Frustrations & Wisdom
Discover the 5 causes of collaboration frustrations and the thread underneath them all + inspiring stories & insights
Collaboration Frustrations
The 5 Root Causes
As we listened to leaders from across the country share their collaboration frustrations, we identified 5 root causes.
During our May Collaboration Connection Zoom, we heard from 5 leaders as they each shared insights about one of the causes.
Territorial Control
Rosy, Acevedo
Lawyer
Executive Director, Dare to Love
Lake Worth, FL
Resource Anxiety
Kevin Petyon
Senior Pastor, Village Vineyard Church
Executive Director, Joshua's Place
South Lebanon, OH
Structural Mismatch
Karen Gilbert
Catalyst, Designed Diversity
Aurora, CO
Collaboration Competency
Dave Bachman
City Director, Nashville Navigators
Nashville, TN
Theology Gap
Nathan Mayo
Vice President of Programs, True Charity Joplin, MO
Key Discovery: Relational Collaboration
The thread we discovered underneath all of the collaboration frustrations . . .
Transaction over Relationship
Our friend Chris Gough, Director of City Gospel Movements for the Palau Association, explains our key discovery:
Relational Collaboration
Collaboration Wisdom
Stories of Collaboration
Congregations recognized for the contributions of their members to a nonprofit
Gateway Mission runs a formal church-partnership program where member churches encourage attendees to donate gently used household goods to the mission's store, and the store returns a portion of that value as gift cards back to the partner church to meet needs the church already knows about. https://hopefoundhere.org/give-help-donation-volunteer-partner/church-partnership
A nonprofit plants a congregation
A direct service provider observed that there wasn’t a church in their small, rural community that was a welcoming environment for their low-income families. For instance there were opportunities to engage kids with Vacation Bible Schools, but no one ran them, so the nonprofit ran them. Ultimately, they wanted to plug kids and families in to congregations that could disciple them. So they partnered with a church planter to launch a new congregation, intentionally designed for accessibility to low-income families.
A nonprofit mobilizes churches to run job fairs
Better Together is a nonprofit whose core mission is keeping kids out of foster care by addressing the root causes — primarily economic — that put families in crisis. 76% of the families that come to Better Together arrive because of economic hardship tied to unemployment, which is what spawned the Better Jobs program specifically. Rather than building its own facilities, Better Together runs recurring job fairs inside host churches, rotating through different congregations city by city. A typical event looks like this: church-based job fairs connect job seekers with local employers ready to hire, paired with free one-on-one job coaching to review resumes and other onsite supportive services. In addition to the community job fairs, the program offers job seekers coaching, guidance, support, and encouragement through local church partners — meaning the church isn't just a venue, it's recruited into an ongoing support role after the fair ends.
A nonprofit mobilizes congregations to build permanent supportive housing on their land
Settled is a nonprofit that helps churches develop permanent supportive tiny-home villages called Sacred Settlements, designed to address long-term homelessness — each one owned and operated by the worshiping community on its own land. This which reduces development costs compared to standard affordable housing, and are protected under federal land-use law that overcomes restrictive local zoning.
A nonprofit organizes churches into a coordinated referral network
Love INC (Love In the Name of Christ) avoids running programs itself, instead it organizes other churches' compassion ministries into a coordinated whole. Founded in 1977, it now operates in 30 states through more than 10,000 churches and community organizations serving over 150,000 neighbors a year. The mechanism is the Clearinghouse: a person in need calls in, volunteers assess the legitimacy and nature of the need, the request is referred to whichever partner church or ministry is best equipped to meet it, and a volunteer follows up afterward with both the client and the church that helped — often alongside a pastoral visit. Affiliates also use the Clearinghouse data to spot gaps in services and help churches launch new ministries to fill them. The organization is explicit that unity, not just service delivery, is the point: churches across denominations join on the condition that they "park their theological and social stances at the door," united by purpose rather than doctrine.
Collaboration Insights
Books
The book that inspired Our Name!
Our Co-Founder, Angie Ward, offers a compelling blueprint for a unified ecclesial future. It's not just a historical and theological exploration - it's a roadmap for rethinking the very essence of Christian ministry. Whether you're a pastor, mission leader, or nonprofit executive, you will be challenged to transcend conventional boundaries and discover the full spectrum of the collaborative potential within your influence.
Written by an active leader in our network, Beyond the Walls focuses on external partnerships and mobilization. Once your foundation and leadership infrastructure are solid, you'll be ready to establish strategic partnerships with schools and nonprofits, develop collaborative relationships with other churches and organizations, mobilize your entire congregation, communicate effectively, and engage your senior pastor as a champion.
Click Here to Check Out a Summary Guide of Collaboration Insights from Chapters 9 & 10.
Our friend Tucker Wannamaker contributed to this book, celebrating the work of our friends at CrossPurpose. Together We Climb challenges the way we understand poverty—not as a personal failure, but as a complex climb shaped by broken systems, disconnected supports, and unclear pathways. Dr. Steven C. Taylor and Jason Janz draw on decades of leadership in education, workforce development, and community transformation to reveal what's keeping people stuck and what actually works.
Articles
Our Co-Founder, Scott Harris, and Amy L. Sherman argue that the traditional "church/para-church" relationship (between congregations and Christian nonprofit ministries) has become dysfunctional, marked by mutual disrespect, an outsourcing mentality, and competing claims over control, credit, and legitimacy, and they call for retiring the term "para-church" itself since it wrongly implies inferiority rather than interdependence. Drawing on three biblical themes (the missionary nature of the church, Ralph Winter's "modal" (gathered congregation) and "sodal" (sent/scattered ministry) structures as two complementary, interdependent expressions of one Church, and God's manifold APEST gifts to the Body), the authors contend that congregations and ministries need each other to fully live out the Great Commission. They outline four "promising practices" for building what they call "generous partnership": rejecting a scarcity mentality in favor of trusting God's abundance, investing in more intentional and strategic deployment of congregants' vocational gifts (not just face-to-face volunteer roles), partnering in synergistic disciple-making that unites mission and discipleship rather than treating them as separate tracks, and committing to mutual, ongoing institutional support (space, funding, training, prayer) rather than one-off transactional giving. Throughout, real-world "snapshot" case studies (Grace Church/Urban Vision, Journey Christian Church/International Justice Mission, Life.Church/HOPE International, Compassion International/Stadia, Brentwood Baptist Church/Mission Increase, and Central Ohio Youth for Christ) illustrate congregations and ministries achieving far more together than either could alone, and the paper closes with a call for churches and ministries to move from disunity and competition toward humble, high-trust, side-by-side collaboration in Christ's mission.
Our friend Kris Eldridge surveys roughly twenty nonprofit partners on what makes churches good or frustrating collaborators, and finds strong consensus on both sides. What nonprofits value most: consistency over one-off events, being known relationally rather than just utilized transactionally, mobilized volunteers (not just financial gifts), unrestricted "no strings attached" trust with resources, and churches amplifying their work through congregational communication. Their frustrations center on churches that show up enthusiastically for a project and then disappear without follow-through, unclear or misaligned expectations about what success looks like, churches that arrive with a predetermined agenda and don't genuinely listen to community expertise (including pressure to insert evangelism into a nonprofit's programming against its mission), well-meaning invitations that overload small nonprofit staff capacity, and partnerships that hinge entirely on one church staff member so they collapse when that person leaves. Eldridge closes with a practical checklist — show up consistently, ask before assuming needs, listen more than talk, give with open hands, use your platform to amplify, build real relationships not just projects, spread the partnership across multiple ministries for resilience, and respect the nonprofit's mission without redirecting it — arguing that church-nonprofit partnerships succeed precisely when each side contributes what the other lacks, starting with churches actually asking their partners what they need rather than assuming.
In this piece, Kevin Peyton — who serves as both a pastor and the executive director of a Christian nonprofit (Joshua's Place) — argues that church-nonprofit partnerships often break down over what he calls "the 3 C's": control (pastors reluctant to defer to a nonprofit leader's expertise, given their own accountability to church boards and mission), convenience (a cultural pull toward quick, simple outreach solutions that oversimplify problems requiring deep, sustained relational work), and credit (churches publicizing their charitable work in ways that can strip dignity from the very people being served, rather than protecting their stories). Drawing on his experience straddling both roles, Peyton counters the assumption that pastors simply don't care about partnering with outside ministries, and instead calls for both sides to replace control with trust, convenience with patience, and credit-seeking with discretion (citing Matthew 6:3-4), so that churches and nonprofits can build lasting, relationally grounded partnerships rather than transactional ones.