Friday, September 26, 2008
It's Institutional
JollyBlogger recently tried to strike a balance in the love/hate relationship most of us have with the institutional church. He does so by first quoting Dr. Sean Michael Lucas:
I have a friend, an employee of the federal government, who is fond of pointing out that bureaucracy is not a de facto bad thing. He likes to point out that things like the pyramids of Egypt or the Hoover Dam of Nevada/Arizona would be impossible without large, seemingly brain dead institutions, exercising enormous bureaucratic cogs. I think my friend is right, as both Lucas and Peterson seem to agree - institution is necessary.
Where I have a problem is when we defer to the "dead bark" theory. I refuse to believe that God would create for His redeemed people institutions that would lack the capability to reflect His glory. It is the attitude concerning the church that refuses to try to be better - that just throws up its hands and shrugs that I have a problem with.
The transformational power of God extends not just to ourselves, but to our institutions, and as institutions, WE NEED TO CLAIM IT! The implications of this are extraordinary, and I will discuss just one.
The leaders of God's institutions must, if what I have just said is true, be the most exceptional, most talented, most extraordinary leaders in the world. They must have, operate from and towards, a vision of a transformed institution.
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Part of the problem, as we have already suggested, is that we have too often accepted the romantic view that real vitality is to be found in practices and friendships, and institutions are at best necessary evils...We carry with us a mistaken myth that institutions are at best the necessary chaff that we must winnow in order to find the pure wheat of the gospel. But that is not faithful to Scripture (it ignores Israel and its institutions, among other things), and it is not faithful to the empirical realities of our life together. We need to reclaim an understanding of what is involved in the creation and renovation, sustenance and extension of institutions that do need criticism from time to time. But the romantic notion that we are somehow going to find a purer community apart from the reality of institutions is fallacious.And then he quotes Joe Carter quoting Eugene Peterson:
Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There's no life in the bark. It's dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it's prone to disease dehydration, death.David seems to think these comments "dovetail," but I disagree. The Lucas quotation leaves open the possibility that the institution is redeemable - that while we seem to pretty consistently do it wrong, it is SUPPOSED to be done right. The Peterson quote, on the other hand, implies that the dead bark of the institution is in a fact a dead necessity. So which is it?
So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn't last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it's prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.
I have a friend, an employee of the federal government, who is fond of pointing out that bureaucracy is not a de facto bad thing. He likes to point out that things like the pyramids of Egypt or the Hoover Dam of Nevada/Arizona would be impossible without large, seemingly brain dead institutions, exercising enormous bureaucratic cogs. I think my friend is right, as both Lucas and Peterson seem to agree - institution is necessary.
Where I have a problem is when we defer to the "dead bark" theory. I refuse to believe that God would create for His redeemed people institutions that would lack the capability to reflect His glory. It is the attitude concerning the church that refuses to try to be better - that just throws up its hands and shrugs that I have a problem with.
The transformational power of God extends not just to ourselves, but to our institutions, and as institutions, WE NEED TO CLAIM IT! The implications of this are extraordinary, and I will discuss just one.
The leaders of God's institutions must, if what I have just said is true, be the most exceptional, most talented, most extraordinary leaders in the world. They must have, operate from and towards, a vision of a transformed institution.
Technorati Tags:institution, transformation, different, leadership
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