Church, Movement, or Institution
One of most basic questions that the United Methodist Church must answer is whether it is a church or a movement or an institution.
An "institution" is simply the organizational form or structure that exists among groups human beings. Institutional life includes physical objects, defined relationships, formal and informal rules, social processes, resources consumed and products produced, among other things. In other words, if a corporate entity (of any sort) is a kind of person, then the institution is the "body." The institution is the "flesh and blood" of a group's existence.
Movements can and do take a variety institutional forms, from formally established organizational bodies to loose associations. The church, too, can take a variety of institutional forms. But whereas movements can organized around any number of causes, the church can have only one thing at its center.
And it's not the case that a church is simply a particular instance of the broader genre "movement." The church is not just the "Jesus movement."
The modern (and post-modern) understanding of the church as a voluntary association derives from John Locke's writings in the English enlightenment:
A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls. I say it is a free and voluntary society. Nobody is born a member of any church; otherwise the religion of parents would descend unto children by the same right of inheritance as their temporal estates, and everyone would hold his faith by the same tenure he does his lands, than which nothing can be imagined more absurd. Thus, therefore, that matter stands. No man by nature is bound unto any particular church or sect, but everyone joins himself voluntarily to that society in which he believes he has found that profession and worship which is truly acceptable to God. The hope of salvation, as it was the only cause of his entrance into that communion, so it can be the only reason of his stay there. For if afterwards he discover anything either erroneous in the doctrine or incongruous in the worship of that society to which he has joined himself, why should it not be as free for him to go out as it was to enter? No member of a religious society can be tied with any other bonds but what proceed from the certain expectation of eternal life. A church, then, is a society of members voluntarily uniting to that end. [A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689]
While progressive Christians might disagree with Locke about religious worship or obtaining eternal life being the purpose of church membership, the idea that the church is the product of free association around a common purpose is embedded in contemporary culture. This is true for both progressive and conservative descendants of what Daryl Hart calls Anglo-American revivalism. The individual with his or her own religious experience, theological reasoning and sense of purpose in the world is primary. A church is just a voluntary association of people who are more-or-less trying to do the same thing religiously. Its value is in its utility. It is a means to and end. It's useful insofar as it helps people accomplish what they want to accomplish. If this is all that the church is, however, there's not really much difference between a church and any other movement.
The church, of course, is something more.
The church today is a voluntary association. We will never return to pre-enlightenment understandings of the church's relationship to culture. This is part of the institutional environment in which we live. But that doesn't explain what the church is any more than the workings of muscle and brain tissue explain what a human being is.
It is a proper understanding of this "something more" that is the key to reforming our life as United Methodists if we are indeed the United Methodist Church.
