Church: Community or Institution?

The church's future depends on our ability to hold two key ecclesial concepts together: community and institution.

I make the case for this claim in a new article - which you can find here - where I look at the reality of the church as both a community of Jesus' followers and an institution complete with church hierarchy, bureaucracy, and connectional structure.

In my experience, Gen Xers tend to gravitate toward the notion of the church as a community. We are skeptical of the 'big institution' approach of our forebears in the Builder Generation, but we're also turned off by the 'save the world' idealism of the Baby Boomers. So we tend to retreat into the local, focusing on our own immediate communities and their surrounding environment.

Don't get me wrong: I think the localism of the Xers is one of their best qualities. It means that we are asking tough questions about the character of the church. As a disciplined community of Jesus' followers, the church must not be a place where cheap grace is preached and practiced. I don't think it's any coincidence that Xers in general tend to be turned off by the "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors" marketing campaign of the larger church. It's not that we don't have open hearts; it's just that we don't want the gospel watered down to some nebulous slogan just for the purpose of trying to make ourselves seem more likable.

On the other hand, the same local focus that helps Xers to think seriously about matters of personal and communal discipleship can sometimes hinder them when it comes to thinking about their responsibility to the institutional church. We tend to neglect the larger church because we don't see what good it does for us and our communities. (Shane Claiborne, who I posted about positively last week, is an interesting example of this trend. Shane grew up in the UMC, but the radical discipleship he practices now is essentially in a free church evangelical context. When he came to speak at Duke a few weeks ago, he made several contradictory statements that made me want to ask him about his understanding of ecclesial authority. Alas, I didn't get the chance.)

But it's important for Xers to remember that the church is bigger than the local congregation. Just as we are individual members of the one body, so too are our congregations individual members of the body of Christ. We live in an age skeptical of big institutions or not, it is true. But in my mind, that gives us all the more reason to reform our own institution so that it better reflects the church God would have it be.

The article, by the way, was published by Faith & Leadership, a new venture of Leadership Education program at Duke Divinity School. It is a kind of cross between an online magazine, a blog, and an all-purpose resource center for church leadership. The site went online a couple of weeks ago, and they've already featured some really insightful articles and commentaries.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this issue of community vs. institution, particularly if you have time to read the article. I consider it to be crucial to our leadership of the church over the next few decades.