Para-church no longer #1 goal of young ministers

Fifteen years ago most all of the students I taught hoped to found a para-church organization instead of working in a local church. They dreamed of following John Maxwell, Dwight Robertson, and Bill Bright and escaping the local church to “do something really massive” in a larger global sense instead of getting stuck in one church in “some out of the way place.” They had all kinds of dreamy ideas including founding a new world-wide missions movement, international traveling juggling acts, and a chain Christian tea houses. In many cases they would start with their own interest or hobby and see how they could turn it into a ministry—sometimes into a profit. And they were not that different from many local pastors in the 80’s and 90’s who saw “being a church consultant” or “teaching in a Christian college” as their ultimate dream job.

All that is changing now. Most of my current students want to work in a local church and some even opposed to para-church organizations as “leeches on the body of Christ” or “mostly find-raising organizations with low accountability”

Why this shift? What role does their home pastor play in this? Who are today’s “famous and influential” folk—para-church folk or pastors? Who appears to be making the biggest impact—para-church leaders or local church pastors like Rick Warren, Rob Bell and Joel Osteen? What are the ages of para-church influencers compared to local church influencers? How does this generation’s rejection of “changing the world” in favor of “changing my world” figure into this shift? Is this new interest in the local church youthful idealism that will get squashed in a real-world local church? Has there been an equivilent shift among pastors? Do some pastors who fled the local church to found their own ministries now regret it as they see so many influencers who stayed behind and got bigger then they did? Is this a temporary post 9-11 blip or something more permanent?

So what do you think?

Keith Drury 7/21/05