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What’s wrong with Para-Church?
By Steve Tibbert
King’s Church Catford, London, UK
Mission must take centre stage in the life of a local church. This is my conviction, that we must build mission-focused communities and avoid any separation between normal church life and our mission agenda. This historical separation has led to an increasingly pastoral church and an ever increasing number of para-church organisations.
A few years ago, on my sabbatical, I looked at apostolic ministry in the New Testament. I attempted to look at the New Testament in the context of mission. As Thomas Schreiner says in his book Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ, ‘The apostle Paul wrote in the context of mission.’ I enjoyed retracing the steps of the apostolic bands through the book of Acts and the letters that were written in response to the challenge of embryonic churches being established. What a joy, with no deadline or the pressure of the next sermon hanging over me!
This overview approach underlined to me that the atmosphere of the New Testament is full of missionary zeal. The promise of the Spirit in Acts 1 is with the purpose of giving believers power to be witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. When the Spirit comes in Acts 2 and Peter preaches the gospel, he does not focus on the manifestations or the fact that it made them feel good. Rather, we have Luke’s wonderful summary phrase, ‘the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved’. The Jerusalem-based church was full of evangelistic fervour. The book of Acts is filled with gospel-preaching, Spirit-empowered witness, church planting, signs and wonders, gospel breakthrough, and times of huge challenge and progress, all against the backdrop of persecution.
The prophetic burden of Restoration includes rediscovering the missionary zeal of the New Testament in everyday church life or, as the prophet Isaiah says, ‘It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth’ (Isa. 49:6). Restoration must go beyond the recovery of local church life; its ultimate purpose is to build churches that take the gospel into the local community and to the ends of the earth.
Mission-focused communities
With this passion to build mission-focused communities, I have a deep concern about the separation of what I deem to be normal church life and mission. My concern is to do with so called para-church organisations – mission-focused organisations disconnected from church life. I honestly believe that these organisations are set up with a desire to reach people for Christ, but while in the short/mid-term they see real evangelistic fruit, in the end they create a context where the local church feels little responsibility for mission.
Some of the most gifted, mission-focused leaders leave the local church to join a mission-focused para-church organisation, which consequently pushes the church into a more pastoral mode. The church wants to identify with the individual on mission out of friendship and a genuine heart for mission, so it funds the para-church activity, thereby reducing the inward investment to the local church. Then, when a mission organisation turns up in town to do a mission and people are saved, where do they end up? In an under-resourced pastorally-focused community. Those who make it through into discipleship see that this is the model presented in the local church: if you are serious about mission, you leave this place and join a para-church group, and so the cycle continues. Many times the new believer never wholeheartedly embraces church life as their allegiance is to the mission organisation through which they were saved.
University Christian Unions can be another example of such a separation. A close friend of mine enjoyed the CU at university but got disconnected from local church life, so that when university finished she was no longer involved in regular Sunday worship and for a number of months she stopped attending church. Fortunately I was able to encourage her back, but she was nearly lost to the church owing to, I believe, a separation between her Christian discipleship and church life. And so the pattern is repeated; the para-church organisations continue to do mission while the church in the land is primarily pastoral, and zealous believers find outlets outside the local church. We thus miss the point completely; the New Testament in no way separates mission and the local church. If we continue to operate outside a Biblical model, we fail to address the core issue, which is, how do we make local churches mission-focused?
Financial implications
Another example of this can be seen in Christian giving. Too often the local church is deprived of financial resources necessary to fulfil its God-given vision, not because Christians are not generous but because of an imbalance in their giving. According to the David Barrett annual survey, which was published in the January 05 issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 38% of all Christian giving worldwide goes to the local church and 62% to para-church organisations. While this imbalance continues we should not be surprised to find weak church life.
I am aware that such organisations as Wycliffe Bible Translators or Missionary Aviation Fellowship do specialist work that a local church cannot do; my concern is more with para-church organisations taking over the responsibilities of the local church. We must work to restore the church to its God-given purpose.
I agree with Howard Snyder in his paper to the Lausanne Congress when he said, ‘The Church is the only divinely-appointed means for spreading the gospel…further, evangelism makes little sense, divorced from the fact of the Christian community…The evangelistic call intends to call persons to the body of Christ – the community of believers, with Jesus Christ as its essential and sovereign head.’ Let’s not settle for second best. Let’s build mission-focused churches, joined in heart to apostolic ministry, so that together we can reach the nations.
I can sympathise with para-church leaders, or even the recent ‘emerging church’ leaders, in their desire to reach our generation and present Christ in a relevant way, and I understand their frustration with the lack of mission effectiveness in church life. However, my concern is with their solution to the problem. I once attended a meeting with a number of senior leaders in the nation to discuss the ‘emerging church’ phenomenon. To my dismay, while I sympathised with their analysis of church life in our country, I found the suggested solution frightening; it seemed to be based more on being culturally sensitive than on rediscovering New Testament Christianity. Let’s get to the root of the problem and build mission-focused communities, rather than try to build an alternative structure, which papers over the cracks.
Focused leadership
To build mission-focused communities requires sustained focused leadership in the local church. If we are to have integrity in challenging the role of para-church organisations, then we must continue to take a close look at ourselves to ensure that we are practising what we preach. Local churches have a tendency to drift towards a pastoral mode, taking their agenda from believers rather than the lost. During the last ten years of leading a local church based in South East London, we have transitioned the church to ensure that mission is the primary drive in all we do. (To be honest, when we started out, the church programme was built around my diary rather than a mission agenda!) As a consequence, and much to our delight, we are now seeing increasing numbers of people saved, and while I would love to report that we are seeing people saved and added daily, we can say that we are beginning to see people saved and added every week.
To build mission-focused communities we need to continue to grow in our understanding of apostolic ministry. I heartily commend David Devenish’s book What on Earth is the Church For? – a must read. He brilliantly illustrates apostolic ministry as not being a static serving of churches but something which catches churches up on mission together (page 71). I love the passage in Romans 15:23 and 24 when Paul says, ‘Since I have been longing for many years to see you, I plan to do so when I go to Spain. I hope to visit you while passing through and have you assist me on my journey there.’ He is already planning his next apostolic journey and boldly suggests to a church he has never visited that they should help him to get to Spain. We need to release and support those with clear apostolic gifting who can help draw us into the regions beyond our local reach. Our attitude should not be, ‘How can we be served?’ but rather, ‘How can we serve?’
We must continue to start new churches with believers reaching out to local communities. Also, our apostolic ministry and mission must have an international aspect to it. The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us; mission has to be lived out on the ground. I was struck recently by what Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 1:5, ‘…we lived among you for your sake.’ Our mission must be rooted in people’s lives, in our desire to see evangelistic breakthrough. We must continue to plant churches across our own land and to the ends of the earth. I am sure many of us will remember Peter and Susan Brooks and family standing at the Brighton Leadership Conference announcing their departure to Sydney, leaving a vibrant, 1,000-strong church to plant a new church, starting with 50 people. This needs to happen again and again.
The gift of the evangelist
We must also make space for the gift of the evangelist to shape our church life. Lex Loizides, based in Jubilee Church, Cape Town, South Africa but travelling internationally, has helped me so much on this. On a recent visit he made to King’s Church, Catford, we had planned a gospel healing meetings. I suggested 45 minutes of worship and then about 30 minutes’ preach and response. Lex laughed at me and said graciously, ‘Let’s do it this way – 20 minutes of worship, then testimony, words of knowledge, pray for the sick, preach the gospel, make an appeal, pray for the sick again.’ With all my desire to see gospel breakthrough, I had planned a meeting for believers!
The Front Edge weekend is an excellent model of intentional equipping of churches to be more mission-focused and effective. They have now been run in South Africa, UK and India. Another is planned for London on 20-21 May 2006, with 30-40 evangelists placed in local churches, preaching the gospel and praying for the sick.
Training emphases
To build mission-focused communities we need to ensure that we identify, recruit and train leaders to have mission focus and skills. Our training programmes should continue to be flexible in achieving our goal. Interestingly, in the latest edition of Quadrant magazine, Professor Leslie J Francis summarises his article by saying, ‘Once ministry in the UK becomes reconceptualised in terms of growing new churches…then the leadership qualities prized by the churches’ selection criteria may also need to be revisited.’ I could not agree more.
As the family of Newfrontiers continues to grow (we now have churches in 31 nations), we will increasingly begin to operate like a missionary society, in the sense that we will be an apostolic people, a sent community. But rather than sending our people to a particular para-church organisation, we will look to the overarching ministry of the apostolic to provide direction to our ever-increasing army of young disciples who have the nations of the earth on their hearts.
Some para-church organisations are aware of this phenomenon and Global Connections very graciously asked David Devenish to address them. As David records in his excellent book, ‘I was asked to speak about church-based mission. My brief was to be as controversial as possible and to raise the very real issue concerning whether there is a future for mission agencies, now that the local church is beginning to take on its responsibilities for world mission’ (What on Earth is the Church For?, David Devenish, Authentic 2005).
We still have much to learn, but I sense that the next generation may see a shift in relationship between so called para-church organisations and new church movements like Newfrontiers. While we still have much to learn from the vast experience of such organisations, I believe the relationship will be more of drawing from that experience than sending our people out through such organisations. A vision of the future would be church planters sent out from our family, overseen by apostolic ministry, while partnering with existing mission organisations for aspects of training in cultural awareness and language. But when it comes to church building, foundation laying, and leadership appointments, this would rest with the overarching apostolic ministry.
In conclusion, the thrust of my argument is that we must continue to look to a biblical model of church which in no way separates local church life and mission. Mission-based para-church 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. The lasting benefit of such mission is limited because, when evangelistic fruit ends up in local churches and these are weak, then weak disciples will be produced. As David Watson says in I believe in Evangelism, ‘If we fail to build individuals into the corporate life of the church we have missed the purpose of evangelism; it is one thing to reap, it is another to disciple and add.’
The local church must place the Great Commission central to its agenda, allowing the apostolic ministry to lift our eyes to the harvest field, and must model an integrated strategy of reaching the lost, caring for the poor and training and sending leaders, with such generosity that many who have given up on the church will return. God is looking for such communities to emerge in our generation. Let us build them, to His glory. |
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