capture Parse.com application logs with syslog-ng

Question

I need to setup a log drain for an application running on Parse. My source looks like this:

source s_parse {
        #internal();
        program("/home/ubuntu/parse/tailparse.sh"
                flags(no-parse));
};

and tailparse.sh looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
cd /home/ubuntu/parse
parse log appname -f

Running the script directly works fine and I explicitly use hardcoded paths and cd to the proper directory before invoking the parse command line utility. Unfortunately, the only ouput I get from syslog-ng is

Mar 18 18:58:52 ip-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX syslog-ng:  syslog-ng starting up; version='3.3.4' 
Mar 18 18:58:53 ip-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX syslog-ng:  EOF on control channel, closing connection;

The Parse utility is built on python, so I am wondering if this is related: syslog-ng not flushing the pipe to external program

Is using the program() source a lost cause? Should I be writing to a file first and using that source driver instead?