Waiting on Tables.

I’m going to start where this question lives for me, which is somewhere in the middle of about thirty years of being a businessperson who is also a Christian. For most of those thirty years I have been told, gently and otherwise, that what I do for a living is not ministry, or really part of the church in any way; perhaps a “mission field” at best. My job is my job. My church is my church. The two meet at the door on Sunday morning, we shake hands, and then the rest of the week is mine to spend on what other people are willing to call my profession or my career or, if they are being charitable, my “calling.” But they do not usually mean by that word what the New Testament means by it. They mean a vocation in the secular sense.

I have never bought it. I want to say that plainly here at the start, because it is the seed of everything else this paper is trying to say. I have never bought it because the New Testament does not allow me to. Jesus, in His final prayer in John 17, asks His Father not to take His disciples out of the world but to send them into it. He says it again in John 20:

As the Father has sent me, so I send you John 20:21

The Great Commission is the same thing said again with feet on it. The church is gathered on Sunday and sent on Monday, and what she does on Monday is not a different thing from what she did on Sunday. One body. One mission. One work, distributed.

This is true for every Christian and for every Christian’s vocation. It is most acutely true, in the institutional sense, for the parachurch ministry world. The missionary agency, the campus ministry, the relief organization, the seminary, the sports ministry, the translation society. These organizations are the church, sent. They are not parallel. They are not adjacent. They are the church in another shape, in another place, doing the same Lord’s work. And yet for most of the modern era the parachurch sector has lived as something close to an orphan in the larger ecosystem of Christian life. Disconnected from the body she came out of. Suspicious of denominations. Defended against ecclesial accountability. Rarely received by the church she serves as one of her own.

This paper introduces two ideas at altitude. The first is that the parachurch is the church. The church in dispersion, to use Peter’s language. Sent. The second is that 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 that we struggle at times to see through the lens of Acts 6. Two more essays follow this one and will go into each idea in the depth it deserves. This paper is the wide frame.

Held together, the two ideas land on one observation that I want to make. The parachurch is the church doing the church’s diaconal work in places the gathered Sunday-morning congregation cannot reach. And the orphaning of the sector, by the church and by the parachurch herself, has to end. Both sides need a measure of repentance. The local church needs to recognize the parachurch as her own hands and feet, and the parachurch needs to come home to the church.

The parachurch is the church.

Paul, writing to the Corinthians, spends an entire chapter on the body. The body has many members but it is one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. The head cannot say to the feet, I have no need of you. He writes the chapter because the Corinthians were doing exactly that, tearing themselves apart over whose gift mattered, ranking the members, assuming that what looked least visible was least valuable. Two thousand years later we are still doing the thing he wrote that chapter to stop us from doing. We just do it institutionally now. We rank the local church above the parachurch. We rank the pastor above the layperson. We rank the proclamation ministry above the ministry of administration, mercy, hospitality, finance, technology, and operations. Worse yet, we set up private foundations and DAFs, we establish missions, visions even giving priorities and funding mechanisms without ever engaging the ecclesial church. And we tell ourselves we are not making a tier; we are simply describing how things are. Always pragmatic, profit maximizing and self glorifying. That’s the culture of the west for you. Paul knew that attitude. He knew it well.

I say the parachurch is part of the body. Not adjacent to it. Part of it. A man called by Christ to serve from inside the Fellowship of Christian Athletes is no less the church than the man called to serve from a pulpit. The widow who balances the books for a Bible translation agency is no less the church than the widow who teaches the women’s class on Sunday morning. Where the Lord has planted a believer to serve, He has planted the church. The man-made institutional shell does not change the spiritual fact.

This “body” theology gets bigger when Peter takes it into exile. When Peter writes his first letter, he is writing to a church in dispersion. The first verse sets the address:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the dispersion 1 Peter 1:1

He is writing to the church in the form she takes when she is sent out. Scattered. Among foreigners. Often in hostile territory. Mind you, we know that they were “sent out” because 1 Peter 1:2 tells us that this was done “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood.” They were sent. By chapter two the language has lifted to the highest pitch the New Testament reaches when it talks about who the gathered believers are: a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession. And then the kicker, two verses later:

Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that ... they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. 1 Peter 2:11--12

Notice what Peter just did. He took the highest theological titles available in the new covenant and applied them to people who, by the world’s accounting, did not belong anywhere. Driven from their homes. Aliens in the cities they were living in. The displaced and dispossessed of their world. Peter calls them a royal priesthood. The dispersion is not a problem to be solved by gathering them all back into one place. The dispersion is part of what makes them what they are. The church in exile is the church in action and at work. She is no less the church for it.

This is the seedbed of an ecclesiology the modern Western Christian imagination seems to have lost. The body of Christ does not require an institutional address or steeples and large parking lots, or stadium seating and designer coffee in order to exist. The church in the locker room with FCA staff is the church. The church in the courtroom with a Christian attorney is the church. The church in the office building with a Christian CFO is the church. A believer in finance at a for-profit company, shaping how the company treats its people, is the church. The walls of the human institutions matter less than the body of Christ that has been sent to inhabit them. The body transcends every shell she has been planted in. In other words, don’t miss the main event for the distraction of the side-show.

If the parachurch is the church, then the parachurch ought to behave like the church. She ought to exalt Christ in everything she does, not as a tagline but as an actual operating commitment. There are no line items in the church’s life that are not ministry. She ought to magnify the local church wherever she works, rather than competing with the local church for the attention, energy, and giving of the Christians she serves. The orphan dynamic does not run only one direction. Sometimes the parachurch is the orphan because the church will not receive her. Sometimes she is the orphan because she has refused to come home. Both, I believe, have to be repented of. And she ought to place herself in submission to the church wherever submission is practically possible. Admittedly, the denominational fragmentation of the modern Protestant world makes this very complicated, but the absence of a perfect option does not absolve us of the principle. The work of submission is then to be designed with intention: in the composition of the board, in the doctrinal commitments of the organization, in whether the staff are actually engaged in the local churches they belong to, and in the disposition the organization takes toward the local church when the two have to (or rightly should) make decisions together.

Outward structures are necessary, but they are downstream. The body has a head, and the head is Christ. The body submits to her head, or she has stopped being the body. The work of that submission begins in the heart of every believer who has been sent.

The absence of submission is so culturally invisible to us we miss it. In Western, particularly American, Christian culture we have absorbed a pattern of self-presentation that runs almost exactly opposite to the one the New Testament asks for. We lead with our titles. We lead with our company names. We lead with our positions. We lead with our accomplishments. We meet a brother at a Christian conference and the first three sentences are about what each of us does for a living and where we sit in the org chart. The church we belong to, the elders who care for our souls, the husband Christ is to His bride... These come up later if at all, sometimes only when the small talk has run dry. Repeated tens of thousands of times, the pattern produces something like Christian anarchy: a rejection, often barely conscious, of the church’s authority, and an assertion, also often barely conscious, of our own independence.

This shows up in our generation in specific places. The parachurch leader who treats his organization as if it were the gospel center of the universe. The Christian who builds a personal ministry and brand functionally separate from any local congregation’s life. The Christian start-up founder who has decided to “serve Christians” with a software product, as if the church were a market segment rather than the bride of Christ. A market to be won rather than a body he is a member of and accountable to. The pattern is the same in each case. The institution becomes the identity. The accomplishment becomes the self. The head shrinks. And in His shrinking we have, without ever putting words to it, dethroned Jesus.

The New Testament has a specific corrective for this. Paul opens half a dozen of his letters by introducing himself as a doulos, a slave of Christ. Not a freelancer. Not a founder. A slave. The word in the first century did not have the residual romance the English word “servant” sometimes carries. A doulos was owned. A doulos was at the disposal of his master. The chief identity Paul wanted to convey in the new humanity Christ is creating was not apostle, not Pharisee, not Roman citizen, not theologian, not church-planter. It was doulos. There is an image in the ancient world that captures this: the under-rower in the lower deck of a Greek galley. The man who pulled the oar. The man who could not see where the ship was going, only trust that the captain on the deck above could. Paul in 2 Timothy 4 says he is being “poured out like a drink offering.” Nothing reserved. Christ in His final prayer in John 17 asked for the unity of His people, that they may be one even as the Father and the Son are one. The doulos posture is what makes that unity visible, because in a body of slaves of one Master there is, finally, no place left for the founder-self to stand on.

Her work, in very large part, is the church’s deacon ministry.

The seed text I want to focus on is Acts 6. The Jerusalem church faced its first administrative crisis. The Greek-speaking widows in the community were being overlooked in the daily food distribution. I won’t get into all of the cultural reasons why, but the apostles called the disciples together, made a proposal, and the church chose seven men full of the Spirit and wisdom to take the work on. The apostles laid hands on them and prayed. And then Luke writes the verse nobody quite knows what to do with:

So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith Acts 6:7

The administrative solution did not enable ministry. The administrative solution was ministry. And the result was gospel growth.

The linguistic point is the foundation, and most popular readings of Acts 6 miss it. The Greek verb at the heart of the passage is diakoneō, to serve. It is the verb from which we get diakonia, ministry, and diakonos, deacon. In Acts 6 it governs both activities. The apostles describe their own work as the diakonia of the word. They describe the work being handed to the seven as to diakonein the tables. Same root. Same word family. The text seems to establish a tier, but more importantly it establishes a complementarity --- two distributions of the same ministry of the church, given to two different groups of people because the apostles cannot do both well at the same time. The story is not about freeing up the real ministers to do the real ministry by handing the lesser stuff to the helpers. The story is that the same gospel work has two shapes and both work together to produce gospel fruit.

I want to be careful with the language here, because deacon ministry and the church’s overarching mission are not exactly the same thing, but they work together of course. The mission, given by Christ in the Great Commission, is to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them everything He commanded. That mission falls on every member of the body. Deacons make disciples. Elders make disciples. Word ministry makes disciples. Table ministry makes disciples. The mission is one. What Acts 6 names is something narrower than the mission. It names a vocational division of labor inside the body. The apostles took the ministry of the word. The seven took the ministry of tables. Both were doing the mission. The two job categories were different and frankly, scale could not be achieved without it. Could it be that even greater scale of the church requires even greater and more sophisticated divisions of labor?

Interestingly, the parachurch sector houses both. Some parachurch organizations fill what is, in vocational terms, mostly word-ministry roles, like campus ministries that disciple students directly, evangelistic associations that proclaim the gospel publicly, missionaries who plant churches where they did not exist before. Calling those workers deacons perhaps stretches the category past its useful shape. Other parachurch organizations are obviously diaconal in their vocation: relief agencies, translation societies, the administrative apparatus that sends and supports the missionaries. And inside almost every parachurch organization, regardless of which side of the line its primary work falls on, there is a substantial diaconal layer doing the operational work that holds the mission together. The proverbial trellis for the vine if you will. The agency that sends the missionary may not itself be doing word ministry, but it is, very clearly, doing diaconal work in service of the mission. So when I say a great deal of the parachurch sector is the church’s deacon ministry at scale, I do not mean every parachurch worker is a deacon. I mean that the diaconal vocation, in the technical Acts 6 sense, fills a much larger share of the sector’s work than we have been willing to name. And that the rest of the sector still depends on the diaconal vocation underneath it to function at all.

Notice what the apostles asked for in the seven. Not credentials. Not operational competence. Not previous experience in food distribution. Not a CPA. They asked for men full of the Spirit and wisdom. They asked for spiritual character. The work, though its medium was material, was spiritual work. You cannot serve the church’s tables faithfully without the Spirit, because you cannot make the daily judgment calls about who is favored and who is overlooked, what is sufficient and what is excess, what is a fair vendor expense and what is a creeping invoice, without the wisdom only the Spirit gives. The character of the person was the primary qualification for the work. We have lost this. The modern church and the modern parachurch both hire ministry administrators for their MBAs and their CPAs and their nonprofit references. Those things are not bad, but they are not what Acts 6 asked for. The Spirit-filled woman doing the books for the missionary care fund this morning is doing the work the apostles entrusted to Spirit-filled men in Jerusalem in the year 33. Her spiritual formation is just as relevant to her work as her credentials are.

There are biblical figures who shape this vocation as much as the seven do. Aaron and Hur, in Exodus 17, hold up Moses’ arms while Joshua fights the Amalekites in the valley below. The text is plain about the mechanics. When Moses’ arms went down, the battle turned against Israel. When his arms stayed up, Israel prevailed. Moses could not hold them up alone. Aaron and Hur stood on either side and held them up until sunset. The man at the front of the battle is the one whose name is sung. The two men holding up his arms are the reason there is a song. That is diaconal work in its simplest form. That is the parachurch administrator on Wednesday morning auditing the books. The pattern repeats through scripture. Joseph, an administrator in Pharaoh’s house. Daniel, an administrator in Nebuchadnezzar’s and Darius’s. Nehemiah, an administrator under Artaxerxes before he becomes a builder of walls. Erastus, “the city treasurer,” in the closing of Romans. God plants administrative servants of His purposes inside structures that are not the church at all and uses them there. The parachurch administrator inside a 21st-century nonprofit is in good biblical company. He has just stopped recognizing the company he is in.

Stephen and Philip are the proof that the diaconal office is not a lesser one. Stephen, the church’s first martyr, after a sermon that fills most of Acts 7. Philip, the evangelist who carries the gospel to Samaria and to the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. The seven were Spirit-filled servants whose ministry of administration sometimes flowed into further ministries of word and witness. The Reformation knew this, briefly. Calvin in Geneva organized his deacons to administer the city’s hospital, manage poor relief, and oversee the wave of refugees who flooded the city in the mid-1500s. He gave them ecclesiastical office, ordination, and dignity equal in kind to the pastoral office. The medieval church had largely lost the original function of the diaconate, reducing it to a liturgical stepping-stone on the way to the priesthood. Calvin recovered the office because he read Acts 6 the way the text actually reads. The recovery did not last.

Now I want to push the argument one step farther. The framing so far has been about the administrative work inside parachurch organizations. That is true, but it is too narrow. The bigger truth is that the parachurch organizations themselves are, in very large part, modern deacon ministry. The whole organization. Not the back office of it. Look at what most parachurch ministries actually do for a living. They feed the hungry. They translate scripture. They care for orphans. They host athletes at camps. They run hospitals. They administer aid in places the local church cannot reach. They support pastors. They train leaders. They publish books. They build software for ministry teams. They run radio networks. They steward billions of dollars of donor trust to make sure those dollars reach the people they were given for. Read the list against Acts 6 and the categories line up. These are the church’s tables. Tables a single congregation could never set on her own. The parachurch sector has, in effect, become an industrial-scale extension of the diaconal work the seven were appointed to in Jerusalem. The legal shells are real in human terms. They are also, theologically, almost beside the point. The deacon ministry underneath them is what the work actually is.

I want to be careful here, because the move I am making can be misread. I am not advocating that the Protestant parachurch sector should now place itself under the centralized governance of any institutional church. I am not calling for a canonical structure to be retrofitted over Protestant ministries. I am naming a theological reality. The parachurch is the church’s deacon ministry at scale. That is true regardless of whether human institutions ever acknowledge it in their charters. Human-contrived structures may or may not recognize this fact. The Body of Christ is one body either way. There is one tradition worth mentioning briefly, only as an illustration that the connection has been held somewhere. The Roman Catholic Church has, for generations, kept its parachurch-equivalents ecclesially attached: Catholic Charities, the Catholic hospital systems, religious orders that run schools and missions, diocesan-level relief and education arms. I should know, I served as the President of one of their many hospital systems. Many operate with formal canonical ties to the church that established them. I am Protestant, and I am not advocating the canonical machinery that holds those structures together. I am pointing to it as evidence that the connection between the church and her diaconal extensions can be held, has been held, and is being held somewhere right now. The instinct and the posture can be recovered.

The orphan in the room.

Set the two ideas next to each other and you get a particular kind of organizational orphan. The parachurch is the church doing the church’s diaconal work, and the church and the parachurch have, between them, mostly forgotten this. The local church looks at the parachurch and sees an outside organization. Useful, sometimes. Inspiring, sometimes. A drain on volunteers and donor dollars, sometimes. But almost never received as another expression of the same body sent to a place the local church cannot reach. The man on staff at a campus ministry, when he is in his own congregation on Sunday, is the man who works for an organization, the way the man who sells insurance is the man who works for an insurance company. His vocation has been theologically airlocked from his church identity. His pastor does not pray for his Tuesday meetings the way he prays for the missionary’s flight. His elders do not lay hands on him before he travels. His congregation does not commission him for the work, even though the work is exactly the kind of work the New Testament knew how to commission people for.

The parachurch, on the other side, has internalized the orphan status and learned to operate accordingly. She has built parallel structures of governance, theological accountability, pastoral care, and community, often because the church she was theologically part of was offering none of those things. The parachurch did not, in most cases, set out to operate as an autonomous parallel institution. She became one. Partly by neglect on the church’s side, partly by drift on her own, partly by the simple force of institutional self-preservation. And the administrators inside the parachurch, the people doing the diaconal work, have absorbed the orphan posture most fully of all. They do not call what they do ministry. They do not understand themselves as deacons. Local church elders do not lay hands on them as the apostles laid hands on the seven. They show up on Wednesday morning to do work that, in any earlier era of the church, would have been done with ecclesiastical office, theological dignity, and ordained accountability. They do it now in a corporate office park, on a software stack, under a board that may have no pastors on it, with a job title borrowed from the secular for-profit world. They do it well. But they do it without the framework that would name what they are actually doing.

I have lived inside this orphaning. I have been a businessperson in mission organizations and in the for-profit world. I have served in large enterprises and in small ones. I have spent years building administrative super-highways for ministry teams whose proclamation I will never share a stage with. And I have lived, all along, inside a Christian culture that did not know what to do with my vocation. It did not know whether to call it ministry. It did not know whether to receive me as a deacon. It was, mostly, polite about my work. It was rarely formed by it. The result, for me and for thousands of others, has been a quiet, persistent suspicion that the Church does not really see us, that we are doing some kind of holy work in a place the Church does not quite acknowledge as holy. That is the orphaning. The deepest layer of it is the layer named in the doulos passage above: the slave who has forgotten he is a slave and started introducing himself by his title. The orphan condition and the founder-self are the same wound. The recovery is the same recovery. We are slaves of one Lord. We belong to one body. The body has a head. We come home by remembering all three.

A hopeful example.

Let me give you a concrete example of what coming home can look like. When I transitioned into a full-time executive role at a large parachurch ministry, I sat down with the pastors and elders of my local church and asked if they would consider ordaining me, rather than having the parachurch do it. The reasoning was simple. They were the men who had cared for my soul. They were the body I belonged to in flesh and blood. The work I was about to do was, in my mind, work I was being sent to do by them, not work that severed me from them. They were glad to do it. They ordained me, commissioned me, and sent me. I now meet with them on a regular cadence, for accountability, for prayer, for discipleship, for the steady ordinary care of my soul that the parachurch role does not give me and was not designed to give me. And to bring a level of accountability and discipline to the parachurch ministry that would otherwise not exist.

That is what the connection looks like in one life. It is not complicated. The local church recognized me as one of her own and sent me. The parachurch received me as a sent member of someone else’s local body. Both institutions held the relationship together because both of them understood, in the language of this paper, that I was the church being sent. The arrangement is replicable. It scales. It is, I would argue, what most parachurch staff in healthy churches should be doing, and what most of the local churches that send them should be offering. Examples like this exist already, in pockets, more than I would have guessed before I started looking for them. The recovery is not theoretical. It is happening. It can be multiplied.

The next two essays in this series go into each of the ideas above in the depth they deserve. In the meantime, the word of God still spreads. The number of disciples still increases. Some of that increase, more than the modern church remembers, comes through the Wednesday-morning work of those who wait on the contemporary equivalent of tables. They deserve to know what they are doing. The Church deserves to receive them as what they are. And the institutions that house their work deserve to be built, and rebuilt where necessary, to make the connection real. Mission Administration is not a new category. It is an old one. I aim to recover it.

— Brandon Harvath