It’s not so much that the movement becomes an institution, its that it loses it’s verve that is the problem

“Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. Those who followed him were given no name to distinguish them from other groups, no creed of their own, no rite which revealed their distinctive group character, no geographical centre from which they would operate. The twelve were to be the vanguard of all Israel and, beyond Israel, by implication, of the whole ecumene. The community around Jesus was to function as a kind of pars pro toto, a community for the sake of all others, a model for others to emulate and be challenged by. Never, however, was this community to sever itself from the others.”

“First we have to ask whether it is fair to expect a movement to survive only as a movement. Either the movement disintegrates or it becomes an institution – this is simply a sociological law. Every religious group that started out as a movement and managed to survive, did so because it was gradually institutionalised…….”

“Our main point of censure should therefore not be that the movement became an institution but that, when this happened, it also lost much of its verve. Its white-hot convictions, poured into the hearts of the first adherents, cooled down and became crystallised codes, solidified institutions and petrified dogmas. The prophet became a priest of the establishment, charisma became office, and love became routine. The horizon was no longer the world but the boundaries of the local parish. The impetuous missionary torrent of earlier years was tamed into a still-flowing rivulet and eventually into a stationary pond. It is this development that we have to deplore. Institution and movement may never be mutually exclusive categories; neither may church and mission.”

A scan of church history shows that God seems to move through movements of his people, but those movements rarely seem to last as movements beyond the first generation.

One exception that I can bring to mind is the Celtic Church, which survived more or less as a movement for around 400 years. I have written last year how profound my time at Iona and Lindisfarne were. The author of “The Celtic way of Evangelism”, George C. Hunter III said:

“The Celtic Christian movement functioned with such intuitive sophistication that, in the academic field of missiology, we have only recently learned enough to name and describe some of what they knew and did that contributed to their reach and expansion.”

I have a hunch that so much of our thinking has been shaped by the industrial revolution and the enlightenment that the moment something special starts to happen between people there is almost a gravitational pull towards structural utilitarianism. I wonder if part of the reason we are only now rediscovering the Celtic Christians is that they simply don’t fit our normal way of thinking… there isn’t a nice definable strategy or structure that is communicable and reproducible…. they were much more the community for the sake of all others that Jesus seems to originally have envisioned.

My sense is that it is this kind of almost messy, relational Christianity that would work most effectively in our era. What do you think?