Faith &
Leadership, an online educational resource associated with Duke Divinity
School, recently interviewed former bishop and New Testament professor N. T.
Wright on his ministry both within the church and academia. In this interview,
N. T. Wright claims that the church, while necessarily institutional, is first
and foremost a community. However, “the institution is like the scaffolding
that you need to be working on the building.” He then likens institutions to
plumbing: “When you go into a friend’s house, you don’t expect to see the
plumbing, but you need to know that it’s working, because if it’s not, fairly
soon there’ll be a bad smell in the house.” Wright admits that institutions
often feel binding, but kingdom principles should guide how people are treated
at every level of the organization. In this way “the mission of the church can
go forward.”
Wright also says
that we in the Western world have “a kind of
romantic idyll, that if only we were really plugged in you wouldn’t have to
have any organization. There wouldn’t be any overheads, any administration.
There will always be things that need to be handled structurally, and it’s not
then a question of Spirit or structure. It is good structure or bad structure.”
I agree wholeheartedly with Wright that institutions happen naturally to any
community and should be worked on. Those of us who want to go back to a
pre-institutional form of Christianity will be disappointed, for even the early
church had leadership structures (i.e. the council of Jerusalem).
