Thursday, February 23, 2006
Doing Parachurch
CT's Leadership blog posted Tuesday on the parachurch. He wonders about their value and if he has found the "perfect" one.
I'll speak from my personal experience. Young Life was founded to help move kids into church, but in the end, they just stay in Young Life. Instead of the bridge it was intended to be, Young Life has become a destination. I think the same will happen with this organization the author has encountered. Why?
Organizations have an organic element to them and as such they seek to survive. Had Young Life done it's mission as it intended, it would have become invisible and perhaps even worked itself out of a job. That is to say, the church would have absorbed the functions Young Life had performed as it grew and gained the experience of those that came through Young Life. Young Life had to become a destination to survive.
The same will be true for WGA. Let's face it, it's mission is to teach the church what it knows, but once the church knows it, there will be no need for WGA. So, I think, inevitably, WGA will start to do the actual functions it is supposed to be training the church to do. Oh, maybe it will do them in "partnership" with a congregation, using facilities and so forth, but it will remain distinctivly WGA, it will seek its own survival.
Given that the leading edge of evangelical churches look more and more like the parachurch of yesteryear, I truly wonder if the church as we know it will survive. Sometimes I wonder if we will eventualy become some sort of parachurch marketplace where individual Christians pick the boutique faith service of thier choice for this week. There are a lot of churches that operate as just such a marketplace now - the church lacks a singular identity and is instead and umbrella under which various "ministries" function.
Hmmm, I wonder if that is what Barna is saying in his latest book? Need to read that.
The parachurch, in any form, increases the rate of decline of the church in general.
We are called to be a community of faith, not consumers of specific faith services. Good churches seek to be defined by the people within them, not the organizations they are -- that is the only way to avoid the idolatry that typically ensues.
I do love the mission of Young Life - it is a call I feel on my heart to this day, more years later than I was old when I worked for them. But oh how I long to do that mission in the context of the church. You see, we do not need a bridge into the church, we need a door.
Related Tags: church, parachurch, Young Life, Chritianity Today, Leadership Blog, Out of Ur
It is not my intention to pick on any organization, but just to wonder aloud. If all of the Younglife leaders in America served in local churches? youth ministries would that be better? If the thousands of volunteers who put on Promise Keepers and Women of Faith events invested those energies in their local churches, would the men and women of their church experience a greater impact? I don?t know, but I wonder.Needless to say, as an old parachurch hand, I have thought about this a lot. I certainly think the "alongside" model of parachurch is prefereable to the distinct and separate model, but in the end, I think it is not where we should be.
[...]
Certainly they are tackling a tough area that many churches have a difficult time handling. However, if you search their website and other materials you will find statements like this: "WGA comes alongside the church to help it minister to people with sexual and relational conflicts." And they mean it too. They regularly have workshops and seminars for ministry professionals on how to address sexuality in their churches.
It was at one of these seminars that I heard a line that changed my perspective on parachurch ministry. The leader of the workshop said, "Our hope is that we would be able to have enough of an influence on the local churches and their leaders in Denver that we would go out of business sometime in the future. The local church would be addressing the sexuality of their people as well as we could."
I'll speak from my personal experience. Young Life was founded to help move kids into church, but in the end, they just stay in Young Life. Instead of the bridge it was intended to be, Young Life has become a destination. I think the same will happen with this organization the author has encountered. Why?
Organizations have an organic element to them and as such they seek to survive. Had Young Life done it's mission as it intended, it would have become invisible and perhaps even worked itself out of a job. That is to say, the church would have absorbed the functions Young Life had performed as it grew and gained the experience of those that came through Young Life. Young Life had to become a destination to survive.
The same will be true for WGA. Let's face it, it's mission is to teach the church what it knows, but once the church knows it, there will be no need for WGA. So, I think, inevitably, WGA will start to do the actual functions it is supposed to be training the church to do. Oh, maybe it will do them in "partnership" with a congregation, using facilities and so forth, but it will remain distinctivly WGA, it will seek its own survival.
Given that the leading edge of evangelical churches look more and more like the parachurch of yesteryear, I truly wonder if the church as we know it will survive. Sometimes I wonder if we will eventualy become some sort of parachurch marketplace where individual Christians pick the boutique faith service of thier choice for this week. There are a lot of churches that operate as just such a marketplace now - the church lacks a singular identity and is instead and umbrella under which various "ministries" function.
Hmmm, I wonder if that is what Barna is saying in his latest book? Need to read that.
The parachurch, in any form, increases the rate of decline of the church in general.
We are called to be a community of faith, not consumers of specific faith services. Good churches seek to be defined by the people within them, not the organizations they are -- that is the only way to avoid the idolatry that typically ensues.
I do love the mission of Young Life - it is a call I feel on my heart to this day, more years later than I was old when I worked for them. But oh how I long to do that mission in the context of the church. You see, we do not need a bridge into the church, we need a door.
Related Tags: church, parachurch, Young Life, Chritianity Today, Leadership Blog, Out of Ur
