Catacomb Resident Blog

Institution versus People

22 December 2023

If you are looking for political entertainment, keep an eye on the Catholic Church. The current Pope is provoking a lot of resistance. When he finally ruled it was okay to bless same-sex marriages, a large number of conservative priests of all ranks began making noise about it. This will not end quietly. It could easily split the massive organization.

If you like things a little more tame, then the Anglican Communion is moving more slowly. Every year the schism gets a little wider. Some of it doesn't make the news outside the Anglican community, but very few doubt that a total formal break is coming. The last stage will be the final decision about what each camp will call themselves.

Several other major denominations are splitting, and there are lawsuits over real estate and facilities. Not every conservative versus liberal split goes to the latter. Some decades ago, the Missouri Synod Lutherans had no trouble spitting out their liberals. You would be forgiven for thinking Southern Baptists had done the same thing, but now their conservative leadership is drifting leftward. And that's largely because the same drift is happening in Big Eva as a whole.

Power corrupts, and Big Eva is nothing if not power-seeking.

Among western religious organizations, it is virtually impossible to institute a means to preventing this kind of thing. It's embedded in the culture of the West. Even if you can develop a subculture that honors decentralization and calm debate without rancor (such as the Cumberland Presbyterians do), you cannot prevent charismatic leaders from ripping it all to shreds -- and the people tend to love it. Westerners are entirely too enamored with the myth of the Great Man, that great nations should focus on a single figure as if that person was semi-divine. It has become an instinct.

While the Scripture is wholly feudal, it still encourages a highly decentralized social leadership of local elders. It is often stated as: No one has any say in your daily life who isn't related by blood or covenant. And covenant trumps blood relations.

The Tower of Babel narrative cannot be confined to its meaning for the Unseen Realm. It's more than just a dispersion of humanity into nations distributed among the elohim council members. It's also a fundamental moral lesson that mankind should never be ruled by centralized authority, symbolized by the construction of the Tower of Babel. God's answer is to forcibly disperse humans into numerous small communities. Thus, the model for the New Testament was a large number of small church bodies scattered across the land. Churches cooperate; they do not operate in concert (as humans might think of it).

Meanwhile, within the church body itself there should be considerable freedom outside rather limited boundaries. Most existing church bodies do this wrong, if you ask me. The art and faith involved in drawing boundaries is completely lost to western believers. The western model is a political organization of relative strangers with lots of rules, not a family of people who know each other by smell. Members today have relatively small investment in each other's lives; instead, everything belongs to the institution. The institution is an artificial static ideal, a notional construct that cannot subject itself to the Holy Spirit.

Has it ever occurred to you that most western Christians see God as a static entity that cannot change in any way, ever? The whole notion of "perfection" is stasis, not living.

The point I make here is that we have a long way to go culturally and socially. If the organization matters much at all, it matters too much. The core issue is faith and conviction, which should lead to a depth of compassion that ignores institutional boundaries. We should allow a greater dynamic in favor of what really matters. This is not easy for folks who grew up in the West. Indeed, we may never actually get there, but it should at least remain a goal in our minds.

People matter, but the reason they matter is because their Father matters more. We cannot just allow anything people carry with them. It's a paradox: western religion is open on things that should be closed, and closed on things that should be open.

The limits of what human organization can accomplish are quite severe compared to what our culture believes. We do not carry enough distrust of institutions. The only reason any form of organization should exist is to serve the mission, and people are the mission. But the mission is to bring people close to God, and that certainly comes with some exclusions. Those exclusions are a matter of our fleshly nature. Our western instincts give the flesh way too much room to assert itself in how a church operates.

I keep harping on covenant boundaries because they are a living thing; they are manifestations of God Himself. We cannot nail them down with hard anchors that our flesh can easily recognize. They are inherently dynamic, shifting to meet the demands of the day, but without changing fundamentally. That's why boundaries and human organization are an art, a spiritual talent. You have to foster the health of the boundaries. I could not possibly tell you where they will be in every context.

Instead, I struggle to help you understand God as a Person, so that the boundaries themselves will become personally familiar to you. Then you will know where they are on any given issue at any given time and place in this world where you are.

A church is people; the organization itself is a living thing. Stop trying to nail it down, to kill it and pickle it for your own intellectual convenience.


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