How the American Church Is Subcontracting Its Mission

One day, Esau came in from the field, tired and hungry, and traded his birthright to his brother for a bowl of red stew. Scripture does not record that he agonized over the decision. He was hungry, the stew was in front of him, and the birthright was a distant, abstract thing.

“Thus Esau despised his birthright,” the text says — not because he hated it, but because, in the moment of decision, it was worth less to him than a meal. (Genesis 25:19-34)

The tragedy of Esau is not that he was wicked. It is that he was practical.

I have spent the better part of fifty years investigating institutions — how they present themselves, what they do when the pressure is on and no one is watching. In that work, you learn to distinguish the story an organization tells about itself from the machinery underneath. Over the last several years, I have watched the machinery grind away inside the American church, mostly unremarked, in the shape of Esau’s bargain.

Congregation after congregation, ministry after ministry, denomination after denomination, is trading its birthright for a bowl of stew. The stew is expediency — money, efficiency, professional competence, and the relief of handing off a hard job to someone else. The birthright is the mission itself: the peculiar work of proclaiming the gospel while feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, raising the orphan, and teaching the young.

This is an overview, a survey. A more complete examination will follow. For now, I want to lay out the general blueprint because until you see how many elements are part of the system, you will keep mistaking each instance for an isolated lapse rather than what it is: a pattern.

The mechanism

Start with the mechanism because it is the same in nearly every case, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

When a church hands a ministry to a third party — a government agency, a commercial operator, or a professionalized nonprofit — the third party’s rules become the church’s. And the third party, whatever it is, is not in the gospel business. The government cannot be. The corporation has no reason to be. The professional association is built on a different foundation entirely. So the gospel content does not survive the handoff. It is not that anyone sets out to strip it. It is that the container it is poured into has no place for it, and the purpose of the ministry quietly drains away.

The clearest illustration is also the most literal. Consider the church food pantry that accepts government commodities through The Emergency Food Assistance Program — TEFAP — or its companion, the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. These are good programs in a narrow sense; they put real food in the hands of hungry people.

But the food comes with a rulebook. Under federal regulation — 7 CFR Part 16, as amended to carry out Executive Order 13559 — an organization distributing those commodities may not conduct “explicitly religious activities” as part of the distribution. If a church wants to pray with someone, hand them a tract, or say a word about the One in whose name it is feeding them, that activity must be separated from the food line by time or location. There can be, in the government’s own phrasing, “no overlap.” And no one may be required to participate in any religious activity as a condition of receiving the food.

A church can feed the hungry with government food or evangelize them, but by law it cannot do both in the same room at the same time. The USDA reiterated this in a clarification memorandum as recently as this year. The church that takes the commodities has agreed in writing to conduct the corporal works of mercy, with the spiritual works excised.

It has kept the soup and surrendered the reason for the soup.

Now understand that this same architecture governs nearly all government funding that flows to faith-based organizations. The food-pantry rule is one example of a government-wide framework — parallel regulations at Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Labor, all built on the same executive-order line — that says the same thing about addiction recovery, homeless services, prisoner reentry, job training, refugee resettlement, and childcare. Take the money, and the funded service must be religiously inert. This is settled administrative law, and it has been for two decades.

The only question is whether a church notices what it is agreeing to.

Welcoming the stranger

Refugee resettlement is where this bargain has been struck on the largest scale and where the results are most visible.

Six of the ten national resettlement agencies with federal contracts are faith-branded organizations: Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service), World Relief (the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals), Church World Service, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, HIAS, and Episcopal Migration Ministries. Together, they represent the denominational names of a large share of American Christianity.

And several of them run on federal money to a degree that would startle the people in the pews whose denominations lend them their names. In my own examination of related organizations’ filings, I have found federal dependency ratios above ninety-eight percent — organizations that, in every financial sense that matters, are arms of the federal government wearing a denominational label.

When an entity draws that share of its revenue from Washington, it is not a ministry that receives some government support. It is a government contractor that retains some religious branding. The tail does not wag that dog; the tail is the dog. Whatever gospel witness such an operation once carried has, of necessity, been subordinated to the terms of the contract that keeps the lights on.

Caring for the orphan

The care of orphans is the most doctrinally revealing case because here we can watch a single organization make the trade and then — remarkably — try to take it back.

Bethany Christian Services is the largest Evangelical adoption and foster-care agency in the country. For most of its eighty-year history, it adhered to a plain statement that God’s design for the family was the lifelong marriage of one man and one woman.

Beginning in 2018, cities and states with which it held foster-care contracts began demanding that it place children with same-sex couples or lose those contracts. Philadelphia suspended Bethany’s contract that year. In March 2021, after what the agency described as a decade of internal discernment, Bethany’s board removed the one-man-one-woman language from its policy and began placing children with same-sex couples nationwide. The mission had met the contract, and the mission had blinked.

Set that against the agencies that made the opposite choice. Catholic Charities in Boston shut down its adoption work in 2006 rather than comply with Massachusetts’ anti-discrimination requirements. Catholic Charities in Washington, D.C., closed its adoption program in 2010. The same pattern followed in Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania — Catholic agencies choosing to stop placing children altogether rather than place them in violation of their church’s teaching. They lost the contracts, the buildings, and the programs. What they kept was the birthright.

The Bethany story has an ending that proves the whole point. This past June — June 10, 2026 — Bethany’s board reversed the 2021 decision and reinstated a statement of faith defining marriage as a covenant between one man and one woman. The agency insisted the reversal was a matter of conviction, not external pressure, and it came, not coincidentally, after the federal nondiscrimination requirements that had squeezed the agency in 2021 were rolled back.

Whatever the motive, the lesson of reversibility is this: the same organization can be pushed off its mission by the terms of a contract and pulled back onto it when those terms change. The contract, not the conviction, was doing the steering. That should trouble anyone who believes a ministry ought to be steered by something sturdier than the current regulatory weather.

Teaching the children

Then there is the fastest-growing version of the bargain, the one that trades not for a contract but simply for cash.

A cottage industry of consultants now advises financially strained churches to “activate” their underused buildings — converting empty weekday square footage into revenue. One such firm has publicly reported advising on more than a billion dollars in church “activation” projects and coined the cheerful term “mailbox money” for the rent a church can collect from a commercial tenant, much of which is shielded from tax under the unrelated-business-income exclusion at Internal Revenue Code §512(b)(3). A favorite activation is childcare.

The pitch is that running a licensed daycare is not a church’s “core competency,” so the church should lease its space to a professional operator and take the check.

The operator that has productized this most aggressively is Learning Care Group, a private-equity-owned company and one of the largest for-profit childcare chains in North America, operating more than 1,000 centers under a family of brands — La Petite Academy, Childtime, Tutor Time, Montessori Unlimited, and others. When Learning Care Group embeds one of its centers inside a church, it uses the brand name Pathways Learning Academy. Pathways is not a faith-based ministry that Learning Care Group happens to run.

Pathways is Learning Care Group — the same corporation, the same proprietary curriculum, the same behavior-management app, and the same secular foundation as any La Petite or Tutor Time, but with a faith-friendly label for a church audience. The only thing “faith-based” about a Pathways school is a weekly visit provided by the host church’s own staff. The curriculum is Learning Care Group’s; the faith, such as it is, is the church’s. So when I describe what Pathways teaches, I am describing what Learning Care Group teaches. There is no daylight between them, and no one should be permitted to pretend there is.

The company is candid about what the product is and is not. Regarding Pathways, its own launch materials state that “the program is secular,” with the option of “short ministry-led lessons” only when a school “is located within a faith-based environment.” Read the arithmetic of that offer. In full-time care — thirty-five or more hours a week, and often forty-five once a working parent’s commute is added — the child is formed in a curriculum built on secular developmental theory, and then, if the host church exerts itself, a pastor visits once a week.

The secular formation is the child’s entire week; the weekly visit is a rounding error against it.

The deepest problem is not that the curriculum is aggressively hostile. It is about what the child is given to rest in. We do not ask a three-year-old to be wise; wisdom comes later. What the youngest child needs first is not doctrine but trust — the settled sense that Someone stronger than she is holds her and will not let go.

A genuinely Christian preschool gives her exactly that, and it does so in the way children that age actually learn: through song and story rather than by argument. It teaches her to sing Jesus Loves Me, This I Know — a Person outside herself who loves her — little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong, which is the Good Shepherd of the twenty-third Psalm rendered for a nursery: the child is weak, the Shepherd is strong, and she belongs to Him. And it grounds all of it in the line a preschooler can carry without a word of philosophy — for the Bible tells me so.

Her assurance does not rest on her own feelings about herself; it rests on what God has revealed. It teaches her, too, that she and every child are precious in His sight — worth conferred from outside, by the God who made her, not manufactured from within.

Now set that beside what the Learning Care Group model actually delivers, on its own account. Its foundation is the child: self-awareness, self-management, the “authentic self,” and her own well-being as the measure of things. Where the hymn says the child is precious in His sight, the curriculum says the child is precious because of who she already is. Same word, opposite foundation — one roots the child’s worth in her Maker, the other in the self.

That is the quiet substitution at the center of the whole model: a genuinely Christian program hands the youngest child the Good Shepherd, a Someone outside herself who knows her and holds her; this one hands her a mirror. And it does so precisely where the secular model claims to be strongest — the emotional and relational life of the young child — installing the self where the Savior used to be.

None of this makes STEAM wrong; a Christian preschool teaches children to read, count, and observe the world, too. The difference is the order. In one, everything is built on the child’s being loved and held by God, and letters and numbers are an exploration of His world; in the other, the developmental program is the foundation, and faith is the weekly appendix laid on top.

Neither Pathways’ publicly available materials nor Learning Care Group’s own descriptions of the program indicate that it recognizes sin, teaches a morality grounded in Scripture, or affirms the biblical understanding of marriage and the family.

Where the record speaks at all, it points the other way. Misbehavior is treated not as moral fault but as developmentally normal conduct — the company assures parents that ninety-eight percent of challenging behaviors in early childhood are “age appropriate” and should be coached rather than corrected. Family is presented through a classroom program the company calls “Reflecting Our Communities,” in which every configuration is affirmed as equally valid. The company’s own diversity statement declares its support for “every type of family — adoption, surrogacy, same-sex, and solo parenting.”

A church that once taught the children in its care that Jesus loves them — this they know, for the Bible tells them so — can now, for a monthly deposit, hand over their formation to a curriculum whose stated foundation is the child rather than God — and call the arrangement a ministry.

There is a further surrender in it that most churches never notice. When a church runs its own Christian preschool, it hires the teachers — and under the First Amendment’s ministerial exception, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor (2012) and Our Lady of Guadalupe (2020), it may require every one of them to share and live by its faith. When it hands the program to Learning Care Group, the teachers become the company’s employees, not the church’s — and a secular corporation, bound by Bostock v. Clayton County and state civil-rights law, cannot screen its staff for adherence to a biblical understanding of marriage and sexuality the way a church lawfully can.

So the church does not merely outsource the curriculum. It outsources the selection of the very adults who will form its children to an employer legally forbidden from applying the church’s standards to that choice — and in doing so it quietly surrenders a religious-liberty protection that the church, as an institution, fought all the way to the Supreme Court to secure.

I will have much more to say about all of this in a later piece. For now, it is enough to note that it is a productized, repeatable model — executed at a megachurch in Plano, Texas; at a church in Johnston, Iowa; and at others, including in Illinois — sold to churches as a solution, and that its selling point is revenue, not souls.

The quieter surrenders

The government-money and cash-money cases are the easiest to document because they leave a paper trail. But the same instinct — to hand the hard, distinctive work to someone else — shows up even in places with no contract at all.

Discipleship is increasingly bought rather than built. Churches license sermon series, small-group curricula, and video teaching from a handful of national vendors rather than developing indigenous teaching rooted in their own congregations and convictions.

Pastoral care is quietly referred out to secular therapy, so the formation of a troubled soul is handed over to a therapeutic model that answers to the American Psychological Association rather than to Scripture. Recovery ministry is replaced by a secular twelve-step meeting in the fellowship hall, or funded by a government substance-abuse grant that carries the same religious-inertness rule as the food line.

The long historical record shows where this road ends if it is walked far enough. Nearly every great American hospital system began as a church’s work of mercy — Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Adventist, or Catholic. Government reimbursement and merger economics have secularized most of them so completely that, in many cases, the denominational name on the building is the only remaining religious content.

The same is true of higher education. Harvard was founded in 1636 to train a learned ministry; so were Yale and Princeton. Historians George Marsden and James Burtchaell have documented, in exhaustive detail, how such institutions drifted from their founding faith, one reasonable, practical compromise at a time. No single step looked like apostasy. Each looked like Esau’s stew: sensible, immediate, and cheap.

The honest objection

A church is not obligated to be good at everything. Running a licensed daycare, meeting federal food-safety standards, and navigating adoption law — these are genuine specializations, and there is nothing unfaithful about a church that lacks the competence itself and delegates the logistics to someone who has it, so long as the church keeps the ministry for itself. Subsidiarity, rightly understood, is a Christian principle, not a betrayal of it. A church may hire a plumber without outsourcing its theology of water.

The trouble is that formation is not plumbing. So I went looking for the church that had actually pulled it off — that had taken a secular curriculum and genuinely filled it with its own theology, keeping the ministry while delegating the logistics. What I found instead were churches that had added a line.

One partner church posted “children are created in the image of God” on its webpage, a sentence that appears nowhere in the operator’s own materials. But a sentence on a landing page is not a curriculum, and a line about the image of God in the marketing copy is not the Good Shepherd taught in the classroom. The children in that program were still formed full-time by the secular curriculum; the verse changed the website, not the classroom. And within a few years, the operator closed that school anyway, on thirty days’ notice, on its own commercial timetable — which tells you, finally, whose enterprise it always was.

The honest answer to the objection is that the thing it imagines — delegating logistics while keeping the formation — is easy to assert and hard to find. The question is never merely “did the church outsource?” It is: did the gospel survive the handoff, or did it die in it?

Did the church keep the birthright and merely delegate the cooking, or did it trade the birthright for the meal? That is a question you can actually investigate, case by case — and my experience, after fifty years of looking at institutions under pressure, is that when the gospel content and the expedient arrangement come into conflict, the arrangement rarely yields.

Esau got his stew. He also, when it was too late, sought the blessing in tears, only to discover that a birthright, once traded, does not come back on request. The American church is making its bargain in a dozen ways at once, mostly without noticing, and mostly for reasons that sound like good stewardship in the moment.

In the pieces to come, I intend to name the elements, follow the money, and ask each one the only question that matters: what, exactly, did we trade away, and can we get it back?