Missional Literature Review - Part 3 - Commonly Held Reasons for Change: The Argument from institutional Crisis

Argument from Institutional Crisis
While it is true that many call for the church to become missional in nature due to the contextual change taking place in the world, the main thrust of most authors calling for missional change concerns the institutional crisis in the church. The institutional crisis of the church is difficult to deny. Granberg-Michaelson (2008) claims that not a single county within the United States experienced an increase in worship attendance between 1998 and 2007. The continual decline of membership, financial viability, and societal influence can be traced all the way back to the 1960s (Dietterich & Ziemer, 1998). Not only is the church failing to shape society, statistics show it is “no longer the primary organizing principles that shapes the lives of most Christians,” who are instead influenced by the “dominant trends with in secular society” (Dinolfo, 1999, p. 261).

Within the vast amount of writing calling for the church to change due to the institutional crisis, both external forces and internal influences are identified as the causes for the ineffectiveness of the church. A brief look at the external and internal factors reveals both the variety and harshness of criticism being levied against the actions and inactions of the contemporary, institutional church.

Ineffectiveness Caused by External Forces

The changes in the cultural context of the church have, like a fierce whirlwind, irrevocably changed the position of the church within modern society. Once at the center of culture and society, the church is being pushed to the “sociological periphery” (Hall, 1999, p. 69). Randall (2007) says that the church is shifting from the centre to the margins, the majority to the minority, settlers to sojourners, and privileged to plurality. Having been pushed from privilege in the new, secular society, the old ecclesiologies, disciplines, practices, and organizational structures of the church simply are not working (Dietterich & Dietterich, 1994; Junkin 1996). Architectural evangelism and the “construct a program and they will come” (Roxburgh & Boren, 2009) mentality are increasingly ineffective, but the church does not seem to know how to move forward in new and innovative ways in the strange, new world. As Hunsberger (1996) aptly notes, the church is facing a “crisis of thinking” (p. 334) as to how it fits into the world.
Ineffectiveness Caused by Internal Forces

External factors may have pushed the church to the periphery of society, but many within the missional movement lay scathing blame upon the church for failing to recognize how accommodated it had become to the assumptions of the culture it supported (Hunsberger & Van Gelder, 1996). Hunsberger’s crisis of thinking facing the church is not only how to fit into the new world, but is a crisis in that the church “has not [emphasis in original] thought carefully, critically, or theologically about [its] assumptions regarding the church and [has] failed to noticed how much they have been shaped by the character of modern American life” (Hunsberger, 1996, p. 334). The failure to think critically seems to have allowed three forces to inhibit the effectiveness of the church from within: individualism, consumerism, and institutional idolatry.

Individualism dominates the church’s current view of salvation as well as its models of ministry and is making the crisis worse, according to missional scholars. The focus on individual salvation and personal relationships with God failed to place importance on the community and the world, causing faith to become privatized (Hiebert, 2009). In a world of privatized faith, the church became nothing more than a “voluntary collection of individuals who came together to support and encourage development of their private faith” (Dietterich, 2002, p. 3) and ministry became defined as provision of “resources and services necessary to fulfill individual religious and spiritual needs” (p. 2). A loss of focus took the eyes of the church off the world and culture and placed them instead upon the individual.

Consumerism, the second internal factor inhibiting the effectiveness of the church, is the one word that can describe the major change of the ecclesial landscape during the twentieth century (Fredrickson, 2007). The consumerist church became a “vendor of religious goods and services” (Hunsberger, 1996, p. 334), focusing on raising the standards of worship services, offering more programs, upgrading buildings, and hiring professional ministers to run the church. As ministry staffs grew, Christians entered into what Hirsch calls a “Faustian bargain,” outsourcing ministry to the professionals. This in turn caused Christians to lack maturity and become weak in the faith. Weak Christians make for weak churches.

As individuals increasingly became church shoppers or consumers, heightened competition among churches arose over members. Maintenance and self-preservation of the institution became the focus of many small churches in a secular society. With numbers declining, the church constantly chased the “new and the next” (Roxburgh, 1999, p. 248) in terms of structures and programs to help facilitate church growth. Hall (1999) speaks to this endless need for church growth and success:
Locked into a culturally determined logic of progress, success, and positive
thinking, Christian bodies in North America regularly resist imaginative and v
viable proposal for the future of the church because they do not correspond to
the great expectations that have been fashioned by centuries of ecclesial
triumphalism. (p. 70)

Ecclesial triumphalism, or “expansionism” (Hibbert, 2009), stems from pride in a denomination or tradition and not from mission. When the church’s focus is upon maintenance or perpetuation of the institution, there is a lack of time, energy, and resources to “anticipate and participate in God’s mission” (Forney, 2008, p. 66). This focus upon the church instead of the mission of God can be called “institutional idolatry” (Forney, 2008, p. 63).
Steps Toward Effectiveness

It is worth briefly noting the two major suggestions critics of the individualized, consumerist, institutional church make to move toward effectiveness. First, the church is encouraged to abandon its cultural baggage and structural dependencies for a missional heart and perspective. This abandonment would entail focusing on God’s mission more than church growth (Barram, 2007). To make this shift in focus would include focusing on the external rather than the internal, people development instead of program development, and kingdom-leadership instead of church leadership (McNeal, 2009). Second, the church is encouraged to re-engage in theological study based on the Gospel and the Holy Spirit instead of contemporary church wisdom (Barram, 2007; Hall, 1999; Hunsberger, 1996; Randall, 2007; Van Gelder, 2008).