How to Be Miserable in Your Christian Life
Chapter Three: Avoid the Institutional Church
(Section One: Clearing Up a Common Misconception)
This chapter may come as a refreshing consolation to some of
my peers (by which I mean the odious underclass known as millennials), who
often get frustrated with the institutional church, and have for several
decades been hoping to “emerge” into something different. Why? Well, it’s
simple: the church, especially the “institutional” church (a lovely turn of
phrase, in that it makes the local church sound like either a drab bureaucracy
or a lunatic asylum), is widely known to be riddled with perpetual frustrations
for its members. But avoiding it, which is what so many of my age-set would
like to do, will actually lead to the popular and much-desired quality of
Christian misery (as I’ll demonstrate below). Talk about having your cake and
eating it too!
Now, I know this may seem
counter-intuitive, but bear with me. Most of you might suspect that the
institutional church itself is the best place to find Christian misery. After
all, being part of the institutional church means that you have to submit to
leaders who often bungle into mind-numbing decisions that you totally could
have handled better. Being in the institutional church means that attention is
given to keeping the “institution” going—all of its “programs” and “ministries”
and paid workers, instead of just getting down into the nitty-gritty of doing
authentic ministry on the streets. (Because, as we all know, the streets are
the most authentic place to do ministry. Avenues and boulevards are sometimes
acceptable, too.) Being part of the institutional church means that I might
even have to live and work with people who have a different generational
mindset than I do, people who like styles of music that have no rational or
emotional appeal whatsoever, and people who just don’t get what church really
ought to be about. Talk about a perfect recipe for Christian misery! If we’re looking to be miserable, shouldn’t
we all be rushing to be part of the institutional church?
Well, actually,
no. The institutional church, regardless of what denomination you’re talking
about, is one of the most startling things in the history of the world. Perhaps
the most startling thing. It looks
mundane, and sometimes boring from the outside, any yet it never ceases to
revolutionize society from the inside out, in every era of history. It is the
most stable and effective vehicle for Christian ministry that has ever been
devised, which is one of the main reasons why it’s still around after 2000
years. If you’re looking for misery in your Christian life, you want to choose
something other than the institutional church, because that kind of stability
and effectiveness is unfortunately likely to produce some unwanted personal
transformations in your daily life. Far better to design your own style of
church, one that already fits the way you are: then you won’t have to change at
all, and your misery will be preserved.
You see,
the institutional church has lots of features that actually work against the
practice of a miserable Christian life. And this is true across the board, for
almost any denomination of local church you can think of. Part of the
misunderstanding comes from the way we use the word “institutional.” It sounds
like an awfully boring word, something that might work in our favor in
progressing toward misery. But, in point of fact, “institutional” just means
“having a structure to ensure that things run smoothly.” Cutting-edge
ministries that reject the institutional church are usually the ones who use
that word to describe it, so what they’re actually doing is simply providing a
contrast so that you understand that their own ministries lack a structure to
ensure that things run smoothly. Such ministries, then, and not the local
church, are more likely to tend toward your goal of fashionable Christian
misery.