My Lovers' Quarrel

2024.  A new year.  We aim for change, but the reality is it’s hard to accomplish.

40 years ago, I started working in the institutional church.  I began as an eager and naive participant. Then experience and reflection caused me to question my assumptions.  I sought new insights and perspectives, which in turn led me to advocate for change.  It’s a relationship in which I have remained engaged for 40 years, working in various positions as an ‘intrapreneur’ attempting to inspire and lead change.  However, it’s not been an easy relationship. In fact I have had an ongoing “lover’s quarrel” with the institutional church.

I write this on January 1, 2024.  A day for contemplating change.  As I started with some reflection time, I read from a meditation I frequently use. The Lectio 365 reflection for this New Years Day ended up reigniting my lover’s quarrel.  Lectio's choice of words to characterize what mission advance means, elevated the ‘full time’ Christian worker, and by default undermined the majority of those who comprise the church.  It was inadvertent, I am sure.  But that’s a symptom of institutionalization, and the reason for my quarrel with it.  The institutional structure depends on the elevation and prioritization of certain roles & gifts because without them it could not sustain its purpose as an institution, nor it’s funding.  Its recruitment, training, and polity by default advance the class of people that are required to sustain the system.  This perpetuates a cycle of self preservation.  I have discovered as an internal change-agent that although this institutional system has the ability to change itself, its very existence is threatened by the change it seeks/needs.  A paralyzing irony.

Transitioning to the often-cited models espousing less structure and reduced dependence on a clergy class, so as to become a more scattered, organic and neighbourhood/marketplace model of existence, is often endorsed in the rhetoric and even strategic initiatives of church institutions.  However, this frequently falls flat during any attempt at execution.  Change is hard.  Execution is harder.  In the past 10 years I’ve led 3 change initiatives, all endorsed and funded by my denomination, that have either been closed or reduced to token, status-quo existence because of the relentless pressures of institutional thinking and demands.

I am not anti-institution, but I have a quarrel with it.  I stayed in it for 40 years advocating for and leading change until recently when I was released due to institutional budget pressures.  I still have hope that the church-as-institution might be courageous enough to change itself.  Where that isn’t feasible, at least be a sponsor/incubator of initiatives that eventually live and grow external to it.  In other words, be magnanimous and empower/cheer on what it can’t accomplish.  However, I no longer think that is possible for my denomination, nor for others. Whatever is now being birthed that is truly new and able to engage culture as effective Kingdom ambassadors, is for the most part coming from outside the institution of the church.  They are often small and scattered initiatives.  Most likely they will never gain the size, status or collective energy typical of the institution.  There is a part of me that wishes they could.  But then I suspect they would suffer the fate of the very institutions they were trying to influence and reform.

This is an historic tug of war.  A pattern that I believe is a divine check and balance to save the church from itself.  

The 5 core APEST gifts (see endnote) that are meant to simultaneously energize the church and keep it in dynamic tension, too often fall prey to their own competing values.  Rarely are they able to perform together in their natural state of tension.  Our humanity ensures that stalemate. Human nature leads us to prefer stability, captured in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  It’s how our brains work – which is why it is hard to change in the first place.  Logically then it’s how we work in collective community, such as in politics, clubs, associations and of course, the church.  Once we have established a measure of personal or collective stability, our preference is to remain there – whether it works for us or not! But change and growth comes from tension.  That tension in the institutional church’s context is the push-pull, the in-out breathing rhythm of the APEST gifts.  Their interplay is necessary to ensure a Christian community retains and displays the dynamic necessary to ensure true impact.  This isn’t happening.  Safety, security, and tolerance for incremental change dominates the institutional church psyche and strategy.

Here is where I part ways with many of my peers.  The church as we know it is not the hope of the world. Christ, the dynamic of that community, is the Hope of the world.  Let’s not confuse the institution of the church with the Community of Christ as some do.  They are not intrinsically identical.

I repeat - The church as institution is not the hope of the world.  Christ is.  Christ living and working through His people is the basis for how we are to organize and act.  The challenge has been, and is, that the institutional needs of the church really drive their agendas for change.  Choices around strategy, personnel or budgets are made in reference to its long-term survival or viability.  Let’s just be real here: rarely is a decision made that fundamentally re-shapes the posture and structure of the church, because its hard for insiders to be change-makers due to the existential threat to their own role, status and employment.  The usual outcome of a ‘what’s next’ vision discussion is a tweak that is trumpeted as innovation.  Tweaks can be communicated with bold rhetoric.  If a bold strategy is launched, I have seen how the cost is often experienced as too heavy to sustain.  The attempt withers.  The system is sustained.

My conclusion is that the church as institution won’t change to the extent needed for significant, relevant impact on this current world because it is incapable.  To reorganize away from institution to be a collective community of ambassadors of Christ, each empowered to build the Kingdom of God, is too threatening to existing livelihoods, missiology and ecclesiology.  As has been the case through history, change happens predominantly outside the institutional form. Some change agents may remain connected as though in orbit – still within the gravitational pull of the institution.  I’ve taken that route so far.  Others leave the pull of institutional gravity entirely.

I have my point of view.  You’ve read it here and in other of my blogs.  Yet the great hope I hold is that Christ works in and through all our imperfect organizational creations.  I truly wish the institutional system could change.  I dedicated the bulk of my career to that end.  I have seen some advances but also many disappointments.  My hope for its’ transmogrification is significantly diminished.  However, my hope lies in the universal Christ who is working through His community all around this world.  Those change agents/ambassadors are inside and outside the institution of the church.  Christ is ensuring that His ways are being advanced to bless and to change individuals and communities around the world.

So, let’s keep living and acting in hope.

Harv

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APEST = Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher.  Based on Ephesians 4 and popularized as a framework by Alan Hirsch in his book The Forgotten Ways.

Changing How the World Works

I am growing weary of mission rhetoric. My thinking on what defines and comprises “mission” is definitely morphing. I grew up in an evangelical environment that was very much about ‘telling’ the story to the ‘regions beyond’. Perhaps like many of you. It wasn't world-changing.  Mostly about changing eternal addresses.

Along the lifetime of my ministry I have encountered my own and the broader church’s narrowness of engagement with broader culture, defined largely by those encounters that would lead to conversions or church attendance. Church mission-rhetoric may be to “love the world as Jesus loves”, or to be "focused on the lost”, but when push comes to shove, the metrics behind whether to keep a program or engagement going is what ultimately reveals the narrow definition of your ‘mission’.

I am a lowly voice among many writers and thinkers who are trying to yell at the church and show a “new, but not new” understanding of the Missio Dei, which embraces all things in this world as the arena for the restorative force of Gods’ Kingdom. After all, it is ‘all things’ that Christ intends to reconcile to Himself (Colossians 1:20).

How engaged are we with ‘all things’ as defining the mission of God?

The power of God to restore the world is in the loving acts of engagement with the world as it is, in order to see it become what He intends for it. We have a grand and just cause that moves far beyond ‘crossing the line’ to Jesus’ side and enjoying spiritual renewal, to a lifestyle that lives out the ways of the Kingdom of God in front of our society. It’s in that living that the power of the Gospel is experienced by the world. That power is not located exclusively through inner renewal or spiritual insight (which much of the church’s energy is dedicated to provide), but it is in the encounter between the Christ in us and the people and systems of this world.

This is how the early church transformed the world. It was not through evangelistic forays into people groups, but via societal engagements that clearly showed and offered a way of being that stood in an appealing contrast to the surrounding society [1]. Christians lived then, as we do now, within an understanding they were part of a new society, an alternate Kingdom. We live by the rules and ways of that Kingdom, which when expressed in word and deed, cannot help but interact with social, economic and political systems. (How can you read your Gospels and not see this embedded in the words and ways of Jesus?). We are to be part of a social revolution that is the direct (and inevitable) result of a Kingdom way of being. The eventual institutionalization of the early movement of the emerging church (the fate of all movements if they don’t die off completely), has had the effect of walling off this new societal revolution and instead has created some doors for entry, but which now require certain types of keys to gain entry.

We, the community of Christ on this earth will always be in tension over the radical movement outward into the world and the urge to consolidate our efforts into the institutional structures and thinking of the church. Believe me, after all I have said when I say this: May the tension never leave us. It’s the intention of the gift-mix Jesus gave to the leadership functions of the church. The apostles, prophets and evangelists are given to call us out of our consolidating tendencies so that we remain focused on living out this new society called the Kingdom in front of (and sometimes as an affront to) the world. Life calls to life. The shepherds and teachers ground us and keep reminding us that Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. But rue the days, as we are in now, when we as the Christ-community settle and merely ‘send off’ the apostles, prophets and evangelists to do their work elsewhere (e.g. to “missions”, or para-church organizations, or local social agencies, or to ‘be a light’ in their jobs), while shepherds and teachers keep the non-profit wheels running and people in the pews to pay for the programs & staff that justifies our corporate existence.

This dichotomy, left unchallenged when all 5 gifts are not informing mission, reinforces to the watching world that the gathered church is NOT a new society living according to new ways of being, but has taken its place alongside other religions of choice, establishing organizational structures for maintaining loyalty and meaning for insiders.

The world is transformed by those who show up.










 Harv Matchullis


[1] For an historical look at the sociological reasons for the church’s significant advance to become 50% of the known world by AD 300, read Rodney Starks’ “The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries”