Jenny Baker talks to the leaders of Christian organisations and asks: is the parachurch a brilliant support to the local church, or a drain on its resources?
What stops the Church taking responsibility for mission, weakens the life of the Church and diverts vital investment from the Church? I’m sure you’d get lots of fascinating responses if you threw that question out over coffee and biscuits at your next house group, or down the pub after the Sunday evening service. And you might be surprised to hear that some people are convinced the answer is parachurch organisations like CMS, Youth for Christ, Open Doors and UCCF.
Writing in Newfrontiers magazine, Steve Tibbert who is the leader of King’s Church in Catford, expresses his concern about parachurch organisations. He concedes that there is a place for specialist organisations like Missionary Aviation Fellowship or Wycliffe Bible Translators. But he believes that while most parachurch organisations are set up with the good intention of reaching people for Christ and they might see fruit in the short term, in the end they create a context where the local church feels little responsibility for mission. He says, ‘Mission-based parachurch organisations have sprung into life in reaction to local mission ineffectiveness. But, rather than solving the problem, they have weakened churches, making the Church more pastoral by creaming off the zealous and motivated.’
He’s not alone. There’s no shortage of online articles and blog posts, mainly from the USA, that make the combination of local church and parachurch ministry sound like the current coalition: an uneasy mix of ideologies that get along because they have to, but which are really poles apart and heading in different directions when they get the chance.
While there are echoes of truth in Hibbert’s critique however, are parachurch organisations really such a threat to the local church? Is it possible to build healthy parachurch organisations that enhance the local church? And is it perhaps time to rethink our categories and call a truce?
Getting alongside
‘Para’ comes from the Greek and means beside or alongside. It conjures an image of an organisation that is detached and separate from the local church, but the reality is often very different. Some parachurch organisations are dedicated to working in and through local churches and wouldn’t exist without them. Urban Saints, for example, currently serves around a thousand churches by providing a structure and content for their youth work. Matt Summerfield sees the organisation as part of the Church, not separate from it, with a prophetic role to call the Church to mission. As a senior pastor of a local church himself, he says 'We want to act as a catalyst and a servant, inspiring and envisioning the Church for mission to children and young people.’
Similarly, Ruth Gilson from Girls’ Brigade sees the work of her organisation firmly rooted in the local church rather than happening alongside it, but finds it often bypasses some of the baggage that going to church provokes. She says, ‘Girls’ Brigade groups are led by people from the Church who are appointed by the church leadership team and are working as part of that local church’s vision for sharing the gospel in their local community.’ She has countless stories of girls who come to faith ‘because Girls’ Brigade provide an accessible and holistic community outreach that a never-churched generation of parents are happy for their daughters to attend.’ Rather than being in competition with the local church, Girls’ Brigade provides a route into it which can be the start of a life-long commitment to Jesus for a missing generation.
Other organisations that might be described as parachurch were actually started by local churches in response to local needs. Lynsey Johnston is the current director of Luton Churches Education Trust. She explains, ‘LCET began nearly 20 years ago when a group of church leaders in Luton, from a variety of denominations, believed that they should set up an organisation to support the Church in ‘bridging the gap’ between the local community and the Christian community that existed there. Those individual churches recognised that if they pulled their resources together, greater impact could be made and more young people could be reached.’ LCET specialises in working in schools, something that an individual church would find difficult to build and sustain. And like the majority of people who work for parachurch organisations, LCET’s staff and trustees are themselves members of local churches, part of local church life and wanting to see churches flourish rather than seeing themselves in competition. You can’t be on one side on a Sunday and on the other during the week without it doing your head in, or realising that the distinctions between the two aren’t as distinct as some would maintain.
An unhelpful term?
That’s not to say that all parachurch organisations are the same, and a key target for criticism is the type of student ministry that enables students to thrive when they are part of a group on campus but that doesn’t equip them to integrate into a local church when they graduate. Rich Wilson from Fusion, an organisation that works with students, says, ‘Sadly I think that criticism holds a lot of weight. My experience is that a Christian student can only give their best to a single Christian community so it is either the local church or parachurch. They haven’t got time for both and for mission. Those who manage to do both tend not to be engaged with many friends who aren’t part of the Christian groups and missional lifestyle is compromised. And then those who don’t integrate into the life of a local church don’t learn what it is to move from being a young person to an adult in church life which has implications for the years after graduation.’ Rich would argue that Fusion doesn’t have any groups that compete with local church communities or mission, only working with a church where they have clear permission and an invitation. Rather than siphoning off part of the congregation into exclusive and disconnected groups, they have helped to grow the Church with students.
Many of the people I talked to are tired of the label ‘parachurch’, and find it divisive and unhelpful. Gavin Calver from YFC chooses not to call his organisation parachurch. ‘We seek to be “a missional arm of the local church to young people.” Obviously we are an organisation but our constant aspiration is to be with and for the Church. As I often say, we are part of the bride but involved in the makeover getting her ready for the wedding! Our connection to local churches is fundamental to all we do.’ Gilson adds, ‘The longer I’ve been involved in Girls’ Brigade’s ministry, the less comfortable I have become with the whole concept of GB as parachurch. I just don’t think it’s helpful. I think that Church today still uses a variety of expressions about Church and ministry that are quite staid and frankly divisive in the way they cause us to think. Language is powerful at shaping our thoughts and, for me, the Christian dissection of children’s and youth ministry sometimes gets a bit stuck in an old paradigm.’
it’s all just a misunderstanding
Jonny Baker from CMS would go further and argue that a separation of ministry into Church and parachurch demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what the Church is. An influential text for understanding the way the Church has been involved in mission through the ages is an article by Ralph D. Winter called The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission. Winter argues that in the New Testament you have the local gathered Church which he calls a modality and the apostolic bands of missionaries who went out preaching and gaining converts, which he calls a sodality – but that both were understood to be the Church. He traces the presence of those two structures throughout mission history including the medieval period and John Wesley, showing how the building and rebuilding of the gathered church has been mainly the work of sodalities. Baker says, ‘When the Church gets stuck, there’s a resurgence of the sodal which is often where the action is.’ CMS was established as a mission agency in 1799, but four years ago was officially recognised as an ecclesial community of the Church of England, meaning that it is structurally a part of the Church rather than a parachurch organisation. That might not mean very much except to those who work with and for it, but as Gilson says, the language we use is important. Baker sees it as an important distinction, ‘CMS is the Church in action; we’re not a bit on the side.’
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the strongest anti-parachurch sentiments come from the US where a local church can actually be the size of a small corporation and can afford to fund distinct ministries to students, singles, teenagers and so on under the umbrella of ‘church’. Here in the UK, where churches are smaller and aware of the need for specialist advice and resources to reach different groups of people, there seems to be much more willingness to work together and a genuine appreciation of what different organisations off er. So perhaps it’s time to drop the word ‘para’, and just get on together in building the kingdom of God.
Jenny Baker is development manager for Church Urban Fund and a regular contributor to Youthwork magazine.
