Create or Partner?

One of the unique challenges of being a large church is the desire to do everything. Larger churches have more resources, people, and gifts be used in addressing all kinds of needs compared to smaller churches, so the temptation is to try to do everything on their own.

When a large church sees a need for more English as a Second Language classes in an area, it starts them. When it sees a need for a crisis pregnancy center, it starts one. When it sees a need for a homeless shelter, food pantry, and mentoring program, it starts one at the church.

We've chosen to go a different route, which I think is healthy. We are always extremely careful about starting a new ministry on our campus - especially if a similar one already exists in our area that we can partner with. There are lots of reasons for this philosophy, but here are a few:

1. It lets other churches get involved. Wedgewood Baptist Church isn't going to get really excited about dumping resources into the McKinney Church Crisis Pregnancy Center, but if there's a separate ministry doing Crisis Care, the potential exists for even more resources than we can give.

2. It decentralizes ministry. Ministry for our church doesn't just happen within our four walls. There's something very powerful about the Church doing ministry outside the church.

3. It allows ministries to locate themselves for maximum impact. Frankly, there are a ton of homeless people around Fort Worth, but not very many around our church. There's a need, but it isn't mainly here. We want to allow a person serving the homeless to be near the homeless. We want to go to them, not just drag them to us.

4. It allows ministries to do what they do without Big Brother looking over their shoulder. The temptation for some pastors to stick their nose in stuff they don't fully understand is just too strong. We have expectations for the parachurch ministries with whom we partner, but we don't have red tape. We're not looking over their shoulder to make sure they're doing it out way... we want the specialists to do it their way.

The local church is not the hope of the world - Jesus is. And as much as we can, we want to help connect people to ministries that are strategically located and empowered in such a way that they can hear about Jesus. That means we can't do it all here.