Why I don't use the word "Parachurch"

There is no such thing as saying "MINE" when it comes to missions

The word parachurch has been on my mind lately as I watch various evangelical groups wrestle over the role of the local church in global missions. I am glad to see the wrestling. Unfortunately, this wrestling often leads somebody to write or say, “The local church is the owner of missions.”

Let me preface this by noting that the Bible doesn’t explicitly use the concept of "owning" missionary work in the way we might think of ownership today, like a local church, organization or individual claiming control over it. Instead, it frames missionary work (obeying the command of Jesus to disciple the nations) as a calling and/or responsibility given by God to all believers, guided by the Holy Spirit. For whatever reason, though, we in modern times seem to gravitate toward this concept of the local church owning missions.

Unfortunately, local church ownership is not what we see in scripture. It might be a good organizational principle, but we don’t see Paul telling churches that they are in charge of missions and that he should take a back seat.

Yes, the church most certainly owns missions. The local church, as in individual congregations, do not. They should own the calling God has given them, but the blanket statement is not helpful. Sloppy ecclesiology, in which we use the term “church” and “local church” gets us into trouble. When we read the scriptures, we should be careful to distinguish the differences between passages which are about the local church and those which refer to those who are believers, what we commonly call “the church universal.” We might even use the term “church visible” if by it we mean all believers (though that term has also been somewhat abused and has its own issues in this context).

The word “parachurch” is more of a polemic than a descriptor. A common definition of the parachurch is that it functions “outside” or “alongside” of the church. If we instead defined the parachurch as functioning outside or alongside an expression of a local church, that would be fine. But we rarely make this distinction clear. What we often refer to as the parachurch is the church but not the local church. It is made up of believers who are a part of the church. Most often they are focused on a ministry purpose that is not contained inside the ministry of a single, local church.

Was Paul and his missionary band a local church? No, they were not. Their mission was the establishment of local congregations, not to be one themselves. I suppose that they functioned like a local church when they first started the church planting process. Their membership as a team reflected different local churches. Paul was from a different church than Timothy or Barnabas. They banded together for a ministry purpose.

In the pages of the New Testament, we can observe this missionary team as the primary means of mission. The best biblical analog to the missionary team is today’s denominational missionary entities, missionary agencies, and other specialized teams formed to carry out Jesus’ command to disciple the nations. To be sure, these entities are far more complex than the simple missionary team of the first century. They are “institutions” with the pros and cons of being such (they are not unlike many of our local church in this way). Yet, the missionary team as a structure distinct from the local church is most certainly a New Testament concept. These teams are a part of God’s people, his church.

My primary issue with the word parachurch is that it is most often used to denote a distinction from the local church. In doing so, we are suggesting that these entities are not a part of God’s church. If we said, “para-local-church” that would be fine. Since we don’t define this more succinctly, the word parachurch lends itself to denoting something perhaps unintended.

It becomes polemical when the term parachurch is used to express some sort of authority or ownership on the part of the local church regarding mission. The New Testament offers little evidence that early churches exercised authority over missionary teams. The closest we come to this is when Paul submits to a church council (councils are yet another form of biblical organization which is not a local church). Note that Paul the missionary most often confronts and corrects church leaders, not the other way around.

In modern times, with the advent of the personal support raising model as well as the denominational missionary agency, churches have been emboldened to exercise authority over field teams. I think this is mostly a money issue. They are funding the work. This is fair. This is not necessarily a model of governance we find in the Bible, but a donor should have the right to fund what they want and withhold funding when they do not like what is happening.

This funding system has also led to the muting of missionary input into local churches. The local church today, just as in Paul’s day, is sometimes in need of correction. Missionaries rarely correct local churches. Could it be that they are fearful of losing funding?

Of course, missions institutions sometimes abuse the relationships they have with local churches. Great progress has been in educating these institutions about the need to engage and respect the local church (Missio Nexus, the organization I lead, has been involved in this effort for some years). Larger missions organizations have entire teams devoted to partnering well with local churches (both in the sending and receiving spheres of mission). Yet just recently I heard about a church being run over by an agency (no, this agency is not a Missio Nexus member - if it was I would be on the phone with them, but I have been explicitly uninvited from weighing in on this situation). Human nature, combined with institutionalization, means these problems will always be with us, so addressing them will be an ongoing concern.

All of this is to say we need to stop arguing about who owns missions. We all do.