Mission Over Institution

Matthew 23:23-28, Matthew 6, 25-34

            Security is one of the gears that drives the American Culture.  Brian McClaren said those words in his 2005 book Everything Must Change.  In the book, Brian spends much of his time talking about the three wheels of “the machine”.  Security, Prosperity, and Equity are those three which are spun by a center gear he calls the framing story. 

            Security can be seen in everything that we do as a society because security is what makes us feel better.  We put more money in the bank each month, we lock our doors at night, we make sure that we have enough toilet paper and milk during a snowstorm to make it through the next 3 months, and we build institutions that provide us with tangible ways to interpret our lives.  Security is everywhere because it helps us preserve our equity and our prosperity financially, emotionally, and spirituality.

            In this scenario, the institution of the church is our security.  The buildings we expand and occupy are micro-securities, and our pre-assembled programs are security.  And then, we realize that no one wants to be a part of our church anymore…

            The institional church with its formulas and binders of programs has become quite the commodity for people inside the church.  We try a new thing (like CD or the newest youth ministry program) and we then have our ability to function back.  We have the tools and the talent to get those gentiles to be Christians and we can save the world through our words and our Sunday worship hour….but then, nobody comes. 

            Well, why don’t we have a committee meeting to talk about this struggle.  We’ll hire a new staff, recruit some volunteers and we’ll put together this packaged worship manual into a contemporary worship service because that will draw out more students…and then, nobody comes.

            Well, maybe we could expand our building and add this new wing on.  We’ll have plenty more space for something that we have yet to come up with…And then halfway through the project, there is no direction and so the money runs out…and still nobody comes…

            Well, why don’t we….you know this story, you’ve lived it.  You’ve lived in an institutional church that wants to have everything predesigned, wants to have everything follow a similar path each and every year.  Even here, we have rituals that institutionalize us.  Our worship looks similar each week, we went on a retreat in the fall (just like last year.)  In the end, institution can be helpful and hindering.  How do we tell the difference?

            The question is built on the centerpiece of Brian McLaren’s “machine.”  The framing story is the story of our meaning.  What is it that we are after.  In modern American society, security, prosperity, and equity are the wheels that are moved by an invisible American dream.  Often times in the church, the framing story is the hope that all our churches will see the light of Christ and will proclaim his name.  But you know that, it that’s going to happen, it’s not going to happen by pre-programmed venues.  It’s going to happen by embracing our mission.

            Security and institution often times find themselves mission the point of Jesus’ gospel.  It’s easy for it to happen when budgets and programs are the economies of the church.  But consider this story from Philip Gulley in If the Church Were Christian…

“ One of my local congregations had a food pantry but claimed to be chronically short of food donations.  Because it had been established for some time and was known to persons in need, we decided that assisting that pantry rather than starting our own made more sense.  The first week of our venture, I transported the food our members had donated to the food pantry and stayed to help distribute the items.  Oddly, the pantry was only open once a week, for one hour, in the early afternoon, when most people were at work.

            Two women from the host church were overseeing the process.  They opened the doors precisely at one o’clock, handed out a few cans of vegetables to each family, then closed the doors one hour later, to the minute, even though, another family, who had walked some distance to get there, hadn’t yet been helped.

            “Come back next week,” one of the women told them.

            I was taken aback by her actions, but since it was my first time to help, I was reluctant to argue.  Instead, I began helping the women put away the food that hadn’t been given out.  When I entered the pantry storeroom, I was amazed to see cartons of food stacked on shelves and pallets on the floor. 

            “My gosh,” I said.  “There’s enough food here to feed the entire city.  Why did we give people so little when we had so much?”

            “We don’t want to give away all our food,” one of the women said.

            “But when people donate to a food pantry, don’t you think they want to see it handed out instead of sitting in a church basement somewhere?” I asked.  “What good is it doing anyone down here?”

            Neither of them responded.

            See, the framing story for the women in charge of this food pantry wasn’t about giving, it was about staying open each week.  If there were to run out of food, the security they had built in order to stay open would have been taken away.  In the world where their value statement had transitioned from support of others to support of themselves, the mission was lost and the institution was preserved.

            In the United Methodist Church, the biggest problem of the day is our institution.  The general conference of 2012 proved that to be true. And honestly, now the Church is considering in many areas about whether this institution can any longer sustain the mission and vision of the Church.  IN Upper New York and in California, measures are being taken to consider a break from the UMC and the formation of another institution.  Will this work…perhaps, but only if the institution gives way and truly finds its core mission.  And you know that, the church’s withering and death, all of that I believe will go away once we reclaim our mission and allow the institution to fail. Because the Church IS NO the institution.  The denomination is.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be together that we should simply scatter.  It means we simply have work to do to find our core.

 Jesus has very strong words for the institution leaders when he comes across them in Matthew 23.  Instead of taking care of the real problems, of actually cleaning out problems inside the institution, they are simply masking them by trying to look all clean and beautiful.  But inside they are ugly.  Institutions thus on the outside might look good, but inside the finer details, the hard and challenging relationships and mission and vision are often lost.  And no matter what we say or do now, everybody knows that every denomination, especially the UMC, has dirty insides.

            The mission and the vision of the church is to get people to come to church and to remain open each week, thus they have to suck the money out of people when the people have no necessary reason to give but out of guilt.  See what we’re building, an institution.  What the church needs is a new framing story.

            Philip Gulley contends that story is actually imbedded within the church, it’s core, but it’s been caked over with the institutional piece of preservation.  But if we peel back the layers, we’ll see the institution goes away and the mission returns.  To peel it back, all we have to do is read those sacred words in Matthew 6….and as the fear of tomorrow goes away, our hope for today begins anew. 

            The Church has been and always will be called to Mission.  Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is shown healing, feeding, demonstrating, protesting, organizing, proclaiming all in the name of God.  It’s the larger idea of evangelizing, which really means to “preach the good news,” in Christian terms.  And the preaching of the Good News, it doesn’t always take place by simply having a program.  It takes place in the everyday, in the every moment, when people are at their most authentic, not when they are simply putting on a show with shirt and tie and Sunday attire.  It happens when we are broken and need help, and God won’t care if we are broken any more than he would care if we were secure.  The institution of the Church has never been what God hoped for.  What God hoped and dreamed of for us was a call to mission, to get out and become radical disciples and proclaimers of a world made new, a world that understands its mission and doesn’t see the need to preserve the institution.

            It happens when we look at the food in our refrigerators or the money in our bank account and we move past our quest for security because there is someone standing on our doorstep in need right here and right now.  It means taking care of people who are in the cold when the power goes out and not hording our valuable toilet paper.  It means understanding our own faults and truly getting to the core of our problems instead of simply making our building and personas look clean and beautiful on the outside.  It means letting things crumble and refusing to let human suffering, violence, hunger, and racism, sexism, and homophobia persist.  Mission is more important that institution, and it always has been.  But the question for the Church is, will they ever be truly Christian?  Because if they would be, their institutions would no longer be the focus, but rather the action of evangelizing through action in the world.  We choose mission, we save the world, and maybe the church.  We choose institution, nobody wins.