The Outsourced Church

Outsourcing is a very popular business model that companies use to cut costs and streamline work flows.  But the idea of outsourcing isn’t new.  The church has been doing it for centuries.  Back in the late 1700′s and early 1800′s, there was a movement to form missionary societies.  For example, the Baptist Missionary Society was formed in 1792.  These societies assumed the role of sending missionaries out into unreached areas.  From an institutional standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.  You can organize on a large scale and ensure that work isn’t being duplicated.  I believe the long term effect has been that today’s church is not as engaged in mission.  On the local church level the result is that missions simply becomes check writing.  Rather than each Christian being called at baptism to the Great Commission, they become an economic engine to support others doing mission.  In a Christian culture, the impact is minimal.  But in today’s post-Christian Western culture the impact is devastating.  Each Christian no longer understands that their baptism is also a calling to the Great Commission.  Thus, the unchurched among us are no longer reached.

The early 1900′s saw the even more outsourcing in the Church with the rise of parachurch organizations.  Today, parachurch organizations exist for almost every imaginable ministry.  While there is nothing inherently wrong with parachurch organizations (I work for one), the result in the Church in the West is the sense that mission is again not the business of the local church.  The local church simply serves as check writers, the economic engine of the parachurch movement.

The missional shift we are in the midst of is a needed correction of this outsourcing.  Once again, churches are rallying behind the Great Commission and bringing these essential elements of missions back into the local church.  Churches are begining to serve their communities, raise up pastors from within, send out church planters and missionaries, and see themselves as the primary catalyst of God’s mission within their locale.

With all the debate about missional churches and what they are and are not, I believe the local church embracing the Great Commission is the greatest benefit of this movement.  I believe this missional movement will require parachurch organizations and missionary societies to reorganize as partners who help the local church become the hands and feet of God’s mission rather than doing it for them.