The charge is familiar, and often meant seriously: if the local church were doing its job, parachurch ministries would not need to exist. In an essay for The Gospel Coalition, Nathan Mayo answers that the parachurch is not evidence of the church's failure but of something else — the way God's commands naturally generate institutions beyond the family, the congregation and the state.
Mayo distinguishes between institutions God ordains and institutions that emerge from his commands. The family, the local church and the government are ordained: Scripture gives each of them a measure of structure and mandate. Other institutions arise because the commands themselves require them. The command to work produced businesses; the command to pass knowledge to the next generation produced schools; the command to care for the sick produced hospitals; the command to care for the poor, widows, orphans and strangers produced charities; and the Great Commission produced mission boards, publishing houses and Bible translation agencies. He notes that the distinction resembles Abraham Kuyper's idea of sphere sovereignty.
The essay is careful about limits. Ordained institutions have distinct mandates, and overeager nonprofits can intrude on the duties of the family or the local church — Paul tells Timothy that the church should not support a widow who has family able to do so. But in general, Mayo argues, emergent institutions are legitimate and complementary rather than competing. He presses the point further: once a for-profit enterprise is no longer treated as the congregation's failure, the line between a kingdom-minded business and a kingdom-minded nonprofit becomes fuzzy. "The tax structure doesn't determine the theological validity of the enterprise," he writes.
For free-church readers, the argument touches a live question. Congregations that govern themselves and guard their independence have often been wary of outside agencies, and some of the sharpest disputes in evangelical history have been over whether a mission board or a publishing society helps the church or displaces it. Mayo's answer is that the question is not whether the church should replace the parachurch, but whether God's people will build every institution needed to accomplish his will. "The more the church does its job," he writes, "the more local congregations there will be, the more nonprofits there will be, and the more redemptive businesses there will be."
Source: The Gospel Coalition — thegospelcoalition.org
