Vines on a Trellis

The organic church need not, indeed cannot, replace the structural church. In the analogy of the body, just as the body needs its life-giving organs so it needs its skeletal structure. If without its vital organs the church becomes a lifeless skeleton, so without the skeletal structure the church becomes a shapeless mass. Theologian Stanley Grenz expresses this duality:

“The church as Christ’s institution confronts us as a historical reality. The Spirit’s constitution of the church as a community however, involves us.” (Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God. Eerdman’s: Grand Rapids, 1994, p. 481.)

Just as a vine grows on a trellis the church as an institution provides the scaffolding upon which the organic body can grow as an expression of the Holy Spirit working within each of us.

But does it? Does the one accommodate the other? I think it is often the case that the two are at odds with each other. So often we hear those who desire a more organic church denigrate “institutional religion.” While those “free spirits” are often seen as amorphous iconoclasts by those needing the scaffolding of the institutional church. As long as we make these distinctions we are not the church of the New Testament.

I think we tend to get off into our own little spheres. We either want to protect the corporate structure from being weakened by individualism or we want to bring down the structure because it stifles our individualism. Why not see the structure as supporting and nurturing the coming into being of the person that God created each of us to be. As we grow together organically, that is, from the inside out, this then should form the church into a living organism. The living church is not a rigid framework of pre-fabricated slots for people to fit into. It is rather a supple body yielding to and taking shape from the emerging image of Christ which the Spirit is enlivening within each of us.

Are we there? Do we dare to be?