Is the "Institutional" Church Anti-Biblical?

October 30, 2009

Over the last few years the demonizing of the institutional church has ramped up. The Church, as it stands, has been called the “bad guy” in the midst of all kinds of cultural and societal changes. As Ben Witherington states in a blog critique of Pagan Christianity the big bad guy, within this movement “is not sin, suffering, the Devil, or any of those things. The big bad guy is going to be what is loosely called the Institutional Church…” If this demonization came from outside the church, it would be easy to overlook. However, that is not the case. The greatest attacks leveled at the Church (and here I mean the institutional church) are often from among those within the Church. Most cloak their demonization in a lofty concern for returning to the ancient ways in order to revive the Church.

The institutionalization of the church, blamed on Constantine, is viewed, by many within this new movement, as an offense to the ancient ways of the Bible. One advocate states that Constantine’s legitimization of the Christian faith and subsequent institutionalization of the Church was “absolutely disastrous to the Jesus movement.”

One of the great failures of this new movement, in my opinion, is a failure to accept institutions as viable, transformational entities. From the time of Christ’s ascension and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, spoken of in Acts 2, the Church has progressed and fulfilled the Father’s glorious purposes. All manners of forms, formats and styles, throughout history have been applied to further the Gospel, none greater than the other. History is replete with revivals and Spiritual awakenings happening within the context of the “institutional church”. I fail to see the power of their arguments. Maybe I am just not smart enough to see it. That is a distinct possibility.

Another problem, as I see it, is a failure to recognize the early and rapid development of the Church’s leadership structures. It is hard to deny that the church had a grassroots movement. It is equally hard to deny that leadership structures, as seen in the Council of Acts 15, did not exist. This council decided on and made sweeping statements for the church at large.

Culture always has, and always will change. That is one constant we can count on. It would be very difficult to prove that culture has not changed since Constantine’s “institutionalization” of the church, and yet that seems to be the underlying claim. Somehow, our culture has so evolved that we have to now radically change our paradigms. Everything we used to know, as Brian McClaren would claim, must be thrown away for something new.

I usually don’t do this, but let me give you a long quote. I think Ben says it about as good as anyone can.

“frankly there are no such thing as ‘institutional churches’. Churches have institutions of various sorts, they aren’t institutions. Furthermore, the Bible is full of traditions and many of those developed after NT times are perfectly Biblical. It’s not really possible to draw a line in the sand between ‘Biblical principles’ and traditions. The question is which traditions comport with Biblical tradition and which do not. And there is a further problem. It is ever so dangerous to take what was normal in early Christianity as a practice, and conclude that therefore it must be normative. It may have been normal in the NT era for non-theological reasons, for example for practical reasons.

To tell us that the church is really people, people united in Christ and serving the Lord, is to say nothing for or against the ‘institutional church’, or for that matter its institutions. Everyone agrees that the church is people, more specifically people gathered for worship, fellowship, and service. Everyone agrees that the church is a living thing and organism, not an organization. So what’s the beef here, and where is the real thrust of the critique?”

Posted 10/30/2009 in Stephen Gray | 1 Comment - Add Comment

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     For any interested, John Zen gives a very thorough response to Witherington by means of some correspondance that is collected here. http://www.paganchristianity.org/zensresponds1.htm