The parachurch is the church doing the church’s work.
An emerging body of work on parachurch theology, the recovery of the diaconate, and what it actually means to lead a mission-driven institution well.
Mission Administration is the working name for a body of thinking I’ve been carrying for the better part of three decades — through Fortune 500 operations, a hospital system presidency, and now from inside one of the world’s largest parachurch ministries.
The thesis is older than the work. It begins with a claim the modern Western Church has mostly forgotten: the parachurch is the church. Not adjacent to it. Not parallel to it. The church in dispersion, sent. And 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 Acts 6 could not have imagined.
These essays are the wide frame, in installments. Three are planned. The first is live below. Read it as the opening monologue of a longer conversation about how the body of Christ actually does her work in our particular moment.
The arc, in three essays.
One published. Two in the works.
Waiting on Tables
The parachurch is the church in dispersion. Her work is the church’s deacon ministry at industrial scale. The orphaning of the sector — by the church and by the parachurch herself — has to end.
Read the essayThe Parachurch is the Church
Going deep on the first thesis. The biblical case for a unified body, why the modern parachurch sector has come to live as an orphan, and what it would look like for the local church to receive her back as a member of her own.
Coming soonThe Recovery of the Diaconate
Going deep on the second thesis. Acts 6 read seriously, the medieval and Reformation history of the office, and what a recovered diaconate looks like for the parachurch administrator, the ministry CFO, and the executive pastor on Wednesday morning.
Coming soonIf this thinking is in your wheelhouse…
I work alongside parachurch boards, executive teams, and local-church leaders trying to close the gap between the body and her sent extensions. If your organization is wrestling with what it means to be the church doing the church’s work, that is worth a conversation.
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