In a sense, Massachusetts Bay Colony was North America’s first parachurch ministry. According to its 1629 charter, “The principal end of this plantation” was to “win and incite the natives . . . to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith.”[1] The colony even marked this missionary purpose on its official seal, which depicts a Native American man begging someone to “come over and help us.”
Like modern-day parachurch ministries, the colonial attempt to convert non-Christians proceeded first through a form of “pre-evangelism.” Rather than preach the gospel directly to the Native American population, Puritans from New England colonies like Massachusetts Bay created “praying towns” where Indigenous Americans could first be “civilized” so that they might be amenable to the Christian gospel. Indeed, as one historian puts it, “Merely living in a town was seen to be a significant step on the way to becoming Europeanized Christians.”[2]
According to the early American Christian missionaries, this was the essential order of things. One of them, Thomas Shepard, declared the following:
What more hopeful way of doing them good then by cohabitation in such Townes, neare unto good examples, and such as may be continually whetting upon them, and dropping into them of the things of God? what greater meanes at least to civilize them?[3]
Perhaps the most famous among their number, John Eliot, argued that Native Americans must “have visible civility before they can rightly enjoy visible sanctities in ecclesiastical communion.” As Eliot’s biographer and contemporary Cotton Mather put it, evangelism of the New World’s “heathens” was a “double work”—the missionary needed “to make Men of them, e’er he could hope to see them Saints; they must be civilized e’er they could be Christianized.”[4]
In praying towns, Native Americans were taught English, reading, manners, and other English customs thought necessary to become a Christian. One such town was established in modern-day Cambridge, Massachusetts, and would eventually become the site of the short-lived Indian College affiliated with Harvard College. In an effort led by John Eliot, the Indian College’s press printed the first translation of the Bible into a Native American language before the college closed in 1693. In the end, there was much more interest in the project from Christian colonists than from the Native Americans they sought to convert, an embarrassment made evident by the lack of any students to teach upon the school’s initial opening in the 1640s.
Even when Native Americans were interested in learning English customs, the adoption of those customs did not inevitably give way to the adoption of Christianity. A Native American man might learn to use fork and knife in the English manner but that did not mean he always went on to take bread and wine at the Lord’s Table. What the praying town had to offer in terms of language, skills, and profitable relationships was sometimes seen as sufficient, even apart from the Christian faith these missionaries hoped that it would lead to. And racism likely played a part in fomenting cynicism toward the genuineness of Native American conversions, even as such cynicism was not entirely misplaced given all the material advantages that came from going along with these early missionary efforts.
Although the praying towns set the general pattern of Christian evangelism in the New World, they were not without at least one notable critic. In “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution,” Roger Williams would denounce this mode of operation:
The ordinances and discipline of Christ Jesus, though wrongfully and profanely applied to natural and unregenerate men, may cast a blush of civility and morality upon them . . . [yet] the misapplication of ordinances to unregenerate and unrepentant persons hardens up their souls in a dreadful sleep and dream of their own blessed estate, and sends millions of souls to hell in a secure expectation of a false salvation.[5]
In other words, Williams was arguing that civilization and Christianity were two separate things, and to confuse them would have eternal consequences for the very people that the missionaries hoped to save. Those in the praying towns might be brought into the English way of life, but they would still be damned to hell.
The earliest parachurch campus ministries operated under a similar logic to the colonial praying towns. The first of these groups emerged in 1877, just a few years after restrictions were lifted on the presence and professorship of non-Anglicans at the University of Cambridge, as Christian students began to meet as part of a nascent version of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). These students were not united by membership within the Church of England but in a shared status as students. The term parachurch would not emerge with any rigor for another century, but IVCF and later organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ (founded in 1951) represented a subtle but important shift from an earlier pattern of sodalities, like monasteries and missionary societies, which had already been operating for more than a millennium to complement the ordinary functions of official church structures (e.g. churches and dioceses).
Sodalities, which depended upon those church structures and were composed of their members, can be thought of as superchurch organizations, performing activities beyond (“super-”) the explicit ministries of the church, as opposed to parachurch organizations that exist alongside (“para-”) churches, doing churchlike things without presupposing any kind of explicit relationships with specific churches.[6] Unlike the older model, in which evangelism efforts emerged out of the collaborations of the members of a specific church body (e.g., Jesuit missionaries sent by the Roman Catholic Church), Cambridge’s parachurch ministry emerged out of the members of a specific student body. In this new model, foreshadowed in the praying towns of colonial New England, Christian practices like evangelism were dislocated from the official structures of specific churches.[7]
The first consistent usage of the term parachurch appears in Alan Walker’s 1975 work, The New Evangelism. Walker, an Australian theologian involved in the creation of the World Council of Churches, argued that he had “become convinced of the value, as an evangelical method, of the parachurch,” which he defined as “a halfway church, not half a church.”[8] His reasoning followed that of Eliot, Shepard, and others like them in attempting to bring the gospel to a population indifferent to its message:
The simple fact is that masses of people now in many societies are so far removed from the Christian church that it is unlikely that they will suddenly enter into its buildings or become part of its worship or its fellowship. There must be some way by which stepping stones or a bridge may be built over which people living beyond the church may move to accept its fellowship. By creating parachurch activities such a way can develop.[9]
Like the praying towns centuries beforehand, this was a two-part evangelistic exercise, or as Walker described it, “the opportunity of offering fellowship at two levels.” Christians can “create the fellowship of the parachurch and seek to serve the community by offering places and activities of interest to all people. Through such centers and organizations interpersonal relationships can be fashioned.” And then, at the other level, “the church can offer to those who have a common faith in Jesus Christ a deeper richness of fellowship.” But importantly, the parachurch was conceived as a stepping stone to deeper fellowship, unlike the earlier sodalities, which involved a further commitment for those already officially belonging to the church. That is, the parachurch model assumed something like Eliot’s “double work”: one could faithfully respond to the preaching of the gospel in a parachurch, but further action and relocation were still necessary to become a Christian member of a church. But unlike in Eliot’s time, today, the necessity of that second work of church membership has often been forgotten or elided.
This new ordo salutis for the parachurch could already be seen more than a decade earlier in Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru)’s Four Spiritual Laws.[10] First promoted by Cru founder Bill Bright in 1959, the Four Spiritual Laws is a technique for sharing the gospel with unbelievers. And although Bright’s laws speak of God’s plan for our lives, the sin that separates us from God, Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf, and the need to be saved by receiving Christ in faith, the Four Spiritual Laws make no mention of the church. They are a way of turning someone into a Christian without ever once putting him or her into a church.
That said, the booklet that eventually replaced the informal teaching included a short section on the church at the very end, after a section entitled “Suggestions for Christian Growth.” Even there, however, church was not to be pursued because it is an essential safeguard of the gospel but much more practically because “God’s Word admonishes us not to forsake ‘the assembling of ourselves together’” and because just as “several logs burn brightly together . . . so it is with your relationship with other Christians.”[11]
Distaste for these developments could come across as no more than high church snobbery were it not for the concerning statistics associated with the parachurch inversion of the historic order of authority and outreach. As James Engel observes, “during 1976 and 1977 [Cru] undertook an ambitious effort to mobilize churches and utilize all forms of media to ‘saturate’ some 250 metropolitan areas in the United States with the claims of Christ.” That effort was successful in changing the internal life and culture of the churches involved, but it was a dismal failure in other ways. Although more than half a million people “indicated they had received Christ . . . fewer than 3 percent [of them] became church members as a result.” Engel went on to worry that the parachurch was replacing the local church. The parachurch “is called to work along side the local church without being a direct part of it,” he wrote, but “there has been a tendency for the parachurch organization to dominate the local church and thereby overstep its bounds.”[12]
An important contemporary examination of church-attendance patterns, The Great Dechurching, found more encouraging numbers in support of campus ministries. Those who were involved in such a ministry during college were “more than three times as likely to stay in church after college.” As the authors explain, “The work campus ministers are doing is vital and must be supported.” And yet, the specific form of involvement in campus ministry is also directly correlated with later church attendance. Congregation-based college ministries were the most effective in driving church attendance later in life—those involved were five times as likely to stay in church after college. Likewise, if you participated in such a ministry, like the Presbyterian Church in America’s Reformed University Fellowship, you were twice as likely to attend church after college compared to someone who attended a campus ministry (e.g., IVCF or Cru) but not a church.[13]
In The Great Dechurching, one of the authors, Jim Davis, brings this point home with an anecdote about the first several years of his ministry in Europe with a parachurch organization: “Hundreds of students were exposed to the gospel and involved in [their] ministry. But today I am not aware of a single person native to that country who is any closer to Jesus because of our work there.” The problem was that the ministry wasn’t “connected to any local church. . . . We were a ‘parachurch’ ministry that wasn’t actually coming alongside any church.”[14]
But what Engel and the authors of The Great Dechurching miss in their analysis is that this tendency is not a temptation of the parachurch but something innate to its inversion of the structure of the sodality. When the church is an afterthought—a “second decision beyond modality membership,” as Ralph Winter puts it—there is no reason why those converted in the parachurch should not stay parked out at what was only ever supposed to be a stepping stone. Like some of the Native Americans in praying towns, they can get everything they want (in this modern case, not etiquette and trading partners but salvation) without anything so demanding as belonging to a local church. One never has to spend Sunday with people outside of one’s educational, professional, and often socioeconomic peers.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer criticized such idealized communities in Life Together:
The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. . . . When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.[15]
An important caveat here is that in the traditional church, the ideal community is a tempting, escapist fantasy that can be resisted; in the parachurch, it is a live and ever-present reality through which many are inducted into the faith. If the parachurch is a stepping stone, a ground-level entrance to deeper fellowship, then Christians who enter the church through the parachurch will naturally “see the community going to smash” when it no longer exhibits the social and demographic uniformity of the parachurch organization. The modality of the church can look deficient if the only model for comparison is the excitement, youthfulness, and shared interests of the parachurch.
But campus ministries need not be parachurches. They can be, and some still are, structured as sodalities. Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) is one such example. Launched in 1973 as a college ministry at the University of Southern Mississippi, RUF was from the beginning affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), although it was not officially stamped with the PCA’s approval until 1979. The “Manual for Campus Ministries,” which the PCA approved at the annual meeting of its General Assembly, acknowledges that this is a very different kind of document than the Four Spiritual Laws booklet—it clarifies that RUF ministry to colleges and universities is a “mission of the church,” that the ministry’s staff are “sent by the church,” that they are “under the guidance and supervision of the church,” and that the ministry is “not the church” [16]
Even in the cases where the PCA has no official presence on campus, local PCA churches are still encouraged to work with parachurch ministries: “The church should reach out to include under its pastoral care and influence individuals working on the staff and students participating in the programs of such parachurch organizations,” counseling that many parachurch participants, including staff members, “have never had a meaningful experience in a church.” The local church has a responsibility to “help to foster in them a meaningful concept of the church,” to pastor the staff members of parachurches, and to “guide students to see that without corporate worship they are missing an important element in the Christian experience.”[17] Without using the explicit language of “sodality,” what the PCA manual is describing are ways of pressing the parachurch back toward a structure of sodality.
This approach appears to have produced fruit within the PCA. While churches everywhere are losing members, especially in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the PCA continues to exceed its prepandemic numbers. And the PCA continues to perform extraordinarily well among Americans age 18 to 35 compared to most of its official denominational counterparts. Believers in this age group make up 25 percent of the PCA, compared to just 15 percent of the Southern Baptist Convention and 13 percent of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.[18]
Rather than treat parachurch campus ministries as a kind of modern praying town in which nonbelievers can come part of the way into the fellowship of the traditional church, campus ministries ought to return to the model of sodality, such that campus ministry is understood as a mission of the church, campus staff are sent by the church and serve under the guidance and supervision of the church, and where there is no confusion that the ministry is nevertheless still not the church. And as the PCA manual witnesses, there are ways to begin shifting existing parachurch ministries toward sodality without their full, formal adoption by churches.
We cannot let the parachurch continue parading about as half a church, or even a halfway church, as Engel called for. “Jesus’ Church is not the fifth Spiritual Law, content to be relegated to small print on the last page of an evangelistic booklet,” as Telford Work quips. For, as John Calvin declares, “To those whom [God] is a Father, the Church must also be a mother.”[19]
In order for the church to be mother, the church must be the church, and that means reexerting its status as the ground floor of fellowship, out of which all missions of the church proceed. For, as Stanley Hauerwas has spent his life reminding us: “the most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church.” In fact, that is all we have to offer, because “the church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”[20]
[1] “1629 Mass. Bay Colony Charter,” Boston 400, https://boston400.blog/1629-massachusetts-bay-colony-charter/.
[2] Alison Stanley, “The Praying Indian Towns: Encounter and Conversion through Imposed Urban Space,” in Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture, 1600–1850, eds. Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 145.
[3] Shepard, The Clear Sun-Shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth upon the Indians in New-England (London, UK: John Bellamy, 1648); reprinted in Michael P. Clark, The Eliot Tracts with Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 114.
[4] Wilberforce Eames, ed., John Eliot and the Indians, 1652–1657: Being Letters Addressed to Rev. Jonathan Hanmer of Barnstaple, England, Reproduced from the Original Manuscripts in the Possession of Theodore N. Vail (New York, NY: Adams and Grace, 1915), 7; and Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: Books I and II Or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England: From Its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698, in Seven Books (Hartford, CT: S. Andrus, 1853), 560.
[5] Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed; and Mr. Cotton’s Letter Examined and Answered (London, UK: Hanserd Knollys, 1848).
[6] Telford Work suggests the diaconate as a better model for thinking about the parachurch in an excellent essay, “Reordering Salvation: The Church as the Proper Context for the Ordo Salutis,” in Ecumenical Theology in Worship, Doctrine, and Life: Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Wainwright, ed. David Cunningham, Ralph Del Colle, and Lucas Lamadrid (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). Sodality can be thought of as a kind of diaconate, which would further ground it in the life of the church.
[7] Stanley Hauerwas observes something similar—though he connects it to the emergence of the tent revival, which is a later development than the praying town and the parachurch—in his essay “Worship, Evangelism, Ethics: On Eliminating the ‘And,’” in A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2000), 155–61.
[8] Walker, The New Evangelism (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1975), 77.
[9] Walker, The New Evangelism, 77.
[10] Campus Crusade for Christ changed its name to Cru in 2011. For simplicity’s sake, this piece will refer to the organization by its current name.
[11] Bright, A Handbook for Christian Maturity (Orlando, FL: NewLife, 1994), 443–44.
[12] Engel, Contemporary Christian Communications, Its Theory and Practice (Nashville, TN: T. Nelson, 1979), 21 and 28.
[13] Jim Davis, Michael Graham, Ryan P. Burge, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2023), 207 and Figure 10.4: Religious Involvement during College Years among Evangelicals.
[14] Davis, Graham, and Burge, The Great Dechurning, 207.
[15] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein(New York, NY: Harper, 1954), 27–28.
[16] Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), “Manual for Campus Ministries,” in Minutes of the Seventh General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (Charlotte, NC: Committee for Christian Education and Publications of the PCA, 1979), 205–17, https://www.pcahistory.org/pca/ga/7th_pcaga_1979.pdf.
[17] PCA, “Manual for Campus Ministries,” 216.
[18] See Ryan Burge (@ryanburge), “I don’t think people fully grasp how much of Protestant Christianity is going to die off,” Twitter, February 1, 2023, 2:35 p.m., https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1620913806003286019; data from Harvard University’s Cooperative Election Study, https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/.
[19] Work, “Reordering Salvation,” 191; and Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Faith 4.1.1.
[20] Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1989), 43 and 83.