THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 20, 1994 TAG: 9408190079
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Issues of Faith
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
SOME YEARS AGO in seminary, I heard a sermon about a rescue aid station that became so well-established, well-funded and well-decorated, it totally lost its sense of mission. The staff became enamored of their pretty offices and new carpeting to the point that they no longer wanted scruffy, dirty people wandering in.
So they stopped rescuing and aiding.
Instead, they made the original rescue aid station the ``home office,'' and built satellite locations to handle the crises and unpleasant problems that wouldn't go away. Soon, those satellite locations also became well-funded, well-established and well-decorated, and were also turned into home offices. And on it went.
The point of the sermon was that the church, like the original rescue aid station, has lost its sense of mission. It prefers to look pretty and appear important rather than to get down in the dirt to heal the sick and comfort the broken-hearted.
I cannot argue with many of David Smiley's points about the institutional church. Many churches have become far more enamored of their respectability in the community and in the appearance of their sanctuaries than they are devoted to the Great Commission as Jesus proclaimed it: to go out into the world and proclaim the good news to all of creation (Mark 16:15).
I do not, however, agree that the institution of the church is the problem, nor is it the natural enemy of the Christian's relationship with God. To pit the institution against the relationship with God - as though our choice were either/or - is to oversimplify the church's history and its present place in the world.
The church's history over the past 2,000 years has been a mixed bag of consummate successes and embarrassing failures; of outstanding progress and incomprehensible ignorance; of true saints and out-and-out villains. Alongside the tragic misguidedness of the Crusades stands the church's dogged commitment to literacy, education and human rights.
Today a good number of the hunger relief organizations active in Rwanda and Zaire are funded by church organizations, some of them large institutions with paid staffs. Is this ``power religion?''
The line between true religion and power religion becomes difficult to draw if the sole criterion is institutionalism. While institutions often devote themselves to ensuring their own survival at any cost, the word ``institution'' itself denotes neither good nor evil. The primary dictionary definition of institution is ``an organization or establishment devoted to the promotion of a particular object, especially one of a public, educational or charitable character.''
The secondary definition is ``a building devoted to such work;'' and the tertiary definition is ``a place of confinement.''
As David Smiley did well to point out in last week's column, there are church institutions which are no more than buildings and others which are really places of con-finement.
Just because, however, a congregation builds a sanctuary and an education wing, pays a pastor and hires an organist, does not mean that it has jettisoned the Great Commission. Some churches with beautiful sanctuaries, big budgets and highly planned programs remain devoted to the promotion of the Great Commission.
The key to the church's effectiveness lies not in its organizational complexity or simplicity, but in its sense of mission. Another word for mission might be output. To use the analogy of the human body, if the church's output does not match its intake, we have a problem.
Yes, we have a sick institution. But not all institutions are sick and not all of them stay sick. Sometimes, institutions experience wholesale reformation, as the church did in the 16th century . . . Sometimes healing comes about through the efforts of grass-roots ministry, as David Smiley urged last week. Sometimes it comes through a more comprehensive process called a ``paradigm shift,'' which is a total change in how it looks at itself and its place in the world.
I for one would rather stick with the institution and work within it to see what pose the Body of Christ will strike in the years to come, than to abandon the stunning array of resources the church as an institution stands to offer a hurting and broken world. MEMO: GUEST COLUMNIST
This week's guest columnist is the Rev. Joan Hedrich Wooten who will
address the issue, ``Is the Institutional Church Necessary?''
Wooten is offering an opposing view to last week's column by David
Smiley. Reader Response to both columns will appear Aug. 27, with a
``final word'' commentary by Betsy Wright on Sept. 3.
Wooten, a former Navy chaplain, is the Presbyterian Campus Minister
at Wesley-Westminster House at Old Dominion University. She lives in
Virginia Beach with her husband and two children.
Send Reader Responses to Issues of Faith, The Virginian-Pilot, 150 W.
Brambleton Ave., Norfolk, Va. 23510; call (804) 446-2273; FAX (804)
436-2798; or send computer message via bmw(AT)infi.net. Deadline is
Tuesday prior to publication. You must include your name, city and phone
number. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by MORT FRYMAN, Staff
The Rev. Joan Hedrich Wooten is the Presbyterian campus minister at
ODU.
by CNB