the need for the institutional church

I am a pastor. I am a pastor of a local church. Our church was given a building a few years back. Our building has a room with a lot of chairs. On Sunday mornings and evenings, people gather to sing together and listen to teaching. Some who come give their hard earned cash. We have a budget. We have trustworthy people who oversee that budget. We have a staff who serves and empowers those who are a part of our local church. We have an elder team who cares for us. We have a deacon team who oversees our resources.

Why all of these pointless, stunted sentences? Simply to point out that our local church is like many local churches. By that I mean we are an organization or an institution. Some do not like church as institution, and for very good reasons. That is fine. The truth, is neither do I. But I am willing to live within it. Let me tell you why.

The church needs fresh thinking, and needs leaders who can (and no doubt will) redefine what we think of when we hear the word “church”. We need unconventional churches that don’t just think outside the box, but blow the box up and start fresh. We should champion such pioneering and creative efforts. But there is another side that we would do well to consider.

For whatever reason a lot of people spend a good chunk of their time each Sunday to enter church buildings to sit and participate in local church gatherings. We have an audience that is willfully captive. This is a time to use what people know and are familiar with to lead them to a place they do not know or are not familiar with. This is the basis of educational philosophy.

No one would ever start math education with calculus. Calculus does not make sense to a five year-old (and still does not make sense to most people). Teachers know they have to build a knowledge base, and then build on that. Children begin their education by learning how to identify each number. Only then do they begin with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

For many, innovative thinking with regard to “church” is frightening and they are unwilling to move anywhere. Not only are they unwilling to move, but they become more entrenched in their thinking and may even regress. As human beings when we are presented with something we do not know, we often go back to what we do know even if that is damaging.

A friend of mine used to say, “The most common mistake of a leader is to go to his or her next logical step and not the followers.” Many people who are thinking, speaking, and writing about the need of the church to change have great thoughts. But they have moved so far down the road that many do not know what the first step is to getting there. So they simply never move.

For better or worse many are comfortable with an institutional local church. For those who are familiar with this, we should use it as a platform to teach them a greater vision of the Church. We should use their familiarity with “church” to introduce to them the revolution that Jesus started 2,000 years ago. We should use our fairly typical Sunday gatherings to teach them what it means to be a part of the movement referred to as the “Kingdom of Heaven”.

From this we can teach about taking the next step. Rather than spend our time throwing stones at the institutional church or fighting against let’s use it. Let’s engage it. It is more slow going, and often more painful, but in the end there lies a good chance that more people might just get a little further down the road. And when this happens the Church will look more like the group of people living as the embodiment of Jesus in our world.