Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you . . .. (Matthew 28:19-20). . . Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. (Mark 16:15)
You and I feel free to speak honestly and openly of our own family. But if our family is, in the least, criticized by others, it burns our bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogance and stupidity, and we want to let all the air out of him and mail him back home flat.
And when we do take an honest look at our church family, some things are so obvious that it becomes clear that we simply love the church too much for some things to be ignored any longer. The time for pretending is over. The time is past to expect that the decades-long challenges related to the institutionalization of the church will vanish. They won’t.
These challenges are not exclusive to any one church family or denomination. They are true, in varying degrees of severity, for all church groups and denominations everywhere – globally.
Let me state my personal view of the obvious. The institutionalized church, for the most part, does not help in the fulfillment of the mission of the church.
It hinders.
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