May 2026

We are building fewer ministries than we once did.

A generation of ambitious Christian leaders is now more likely to build inside megachurches, secular nonprofits, faith-driven businesses, or personal platforms than to start a distinct Gospel ministry.

As a result, the Church is losing focused innovation and energy at some of its most important frontiers, like Bible translation, evangelism, church planting, theological education, cross-cultural mission, and other forms of specialized work.

Congregations, businesses, and digital platforms all have their place. But they are not ministries in the structural sense; they have different logics, different strengths, and different ends. Historically, ministry structures have been the Church’s most dynamic instruments for extending the Gospel. If we want to engage the frontiers of our time, we need to build ministries again.

In Defense of Ministries

For my purposes, a (Christian) ministry is a distinct social and organizational structure ordered around a specialized religious mission. It is distinct from the local congregation, distinct from a secular nonprofit, and distinct from a business, even a values-driven or faith-informed one.

It has four defining features:

• It carries a clear, specialized religious mission.

• It is sustained primarily by gift capital.

• It operates beyond the boundaries of a single congregation.

• It is designed to extend, multiply, or scale its mission in some form.

Take one or more of these away, and you usually have something else.

Readers may map different words onto this category: parachurch, missions agencies, religious orders, missionary societies, evangelistic fellowships, or translocal ministry networks. These are not identical forms, and each has its own history and governance. But they share a common logic: they are specialized Gospel structures built to do scalable work beyond the ordinary scope of a single congregation. This is the category I’m after.

The most important defining feature is the specialized religious mission. In an age when almost everything can be described as “mission,” we need a more careful definition. A specialized religious mission means the organization’s constitutive purpose is bound up with the Gospel itself.

It may proclaim the Gospel, translate it, teach it, embody it, defend it, or build structures that help it spread and take root. But without the Gospel, the institution no longer makes sense as itself.

Wycliffe exists to translate Scripture. Cru exists to make disciples. Alpha exists to create evangelistic spaces. Many justice-oriented Christian ministries are animated not merely by generic compassion, but by explicit theological conviction and Gospel purpose.

If the work could be carried out in essentially identical form by a secular institution without fundamentally changing what the organization is for, then it is probably not ministry in the sense I mean here.

That distinction matters, because the Church needs organizational forms whose reason for existing is irreducibly Gospel-shaped.

Ministry & History

This is a deeply historical category and pattern in the life of the Church.

Ralph Winter argued that the Church has long operated through two distinct sociological structures: modalities and sodalities. Congregations are modalities. Ministries are sodalities. Both belong to the life of the Church, but they do different things and are organized differently.

Congregations gather a broad body of people in a place. They worship, disciple, pastor, and sustain a community over time. Their strength is breadth, stability, and ordinary formation.

Ministries organize a more defined group of people around a specialized Gospel task. They are ordered toward a frontier, a mission field, a problem, or a population. Their strength is focus, mobility, and coordinated action.

Paul’s apostolic band was a missionary structure, not reducible to a congregation, with a vision for the frontiers of the Roman empire. The same pattern appears in monastic orders, missionary societies, evangelistic fellowships, student movements, and trans-local ministry organizations: the Church has repeatedly built specialized structures for specialized Gospel tasks.

From the Benedictines and Jesuits to Wycliffe, the Navigators, and Campus Crusade, these ministries reflect a longstanding tradition. For much of the modern era, frontier-oriented Gospel ministry was a normal and respected path for serious Christian leaders.

That is no longer true in the same way.

What Happened?

Over the last generation or two, especially in the West, the conditions for building ministries have weakened. Important ministries still exist, but the instinct, pathway, and support system for founding new ones have thinned out.

Several forces have contributed to this.

Philanthropy secularized. Christian ministry is actually what gave birth to philanthropy in the west. But the nonprofit world became increasingly governed by elite secular assumptions, secular vocabularies, and secular frameworks, and Christian leaders learned to translate their deepest convictions into more publicly acceptable language. Explicitly Gospel-shaped work became less legible, less prestigious, and often less fundable.

Congregations absorbed more ambition. As the megachurch era matured and attention turned inward toward the West, many of the most gifted leaders were drawn into church-centered leadership tracks. In many settings, the highest-status Christian leadership path became building a larger church platform rather than founding a distinct ministry.

Business absorbed entrepreneurial drive. Faith and work, business as mission, and redemptive entrepreneurship opened real opportunities. But they also redirected a certain kind of builder away from ministry altogether. Business offers capital, legitimacy, and clear pathways for execution. It also imposes its own disciplines and constraints, often shaped by the profit motive and investor priority. It is not built to carry every kind of Gospel task.

Platforms absorbed public influence. Podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, and social media accounts created new avenues for voice and visibility. But platforms are not institutions, and reach is not the same thing as durable organizational capacity, and the “medium is the message,” meaning the algorithm is ultimately in charge.

There are many Christians doing amazing work in each of these categories.  But the result is often confused leaders building confused forms: ministries controlled by church brand priorities, businesses burdened with goals they are not built to bear, and influencers dependent on eyeballs rather than transformational outcomes.

When our ends and means are unclear, our strategies get muddled. If we want ministry outcomes, we have to recover confidence in ministry as a form.

It’s Time to Build (Ministries)

Ministries remain uniquely important to the Gospel because they can do things other structures cannot do as well.

• They can organize around a specialized Gospel frontier with focused clarity.

• They can mobilize people across churches, cities, and networks.

• They can hold long-term focus on a mission task that would otherwise be diluted.

• They can build institutional depth around evangelism, discipleship, formation, justice, church planting, or theological education.

• They can create capacity for Gospel work beyond that of a single congregation or personality.

At their best, ministries help the Church extend itself into places and spaces that would otherwise remain unreached and underserved.

That is why this matters. The question here is not nostalgia for an older era, but whether the Church can recover the structural imagination needed to build the kinds of ministries today’s frontiers require.

If we want to rebuild the ministry field, we have to rebuild several things with conviction.

Theology. We need to recover theological clarity about the nature of the Church’s mission, the urgency of the Gospel, and the legitimacy of specialized Gospel structures. We need to be honest about what belongs properly to the local church and what requires translocal, task-focused forms. And we need a more expansive imagination about the frontiers of our time: not only the secular West, but the nations, the unreached, the university, the city, the digital world, and the institutional crises shaping modern life.

Founders.  We need a new generation of ministry founders. The post-war generation built many of the institutions we still rely on, but those leaders are aging out, and the pathways that formed them are weaker than they once were. Seminary prepares leaders for church contexts. Business school prepares them for markets. Very few environments intentionally form ambitious Christian leaders to build ministries. We need to recover ministry as a legitimate, demanding, and supported calling for builders.

Capital.  We need to recover the dynamism of gift capital for Gospel work. Ministry has historically depended on patrons, donors, churches, and foundations willing to fund work because it is worthy, not merely because it can generate financial return. That does not mean rejecting accountability or effectiveness. It means refusing to let investment logic become the default logic for every Christian venture. Some of the most important Gospel work in the world will never fit a market-based model. If new ministries are not being built, one of the reasons is simple: early risk capital for ministry is painfully thin.

Innovation.  We need fresh institutional imagination. We need new wineskins, new strategies, new organizations, and new support systems for ministry builders. The language of incubators, accelerators, design, and innovation are extremely useful, but insofar as those tools are placed in service of ministry goals, and don’t import frameworks that redefine them. The Church should bring its best strategic thinking, technology, and organizational intelligence to the frontiers of mission.

Partnership.  Churches, legacy ministries, and established institutions need to learn how to send again. Local churches should not feel pressure to internalize every expression of missional energy within their own brand. They should bless, incubate, and release leaders into broader mission fields. Existing ministries and institutions should also recognize their responsibility to help shape what comes next. That means sharing trust, people, platform, and capital with a rising generation of builders.

Today’s frontiers are not smaller than they once were. They are larger, more complex, and in many cases more neglected.

We still need Bible translation and engagement.
We still need evangelism and cultural witness.
We still need church planting in every context.
We still need theological education in the age of AI.
We still need cross-cultural mission to the billions of unreached.
We still need discipleship strong enough for a fractured age.

The work is still the work. The category is still the category.

What we need are leaders with the convictions to build for it again.