Darrell Guder on parachurch ministries

“A further evidence of the reductionism of the church and its mission that must issue from a reductionist gospel is the emergence in postmodern Western Christianity of organizations whose sole activity is evangelism.

Such entrepreneurial organizations are often called para-churches.  This nomenclature originally meant that they were Christian ministry organizations “next to” the established and traditional forms of the church.  Although that definition is still valid, there is a prophetically accurate reduction in the prefix, since it implies that the evangelistic mission of the church can be separated out from the rest of the institutional church and function as its own distinctive ministry.

That works of course, when the gospel one proclaims evangelistically is reduced to the individual, the personal and the private. Although many evangelistic movements stress the need for the Christian to become part of a “local church”, their own calling to “save souls” as separate from “call to faithful witness” shows how readily a reduced gospel comes to be taken as all the gospel.”

Darrell Guder: The Continuing Conversion of the Church, p136

This is an interesting addition to recent posts on parachurch ministries, except I would just like to add one thought – my experience is that often parachurch ministries practice holistic ministry and community better than what would traditionally be called “local churches”.

Guder point though is that mission cannot and should not be separated from a local community.  Mission in community and through community is God’s primary context for mission.

~ by John on April 16, 2009.