Considering the Institutional Church

Yesterday I listened to an interview with Frank Viola and George Barna about their book Pagan Christianity?.  I keep thinking of the former pitcher for the Red Sox.  You have to really have your head in the sand to not notice all the books critical of the “institutional church”.  This is a phrase that was used ad infintinum during the 70-minute interview.  Never defined. 

Here’s my beef with the beef against the institutional church.  Actually I have a few beefs.

1. Overgeneralization.  Yes, many of the criticisms are true of many churches.  But none of the criticisms is true of all churches.  So you end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  Yes, for instance, many churches are all about buildings (I could tell you stories, baby).  But not all are.  And that includes some big, famous congregations.  For instance, Redeemer PCA in NYC does not have a building.  They continue to rent facilities.  

But sometimes owning your facility is a good thing.  Rent was one of the problems we ran into in our restart.  If we had put our money into a new facility on a visible piece of land we might have done better.  I don’t know, and never will.  But buildings alone are not the issue- but the attitude about buildings.

2. Lack of Personal Responsibility.  They blame the church, not themselves.  Yes, there are some dysfunctional churches, and churches that enable spiritual slackers.  But most churches I’ve been associated with want people to grow and be involved.  Most people who are not engaged are not engaged because they don’t want to be engaged.  Those people fail to take personal initiative to build relationships with others, allow others into their lives, go to small groups and the list goes on.  It is easy to make the “institutional church” the scapegoat. 

The larger the church the more effort you may have to put into getting to know people.  But I’ve been in churches of over 1,000 and been able to make friends and build relationships that lasted longer than my time there.  Am I special?  No!  I recognized my personal responsibility instead of expecting everyone to initiate contact with me.  Most churches nearly beg people to be involved, they aren’t wanting to have a congregation of spectators.

3. Rejection rather than Reformation.  These critics advocate leaving the “institutional church” rather than working to reform it.  This is odd because you can’t be sure who is supposed to be ruining the “institutional church”.  George Barna, for instance, was a pastor.  Yet, he walked away from the church to plant a “house church”.  Was he so powerless to effect change?  Maybe, but that is only one congregation.  You don’t abandon the institution of marriage because you married an abuser, or have had numerous divorces.  Or are the pastors the problem?  Afterall, many lay people are complaining about the “institutional church”.  So I’m not sure whose to blame (reality is it is probably both depending on the particulars of the situation).

The people often hold the key.  Most churches are representative in some way- you vote for elders and/or deacons.  If you elect lousy officers it is your fault (and the same is true in politics- don’t complain about the people you continually vote into office).  Choose officers who get that it is about Jesus, the gospel, people and learning to grow in grace, love and service.  Congregations don’t change unless the people in them change- one person at a time.  Don’t just leave, but build relationships and winesomely win people to a more biblical vision of Christianity.  Just make sure your vision really is biblical Christianity rather than your preferences or prejudices.  But if that congregation refuses to change, find one that is more appropriate.  Few people live in an area with only 1 or 2 churches.

4. Misunderstanding the Relationship between Church & Culture aka an Idealized View of the Early Church.  You often hear about a “New Testament church” in these discussions.  One group that did that when I was a young Christian turned out to be a cult.  They thought the “institutional church” was the whore of Babylon.  Not everyone who uses this phrase is a heretic, but we have to ask what they are getting at.  If you read the New Testament, you see that every church had problems.  There was no perfect church, even then.

Every church has existed in a particular time and a particular culture.  This is in the providence of God.  The church has to evaluate that culture and decide what to (adapting Niebuhr’s catagories) affirm, adopt, adapt and abandon.  We will recognize some cultural practices as consistent with biblical teaching and affirm them.  Some will be basically value neutral (diet, dress, language) unless they violate biblical imperatives (cannibalism, immodesty, abusive speech) so we adopt them to fit in.  Some, like art forms and technology, are used to promote evil but can be redeemed to promote godliness instead.  Some cultural practices are to be rejected outright for violating biblical standards (there is no such thing as Christian pornography for instance).  Some churches adopt cultural practices they shouldn’t.  That needs to be addressed.  Some of the practices picked up in one culture/time are no longer appropriate for the new cultural situations.  They need reform.  But to merely reject things because they are not “biblical” is to miss the point that God works in and thru culture to reach the people of that culture.  We are missionaries, not monks.

An example is Sunday School.  You don’t find it in the Bible, and the church existed for 1,800 years without Sunday School.  It originated to teach young children to read by having them read Scripture.  It was for outreach.  Sunday School as it exists today is not essential to church experience.  But, it is an often appropriate method of fulfilling a biblical mandate.  We are given numerous biblical mandates, but not how to fulfill them.  God leaves this up to us to find culturally appropriate means of fulfilling those mandates.  He regulates what we are to do, but how we do it may change depending on the culture in which we live.  This does not make Sunday School, or youth group, “pagan”.  They are means to accomplishing biblical ends.

5. The Endless Quest for “Something More” May Reveal Spiritual Ignorance.  This is another phrase used often, “something more.”  People are unhappy, discontent, with their spiritual experience.  This could be because they don’t understand what is already theirs in Christ.  It could be because they have unrealistic expectations of what is now ours.  We live in the Already/Not Yet.  We enjoy the firstfruits of our salvation, the downpayment as Paul also puts it.  We do not enjoy the fulness of our salvation.  There are aspects of our salvation that we will not enjoy until the end of time.  To expect us to enjoy those things now is called an over-realized eschatology.  People grow frustrated because their experience doesn’t match what they read about or hear about on TV.  They are endlessly chasing the glory cloud wanting an overly experiential Christianity.

I believe Christianity is experiential.  But those mountain top experiences are not ordinary.  God didn’t show up on Abraham’s doorstep every day.  Miracles came in clumps, around new redemptive acts.  So believers’ lives were usually mundane.  It is just like marriage.  There are moments of great joy, intimacy and prosperity.  But mostly marriage is working together in the mundane things of life: meals, chores, childrearing, work.  Our faith is expressed in those places, not estatic religious experiences.

6. Unrealistic expectations of people.  Of what is the church comprised?  People, sinful people.  So obviously every congregation will have problems.  No congregation will live up to the ideal set forth in Scripture.  The flesh resists every impulse toward faith and obedience.  That’s a bunch of people resisting faith and obedience in a congregation.  Yet there we are to learn love, patience, forgiveness, long-suffering and so much more.  But when we bail, we don’t.  Our own process of sanctification short-circuits.  Yes, you may still have Christian fellowship/friendships.  But there is something about being committed to people you don’t always like or agree with- and not walking away- that changes you into a more godly person.

So as I listen to all these criticisms, I might agree with the disaffected on some points.  But I find their solutions to be less than biblical.  God calls us to not make superficial judgments, but to work to reform His church and to fit in with culture (as expressed above).  But what I read and hear is run, hide and do your own thing.  I find it very selfish and unloving.  As a result, I find it problematic.