What if you outgrow church?

It is evident that the moment a gathering of believers becomes an institution, the impulse to hold on to the institution’s members increases. In truth, its very survival depends on maintaining and even growing its membership roles. When its survival is threatened in any way, an institution can react in extreme ways that are not necessarily in keeping with its stated identity or purpose. These reactions can become quite nasty. Consider a person who presumes to outgrow the institution. It is not unusual for the institution to treat such a person as a traitor or an infidel. The institutional response to such apparently treasonous behavior can, and often does include heaping on shame and using the threat of eternal punishment to get the person back into the confines of acceptable behavior or belief.

To be clear, I am not referring to any particular religious institution. All are subject to some form of this institutional reactivity. One example is the institution called family. Some families behave as if loyalty and obedience to the leadership of the family is the highest, perhaps the only, acceptable value. But, doesn’t that position obscure what might be the more central purpose of a family: that of nurturing children into becoming fully functional adults?

I see any healthy system, including church, as resisting the temptation to put its institutional survival ahead of the wellbeing of the people in it or ahead of the wellbeing of the community it serves. To use the imagery of Jesus, what does it profit us to gain institutional survival at the expense of individual and corporate spiritual growth?
I would like to believe that the church is most successful, not when it has full pews and well-lined coffers, but when it helps people make the transition from childhood, through adolescence, and then into adulthood.

I would like the church to affirm the requirements of the individual for appropriate nourishment, even if the particular institution cannot meet that particular need. I would like the church to be proud of its “graduates”: those who follow a path of mature integrity like Jesus did.

Buildings, congregational relationships, and governance structures have their value, but we must be ever vigilant that they not substitute obedience and loyalty in the rightful place of healthy development.

A particularly dangerous situation emerges when religious institutions believe that they have the correct set of beliefs and/or practices, and that “God” will be unhappy with anything else. One of the hallmarks of healthy liberal religion is when it recognizes the limitations of its understanding, and similarly, the limitations of any word, image, ritual, or tradition to encompass the fullness of divine presence and meaning. All of these have their value, but only as ways to point us toward ultimate reality. The limitations of finitude will always keep us well short of complete understanding, but those same limitations can motivate a lifetime of growth and learning.

I see two possible benefits, one for the individual and one for the institution. A healthy institution will always help individuals to develop more fully, and at the same time the institution has the opportunity develop more fully as well. Maybe the Realm of God works something like this.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson