Partnering

I've been thinking a bit about partnerships lately. I've seen a lot of partnerships in connection with my work. The project I finished evaluating in April saw a partnership between a social service organization doing outreach, 6 schools to do education with parents and students, and other agencies to help with PR, providing resources, etc, all part of the same project to improve children's safety. Government is partnering more and more with outside organizations. Healthy Baby programs, for example, were devised and are funded by government, but government partners with RHAs and community organizations to deliver the program.

The advantages to partnering is that sometimes you just can't do it all yourself, but if several organizations each take a small piece, big projects and programs can happen that otherwise would not.

Then I turn my mind towards the church and parachurch organizations. I don't see much partnering. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I just haven't seen or heard of many examples. Rather, I've seen things like parachurch organizations saying that really, they are "the church" and local churches saying they're not, local churches insisting that tithe has to go to the local church and only offerings can go to parachurch orgs, a person who said if churches were doing their job there wouldn't need to be any parachurch organizations, etc. I don't think the boundary lines extend just between church and parachurch. I'd be hard pressed to think of 2 parachurch organizations that have worked together on a project (actually, I thought of one just as I started writing that sentence) or 2 or more churches that have partnered (other than March for Jesus).

I wonder if the church universal can get past some of those boundary lines to work more effectively with other parts of the church universal or even - dare I say it - secular organizations? I think there is tremendous benefit for everyone involved.