and oversee the wave of refugees who flooded the city in the mid-1500s. In the Institutes (IV.3.9), reading Romans 12:8, Calvin actually argued for two diaconal offices, not one: procurators, who gathered and stewarded resources, and hospitalers, who administered the care itself. That distinction maps almost directly onto the modern parachurch landscape. The relief agency, the translation society, the administrative apparatus that sends and supports missionaries — these are Calvin’s procurators, scaled. The hospital, the foster care network, the direct-care ministry — these are his hospitalers. The Reformed tradition has had categories for this work for almost five hundred years. We did not need to invent them. We have only forgotten where they were. He gave them ecclesiastical office, ordination, and dignity equal in kind to the pastoral office. The medieval church had, in many quarters, reduced the diaconate to a liturgical stepping-stone on the way to the priesthood (though the medieval period also produced the mendicant orders and the hospitals that kept much of the diaconal labor going under different names). Calvin recovered the office in its Reformed shape because he read Acts 6 the way the text actually reads. Unfortunately, the recovery did not last, and still today I often wonder how many churches have relegated the office of deacon to serving communion once a quarter and perhaps the occasional visit to a widow.
I want to dwell on that last point because it matters more than it sounds. The average deacon in the average evangelical congregation today is doing almost nothing of what the New Testament calls deacons to do. He passes the offering plate. He hands out the elements on communion Sunday. He helps with the occasional building project. He visits a widow twice a year. None of that is bad. All of it is small. The work that scripture appointed deacons to do — the daily judgment calls of distribution, the stewardship of resources at scale, the care of the overlooked, the operational machinery that lets the word go out unhindered — that work is happening somewhere. It is happening at the food bank down the street, at the relief agency three states over, at the mission organization that employs the man sitting in the pew this Sunday. The deacons in our churches have been relegated to a ceremonial shell while the actual diaconal work of the body has been outsourced to parachurch organizations that the church does not even quite acknowledge as her own. There is something deeply broken about that picture. And the fix is not, in the first instance, to defend the parachurch. The fix is to restore the office of deacon in the local church to the kind of work the New Testament had in mind, and to recognize the men and women in our pews who are already doing that work in their day jobs — the CFOs, the operators, the administrators, the technologists, the relief workers, the missionary care officers — as the people Christ has gifted His church with for exactly this purpose. Imagine what a local church could solve, for the body of Christ and for the watching world, if it called those members into formal diaconal service rather than leaving them to do the work alone, under no commissioning, with no covering. The opportunity is enormous. The category exists. The people are already in the building. We are just not asking them.
Now I want to push the argument one step farther. The framing so far has been about the administrative work inside parachurch organizations. That is true, but it is too narrow. The bigger truth is that the parachurch organizations themselves are, in very large part, modern deacon ministry. The whole organization. Not just its back-office operations. Look at what most parachurch ministries actually do for a living. They feed the hungry. They translate Scripture. They care for orphans. They host athletes at camps. They run hospitals and administer aid into places the local church cannot reach. They support pastors and train leaders. They publish books, build software for ministry teams, run radio networks. And they steward billions of dollars of donor trust so those dollars reach the people they were given for. Read the list against Acts 6 and the categories line up. These are the church’s tables. Tables a single congregation could never set on her own. The parachurch sector has, in effect, become an industrial-scale extension of the diaconal work the seven were appointed to in Jerusalem. The legal shells are real in human terms. They are also, theologically, almost beside the point. The deacon ministry underneath them is what the work actually is.
I want to be careful here, because the move I am making can be misread. I am not advocating that the Protestant parachurch sector should now place itself under the centralized governance of any institutional church. I am not calling for a canonical structure to be retrofitted over Protestant ministries. I am naming a theological reality. The parachurch is the church’s deacon ministry at scale. That is true regardless of whether any human institution acknowledges it in its charter. The Roman Catholic Church offers one illustration that the connection between the church and her diaconal extensions can be institutionally held — Catholic Charities, the Catholic hospital systems, religious orders, diocesan relief arms, all kept canonically attached to the church that established them. I am Protestant. I am not advocating that machinery. I am pointing to it as evidence that the connection has been held, is being held, and can be held by us too. The instinct and the posture can be recovered.
The orphan in the room.
Set the two ideas next to each other and you get a particular kind of organizational orphan. The parachurch is the church doing the church’s diaconal work, and the church and the parachurch have, between them, mostly forgotten this. The local church looks at the parachurch and sees an outside organization. Useful, sometimes. Inspiring, sometimes. A drain on volunteers and donor dollars, sometimes. But almost never received as another expression of the same body sent to a place the local church cannot reach. I remember an instance when serving as an elder in our local church and several church members wanted to ask permission to transform a closet space in our fellowship hall into a food pantry. Some of the elders adamantly opposed the idea citing the location of a “non-profit down the street” and we shouldn’t take the risk of “getting involved” with homeless and needy community members. Terrible to say the very least, but in that response quite a bit of irony at the same time! The church in that sense is simply ignoring its responsibility to be the church, and outsourcing the diaconal ministry of the tables to the world, or even the government. The ironic part is that the man on staff at a campus ministry, when he is in his own congregation on Sunday, is the man who works for an organization, the way the man who sells insurance is the man who works for an insurance company. His vocation has been theologically airlocked from his church identity. It’s more likely than not that his pastor does not pray for his Tuesday meetings the way he prays for the missionary’s flight. His elders do not lay hands on him before he travels. His congregation does not commission him for the work, even though the work is exactly the kind of work the New Testament knew how to commission people for.
The parachurch, on the other side, has internalized the orphan status and learned to operate accordingly. She has built parallel structures of governance, theological accountability, pastoral care, and community, often because the church she was theologically part of was offering none of those things. The parachurch did not, in most cases, set out to operate as an autonomous parallel institution. She became one. Partly by neglect on the church’s side, partly by drift on her own, partly by the simple force of institutional self-preservation. And the administrators inside the parachurch, the people doing the diaconal work, have absorbed the orphan posture most fully of all. They do not call what they do ministry. They do not see themselves as deacons. Local church elders do not lay hands on them as the apostles laid hands on the seven. They show up on Wednesday morning to do work that, in any earlier era of the church, would have been done with ecclesiastical office, theological dignity, and ordained accountability. They do it now in a corporate office park, on a software stack, under a board that may have no pastors on it, with a job title borrowed from the secular for-profit world, or recommendations from the IRS. They do it well. But they do it without the framework that would rightly name what they are actually doing.
I have lived inside this orphaning. I have been a businessperson in mission organizations and in the for-profit world. I have served in large enterprises and in small ones. I have spent years building administrative super-highways for ministry teams whose proclamation I’ll likely never share a stage with. And I have lived, all along, inside a Christian culture that did not know what to do with my vocation. It did not know whether to call it ministry. It did not know whether to receive me as a deacon. It was, mostly, polite about my work. It was rarely inspired let alone formed by it. The result, for me and for thousands of others, has been a quiet, persistent suspicion that the Church does not really see us, that we are doing some kind of holy work in a place the Church does not quite acknowledge as holy. That is the orphaning. Not the orphaning of the parachurch worker who has walked away from a local body — that worker has orphaned himself, and my argument runs against him, not with him. The orphaning I am naming is the orphaning of the faithful. The administrator who is in her pew on Sunday, under her elders, doing the work of the kingdom on Wednesday, and still cannot get the Church to see what she is doing as the Church’s own work. The deepest layer of it is the layer named in the doulos passage above: the slave who has forgotten he is a slave and started introducing himself by another title. The orphan condition and the founder-self are the same wound. The recovery is the same recovery. We are slaves of one Lord. We belong to one body. The body has a head. We come home by remembering all three.
A hopeful example.
Let me give you a concrete example of what coming home can look like. When I transitioned into a full-time executive role at a large parachurch ministry, I sat down with the pastors and elders of my local church and asked if they would consider ordaining me, rather than having the parachurch do it. The reasoning was simple. They were the men who had cared for my soul. They were the body I belonged to in flesh and blood. The work I was about to do was, in my mind, work I was being sent to do by them, not work that severed me from them. They were glad to do it. They ordained me, commissioned me, and sent me. I now meet with them on a regular cadence, for accountability, for prayer, for discipleship, for the steady ordinary care of my soul that the parachurch role does not give me and was not designed to give me. That cadence also brings a level of accountability and discipline to the parachurch role that would not otherwise exist.
That is what the connection looks like in one life. It is not complicated. The local church recognized me as one of her own and sent me. The parachurch received me as a sent member of someone else’s local body. Both institutions held the relationship together because both of them understood, in the language I am using here, that I was the church being sent. The arrangement is replicable. It scales. It is, I would argue, what most parachurch staff in healthy churches should be doing, and what most of the local churches that send them should be offering. Examples like this exist already, in pockets, more than I would have guessed before I started looking for them. The recovery is not theoretical. It is happening. It can be multiplied and encouraged. I should be honest that it is not always this clean. Sometimes the parachurch resists the relationship because the relationship is costly — it asks for speed and theological flexibility the parachurch is not eager to give up. Sometimes the local church and the parachurch are not in close enough theological alignment for the relationship to be simple. Sometimes the worker’s church and the parachurch are in different states and the cadence has to be designed across distance. None of those frictions detract from the principle. They just mean the work of recovery has to be done with intention and patience, not by formula.
If you are an elder reading this, let me leave you with three concrete moves. First, identify the parachurch staff who are members of your congregation by name. Pray for them from the pulpit by name, the way you pray for your missionaries. Second, formally commission them. Lay hands on them. Send them. Receive them back as ones you have sent. Third, establish a pastoral cadence with them that is not just about their souls but also about the work — the kind of regular contact that lets you, as their elder, know what they are actually doing on Wednesday morning, so that your pastoral care of them is informed by their actual vocation rather than guessing at it. None of these requires institutional reform of the parachurch sector. All of them are within your reach this month.
In the meantime, the word of God still spreads. The number of disciples still increases. Some of that increase, more than the modern church remembers, comes through the Wednesday-morning work of those who wait on the contemporary equivalent of tables. Those deacons deserve to know what they are doing. The Church deserves to receive them as what they are. And the institutions that house their work deserve to be built, and rebuilt where necessary, to make the connection real.
Mission Administration is not a new category.
It is an old one.
I aim to recover it.
— Brandon Harvath