The Institutional Church

Many people love to complain about the “institutional church.” They love Jesus. They love the concept of being one of His followers. But they don’t like the notion of organized Christianity or of the structure and rituals that go along with “the church.” They are all for the church as an informal gathering of believers who help each other, but they don’t want to see anything fossilized into the rigid structures called “church” today.

This is in large measure an American perspective, for Americans have been loathe to love any institution, whether it be government or the “ivory tower” of the academy or any other organization. There has been this notion that everything would be all right if we were all allowed to be free individuals interacting with others on an occasional basis. The history of American religion is littered with examples of people turning their backs on organized religion and creating something de novo. It is to be found in the two Great Awakenings, where people turned their backs on historic confessional churches for new denominations. It is even clearer in the various denominations that have arisen on American shores—from the peculiar (such as the Campbellites) to the bizarrely heretical (such as the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses)—who have written off all previous church history as bunkum and sought to establish a new, purified church, free of all the previous corrupting tendencies of religious life. The pattern continues to this day, with the Emergent Church movement rebelling against the formalization and rigidity of Evangelicalism, which itself had proclaimed to be a liberator of rigid creedal and liturgical churches.

This pattern persists because we Americans prefer real life relationships over institutions, all the while failing to see that institutions are simply a formalized set of relationships. All the evil that is rightly attributed to institutions acting badly can be found in even the most informal of relationships. For example, institutions are known to pass the buck so that no one ends up being accountable, goad its members on to doing evil that none would commit individually, and cover up deplorable evils to preserve its own reputation. Even when not behaving so badly, institutions fall into the trap of maintaining the status quo and encouraging groupthink. But each of these accusations that can be leveled against institutions can also be charged against small, informal relationships. Everybody in a small household is expected to clean up, but nobody does so and instead blames someone else. A few gang members are enough to goad each other on to a life of crime; meanwhile, a mob may be completely disorganized, but can still carry out a lynching that none of its members would do by itself. And the impulse to cover up scandals is not unique to large corporations, churches, or governments; rare is the family that wants to have its dirty linen aired. Moreover, traditionalism is not just the habit of institutions; individuals and families too soon fall into comfortable routines that are only occasionally challenged. Thus, the problems with institutions are those of human relationships in general.

It is naïve then to assume that one can correct institutional problems by abandoning anything that smacks of an institution in the hopes of creating something different. In the end, one would simply be creating what would turn into another institution. Institutional problems are solved by calling people back to the purpose of the institution. A dysfunctional family should not necessarily be abolished; instead, everyone in the family should learn how to do their job better, whether as father, mother, husband, wife, or child, and to do their job in a holy manner. By the same token, when the church struggles as an institution, she can get back on track by recalling her holy calling, not by having her members abolish her or abandon her.

This has the example of the Scriptures behind it. The prophets of the Old Testament excoriated the Israelites who adopted a formalistic or ritualistic approach to the sacrifices. Instead of abolishing the sacrifices, the priesthood, and the temple, they urged the Israelites to do more than go through the motions. In other words, they kept the institutions but challenged them to do more. Our Lord took a similar attitude when He praised the Pharisees for their teaching but warned that His disciples would have to do better than them if they wanted to enter God’s kingdom.

The Lutheran Reformation also proceeded from this same understanding. It did not set out to create a whole new church, but to reform the church as she was by calling her to a more faithful adherence. The Augsburg Confession (especially in Articles 1-21) professed to be teaching no new doctrine and argued that it had church history on its side. It also argued (Articles 22-28) that the Lutheran practice was rooted in a much older and wiser catholic tradition than the Roman practice was. Far from taking an American burn-all-the-churches-down-and-start-over approach, the Lutheran Reformation cherished the church and simply wished to call her back to greater faithfulness.

Yes, the church of today needs renewal. But if we were to look to the approach of the Scriptures—as well as that of the Lutheran Reformation—we would make much better progress than the slash-and-burn method so popular in American Protestantism.