Parachurch

We attempted to distinguish between church and parachurch. We wound up going back to our Nicene Creed definition of a church and most non-church but Christian groups don't meet all the criteria. For example, CCF doesn't meet the "catholic" requirement of being as open and inclusive as possible. CCF's sponsoring parachurch organization has a good writeup on the relationship between the local church and CCF in their CCF Handbook. (The author is a former Deacon at TCBC before he was sent to our daughter church.)

Another perspective on this issue is to "follow the money". What counts as tithing? The secular econcomist concludes that a logical giver should only give to a single charity after careful consideration of the options. This is because if the donations are small, the world hasn't changed after the first donation thus whatever reasons made the first donation valid still applies. Donations to a second charity means the giver is purchasing psychological benefits. (See "Giving your all" by Steven Landberg in Slate Magazine, Jan 11, 1997. Disclaimer: this is a secular article on charitable giving, not a Christian view.)

How does this apply to Christian giving? At the very least we need to carefully examine our motives. We need to answer the rational economist's analysis as well as to God. One of the students jumped to the extreme application of this logic: most of us are already giving to our local church first thus we should only give to our local church. While I'm not advocating this extreme position, it certainly forces us to think.

We then looked at the view of churches and para-church organizations. Not surprisingly, churches take a firm stand that tithing is to the local church. (See for example Saddleback's view.) Parachurch organizations do not oppose the primacy of the local church but leave open the possibility of tithing to parachurch groups. (See for example, Urbana.)

This is an extremely complex subject with no easy answers. My personal view is that the Holy Spirit is working through the plethora of parachurch organizations to build unity across the diverse Protestant denominations. Previous human attempts at ecumenical unity have been superseded by a de facto emergent universal church.