Kevin De Young and Ted Kluck wrote a guest piece for the Washington Post calling out a whole generation for their “issues” setting Jesus against “organized religion”. It’s a piece worth reading. I wrote this as part of a discussion on it in CRC-Voices.

DeYoung and Kluck sell their points strongly and sometimes at the risk of being a bit snarky but I do think they make good points. A lot of this has to do with the relationship between Christ, culture and institution.

1. One of the points they make well is that Jesus himself inhabited a religious/cultural institution and embraced it to a degree. The running battles with the Pharisees and Teachers of the Law (in NIV and TNIV vs. NRSV & ESV “lawyers”) had a lot to do with reform of the Jewish institution of the Synagogue with respect to the Oral Tradition/Tradition of the Elders that would eventually greatly influence the church. The Synagogue would be the context out of which the church would grow in the empire. As the church permeated the empire and the empire eventually embraced the church (for better or worse) other institutional expressions would develop that the church would embrace. Enduring communities will adapt, adopt or establish their own traditions which will become “institutions” of sorts. When Jesus says and the disciples participated in ritual (baptism, Lord’s Supper for example) and expressed assumed positions of leadership with or without explicit titles they were establishing “institution”.

2. The difficulty we have is that we have our own culture filters through which we see institution. I’ve been doing a lot with the denominational offices in the last few years and I’m often struck at how business tools and culture permeate this world. For many of you this feels very familiar but most of the time I inhabit a very small institution where most of these tools aren’t used. I can understand them but they feel alien. The seeker movement was all about opening the doors to these institutional tools, habits, gifts and liabilities. For many this institutional culture so reeks of a manipulative marketplace culture which dehumanizes and seeks to monetize and manipulate everything and everyone for the acquisition of power and wealth that they flee from it. I don’t think we understand the emergent church movement without understanding this dynamic. Same goes for the Christian un-churching movements (expressed in George Barna’s book “Revolution”). Churches must embody and always will embody an institutional culture but those cultures will never be neutral to everyone. That is why the church is always tinkering with institutional cultures. I think that is also probably why although Jesus clearly inhabits institutional culture the amount of prescription given by Jesus is amazingly sparse. It is this sparseness that has allowed Christianity to adapt and adopt to so many different places and cultures throughout the history of the world. I also believe that this will not end with the transition from the age of decay to the age to come. (See the outline of Tim Keller’s “Culture” sermon.)

3. The interview with Ken Myers raised a really important point about our own culture filters that I think plays into this discussion:

My favorite example of this is the shift since the 1970s toward informality in public. People used to wear coats and ties to go to a baseball game, and now they wear a ball cap at church. We’ve moved away from formality toward informality in almost every area—language, dance, food, worship, music—and I’m convinced that it’s largely a symptom of a suspicion of authority. You don’t want to submit to a set of standards and proprieties that you didn’t freely choose yourself. So if the move toward informality expresses a widespread suspicion of authority…

I think he makes a really good point here. The Christian un-church movement (in a very American way) likes to pass themselves off as being free of these dynamics and pure, simply re-discovering and re-embodying “Jesus’ way”. That’s naïve. One should read a bit of history at how many groups have made this claim and how obviously all of their concrete embodiments were cultural expressions. Jesus’ little group in Judea didn’t look like Paul’s little groups in whatever Roman city or the groups John wrote to in Revelation. That’s OK. There are commonalities and things that are different. Paul was conscious of these cultural difference and willing to accommodate so that people in different cultural groups could be united with Christ. De Young and Kluck are calling these groups on their own cultural filters. These groups like to say they have no clothes but everyone else can pretty easily see they aren’t naked. pvk