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The institutional church

For those who have become cynical about the church, it’s important to distinguish between the body of Christ as described in the Bible and the business that many churches now operate here in America. The “body of Christ” is as unwieldy a term for the assemblies prescribed in the Bible as i…
By Seth Barnes

For those who have become cynical about the church, it’s important to distinguish between the body of Christ as described in the Bible and the business that many churches now operate here in America.

The “body of Christ” is as unwieldy a term for the assemblies prescribed in the Bible as is the term “church” with all its modern connotations of a building with a Sunday morning service. We’re given many examples of the body of Christ assembling together and we’re introduced to the term “church” in the New Testament, but nowhere do we see anything that remotely resembles the institution that many local assemblies have established.

Institutions are as inevitable as tunnels in an ant farm. When people get together, they need some level of structure to keep from tripping over themselves and to realize a degree of predictability and efficiency in their interactions.

The problem with institutions is that they are built to bring order to one set of people and realities. And then life changes, rendering parts of those realities irrelevant. This didn’t used to be as big a problem back in the day and age when change was slow. But our society is changing at an incredible rate at this stage of history. In many industries, the rate of change is 20% a year. If you don’t change 20% of what you’re doing each year, you will be completely irrelevant in five years.

The institutions of the YMCA or the Salvation Army were started by radical Jesus-followers addressing the worst problems of their day a century ago. Much of what the Salvation Army does now is wonderful, but William Booth would be turning in his grave if he could see the hide-bound bureaucracy that it has become.

The institution of the church is just like every other institution – it is slow to respond to the realities of a world that is racing by it. It is hemorrhaging two million people a year and continues to argue about hymnals.

Jesus didn’t set up a seminary and didn’t enroll his disciples in it. He didn’t form an institution and didn’t write out bylaws. Yes, he is God, an organizing God, and we are created in his image to bring order from the chaos. But according to the second law of thermodynamics, chaos fights back. Confuse the body of Christ with a church building and the incessant campaigns to fund them and your church building will one day be empty like the great cathedrals of Europe.

The Bible tells us not to forsake assembling together – we Jesus-followers need each other to thrive. The original disciples resisted structure, only giving in to a division of labor with deacons doing some work after a lot of time had passed. The Bible does not tell us much about how to structure ourselves because structure is not the point, people are. The institution is not the point, people are. If you commit to the institution as a primary commitment over relationships, you are missing the point. Unity and love cannot be organized; they happen as a function of covenantal relationships.

I run an institution called AIM. We do a lot of good and I’ve devoted 17 years of my life to it. But the good that we do is a function of people and their commitments, not our 501c3 status or our bylaws. I’ve always got an eye on our ends and our means. At some point, if means begin to overshadow ends, I’ve told our staff, I will blow it up. If we stop being radical and creating radicals and start catering to people’s need for comfort, we’ve run our course and we need to turn out the lights and go home, or better yet, start over from scratch.

Probably more churches need to look around, see that the world has changed dramatically since they were started, and do the same.

 

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