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Para-chruch ministries work outside of and among the different denominations (interdenominational) but are not denominations themselves. They attempt to perform the functions which the Bible assigns to the elders, Pastors, Bishops, overseers of the local church – e.g. raising up disciples who are equipped to minister the gospel to the lost. A scant few actually accomplish this in some Christians but most do not.
If the church conducted itself in a biblical way as opposed to behaving in accordance with old traditions or worse, ‘new’ traditions, there would be no place for these groups. There are a few worthwhile para-church ministries, a few of which we mention here, but unfortunately, many of these “extra-church” ministries are also “extra-biblical”. YWAM, YFC and OM listed below are examples of this. The latter are typically more like expensive long-term Christian youth camps which offer young people organized ministry outings here and there in order to give them a ‘taste’ of ministry in order to take up the Christian call as a “career” and not as day-to-day obedience.
Most Pastors are a bit leery of these independent parachurch “ministries” as mostly they offer activities which the teenagers could or should do in their own hometown for their own local church, but because its promoted to the young people as “an adventure” it is suddenly not as much fun to a young person to stay and impact a people that they know well and speak the same language. Instead these organizations convince the kids to beg their friends and families for money to “support” them on their “mission” – which is really just a youth camp with a few ministry activities attached along with the indoctrination of unbiblical doctrines like ecumenism, pentecostalism and/or worldly antinomianism.
This page attempts to cover the most popular groups and to provide a bit of information on them based on how their fruit lines up with scripture.
This group began with a group of Christian students at Oxford University in 1877 who met together to pray, study the Bible, and share their faith with fellow students. Eventually, these groups spread to Canada, America and the rest of the world. This group organizes student fellowships on College campuses all over the world with the chief end of discipling these students in the word of God. In my early days of Christianity over 30 years ago, I had a dear brother take me and a friend at the church through the InterVarsity discipleship manual which was incredibly effective for grounding us in the word of God.
Today there are approximately 1,500 InterVarsity staff serving more than 40,000 students and faculty on over 700 campuses nationwide. In addition, InterVarsity Press publishes 100 titles a year that equip church leaders, professors, and Christian disciples who want to grow spiritually.
This para-church ministry is perhaps one of the most biblically based and useful for the body of Christ as it’s primary focus doesn’t revolve around recruiting young people away from their local churches in order to influence them to an aberrant form of belief like YWAM or OM but they seek to raise up biblical disciplers who disciple others. The Navigators were founded in 1933 by a man named Dawson Trotter who sought to obey the call of God to Biblically disciple others as seen in 2 Timothy 2:2 which they call life-to-life discipleship.
Flee also youthful lusts; but pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.
The Navigators are a biblically based organization and adhere to the fundamentals of the Christian faith while avoiding many aberrant extra-biblical beliefs like pentecostalism or seeker sensitive ecumenism. The following is a statement of beliefs from their website”:
The Navigators have a publishing company known as “Navpress” and they produce a series of scripture memory systems which I can personally recommend as effective for getting the word of God into your heart. Navigators have staff in 57 countries, plus countless thousands of Navigators making disciples where they live, work, and play.
YFC was started by Casper John “Jack” Wyrtzen who was an evangelist to young people. He had a strong influence on the ministry of Billy Graham. YFC was started in 1940 and would lay the groundwork for many ‘copycat’ youth parachurch ministries like YWAM and Campus Crusade for Christ.
Whereas YWAM was founded on and is currently operating by Pentecostal or even charismatic cultic principles, Wyrtzen founded YFC on a Biblical foundation whereby he embraced biblical inerrancy, scriptural authority (as opposed to the supposed voice of God through private whisperings in the mind) , the Deity of Christ, the bodily Resurrection of Christ, the triunity of God, the total depravity of man (as opposed to the pentecostal doctrine of Christian perfectionism), and salvation by grace through faith alone. He also adhered largely to dispensational theology.
YFC begas as youth rallies in New York in 1940 and has grown to an international level of over 100 nations and is still going strong today. This group is the oldest and probably the best of the bunch.
Founded by Bill Bright in 1951 on the campus of UCLA as an evangelical outreach to students on college campuses across America. Bright was a recently born again Presbyterian and the evangelical views of Campus Crusade for Christ still reflect Reformist theology.
Apart from the aberrant self-centered gospel (pictured), “CCC” adheres to the primary fundamentals of the Christian faith. The organization came under criticism from atheist groups and others after many cults imitated the approach taken by Campus Crusade.
Bill Bright was a driving force behind CCC and in 1956, he penned the Four Spiritual Laws which provided a narcissistic view of the gospel: God has a plan for your life, you have sinned and lost that plan, God sent Jesus to restore that plan etc. This makes the gospel all about the recipient while the Bible says that you and I are not worthy but God in his great love, mercy and kindness sent His Son who died for our sins and was raised from the dead after 3 days. This gospel is all about Jesus and what He did, not about us and our “plan”.
There are hundreds of thousands of tracts and brochures that are distributed throughout the world that reference these “Four Laws” which are doing significant damage to the genuine presentation of the Gospel as many come to Christ under the guise of “getting” something as if it is “owed” to them instead of with a heart of repentance for their life of sin and enmity toward the God who saved them and thereafter living their lives out in gratitude toward Jesus seeking to serve Him in any way they can – dying to self and living to Christ, “plan or no plan”.
Campus Crusade for Christ, as of July, 2003, serves in 191 countries with a staff of 26,000 full time employees and 225000 volunteers.
YWAM was started by Loren Cunningham in 1960 as a Christian missions organization for youth. Cunningham had a vision in 1956 while in the Bahamas, where he saw “waves crashing on the shores of the continents, completely covering them up…” The waves in the vision became young people preaching to the lost outside bars, on the streets, etc.
Cunningham then shared his vision with his denomination (Assemblies of God) and they kindly offered to “pray about Loren’s vision” . They returned to him a short time later to claim that Loren’s vision “was not from God”. Cunningham disagreed with their findings and pursued the vision, knowing that it was from God. He began to establish small inter-denominational bases that mobilized young Christians for short term missions. The YWAM movement flourished and by the year 2000, there were 11,000 staff missionaries in/from over 130 countries.
Whereas YWAM is inter-denominational, it is widely regarded from within and from outside the movement as pentecostal and/or even charismatic. This can be attributed to its Assemblies of God roots. There are no “YWAM” churches as the volunteer staff at the various bases, seek out appropriate home churches in their communities of which to be a part.
As a post script: the Assemblies of God, seeing the success of the YWAM movement, attempted their own version of a “youth driven missions and service movement” called “Masters Commission”. With this, its safe to say the Assemblies of God have “reconsidered” their response to Cunningham’s vision from God although they have never publicly admitted it.
Like YWAM, Operation Mobilization (OM) is like a 2 year pay-to-play Christian youth camp on as the ship sails to ‘minister’ to people somehow (OM ships get free service – parents and relatives foot the bill). It was launched as a parachurch ministry in 1957 and quickly became international. Now ministering in over 118 countries. OM appears to embrace the seeker sensitive/megachurch view of a “Come as you are” approach which in essence means that you will “leave as you were” thereafter. It also refers to believers as “Jesus Followers” instead of “Christians” which is usually a red flag as this is the preferred term used by seeker-sensitive false teachers like Joel Osteen, Andy Stanley, Rick Warren and Steven Furtick.
OM Ships appears to be heavily into a “social gospel” approach to Christianity Jesus following which is a false gospel altogether. It appears to be discipling young Christian Jesus Following men and women to work at doing “nice things” for unsaved people while avoiding preaching the 5 critical and biblical points of the genuine gospel:
This genuine gospel will be an offense to some people and a stumbling block to others (as it is intended to – 1 Corinthians 1:23-24) The false social gospel of the megachurch/seeker sensitive approach embraced by OM, YWAM and CCC does not offend anyone as it is designed to befriend the world which the Bible says is enmity toward the Lord.
Like YWAM and Megaseeker churches OM presents itself as “interdenominational” which is a thinly veiled cloak to expose your children to the errors of charismatic Christians Jesus Followers and other aberrant beliefs like assimilating with the world in order to ‘reach’ them. This approach, unfortunately, only results in carnal Christianity as it is usually the young Christians Jesus Followers who are “reached” by the world and not vice versa.
This is a para-church missions organization made famous by their “sponsor a child” program (full disclosure, I’ve fallen for this a few times as a young Christian). Unfortunately, they were caught up in a scandal where allegedly 50 million dollars in donations were sent to the terrorist organization called Hamas (you might have heard of them) and cooked the books to fake receipts etc. The director was arrested by the Israeli government for these crimes but I believe he was eventually released. They have been swimming in allegations over the years of corruption. One bright spot is that they stood on Biblical principles in refusing a gay person from employment which any and all Christian organizations should do as the Apostle Paul tells us to remove ourselves from such people – not those who are unbelievers but those who are named brothers (1 Cor 5:9-11)
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