Institutional Imagination
14 Dec 2007
I’ve been doing some reflection and thinking about organizations, and in particular structure, hierarchy, and the nature of institutions.
I’m convinced that institutions are the enemy of good practice. By that I mean that any institution that forms to deliver good practice will always wrestle with becoming so bureaucratic and concerned for itself, that it undermines the very thing is seeks to deliver.
We see this with hospitals for example. Places dedicated to providing medical care to human beings, can become so caught up in politics, and management conflicts that the medical care they are supposed to provide are undermined, and in many cases people are harmed.
We see the same with Church. The organisations of the church to facilitate the incarnation of the gospel, quickly becomes an obstacle to the very nature and purpose the church in the first place, and people are harmed more than helped.
Often in reaction we think that having no programmes, no hierarchy, the removal of institution will solve the problem. After all if the institution is getting in the way of the purpose, get rid of the institution. This response is increasingly ingrained in us, such that even using the word institution is an axiomatic and pejorative.
Many of you will think I am arguing for the perpetuation of insitutional church, which I am not. What I am desperate for is an articulate insitutional imagination. something more than the incapacity of being ant-institutional.
You see, if you get rid of hospitals you might remove the problems they produce as institutions, but you also remove the delivery of medicine from everyone who had access to it before, or restrict to just a few who are in proximity to the people who can provide it with no institutional support.
The question isn’t whether you can avoid being an institution, the question is what kind of insitution can we imagine that will support the purposes of who and what we are trying to bring to others?
And always that organisation and institution will move to undermine what it was set up for. That includes the no-institution institutions.
Tagged: Church, Ecclesiology, Institutions, Structures
8 comments
Trackback
Comment by brett jordan
12.23 pm on 14 Dec 2007
Institutions happen even if you try and avoid them. And they don’t have to be negative things. Fostering cultures of accountability, ongoing analysis of what is and isn’t ‘working’, having clear goals, and making sure that the appropriate people are doing the appropriate jobs… oh, and yes, that means that leaders have to be allowed to lead… oh, and ban committees… 90% of all decisions can be made ‘on-the-fly’… just my two-penn’orth
Comment by Paul
12.25 pm on 14 Dec 2007
An interesting post Jason, especially as I spend a lot of my day job working with institutions in order for them to become more customer orientated, strategic and deliver better value for money.
There is a quandry as responsive local services do not work well in national set one size fits all top down government led targets (all they do is skew funding to national priorities which means that some cancers for example get a lot of funding and others don’t leading to an overall average decrease in life expectancy for cancer sufferers in the UK as opposed to europe or the USA).
On the other hand the pressure for local, personalised, taylored services that citizens want demands an incredible amount of money that they are often not willing to see their taxes rise to pay for. If we accept the argument that different localities have different priorities than we also have to accept different services, delivered differently and run the risk of the daily mail going on about postcode lotteries…
It is within this context that a lot of institutions are doing a lot of innovative and dynamic work – my point is that institutions that don’t have to change are the ones that become concerned about preserving themselves but the ones that are pulled from above and below have to respond and often respond in ways that were not imagined.
A great example would be hospitals in cornwall who now source a lot of their food locally, more cheaply and sustainably – patients rave about quality, the local economy is improved and the costs are lower.
So i don’t think institutions are necesarily the enemy of good practice – they can become the champions of good practice and those that drag their feet and refuse to improve will be taken away.
Sort of like an institutional story of the talents… :)
Comment by The Krow
12.27 pm on 14 Dec 2007
Great post man. I’m glad someone else is struggling with this idea. As I plant a church in a post-modern context I encounter tons of anti-institutional people, myself included. I scream “fight the systems” but the systems are needed. As I look toward getting some backing as a pastor, the system is essential and I can value it greatly. Even in forming a church, I struggle with not wanting structure, but I can see where it is essential to the growth of the church, and the church planting movement birthing from it.
The biggest thing I see is do we use the institution as a whip to form and and force others to conform to, or is it a structure that is used for servanthood and support.
Comment by steven hamilton
1.34 pm on 14 Dec 2007
now this captures my…dare i say it…imagination.
to take your parabolic hospital thought a little further…(because we tend to live our lives based on underlying metaphors that we may or may not recognize)
the church has followed in a way the reactions and back-and-forth of the problematic resolutions for hospitals that you outlined. what have they done? some have made it more convient – so you get nurses hosting ‘minute-clinics’ at your corner drug store here in the US, like they do at CVS.
you get ‘free clinics’ established in poorer neighborhoods to serve health care and medicine to the disadvantaged. you get specialty clinics, like cosmetic surgery centers and other high-end clinics for those who have the wealth and can afford it.
the models of ‘doing-church’ that i see out there follow right along, don’t they? we’ve got high-end church models and low-end church models and church models that go into poorer neighborhoods and churches that cater to the wealthier…this brings up huge issues, doesn’t it?
but my first question from this line of thinking is: are people getting ‘better’ access to medicine and health care? are people getting access to a gathering of disciples pursuing the incarnation of the good news?
Comment by Jonathan Brink
7.23 pm on 14 Dec 2007
Nice post Jason.
For me, this is the tension between the need for established practices so people don’t have to reinvent evertything every time and the ability to adapt on the fly. Very few churches give people the commission to move on the fly. My heart tells me this is a control issue. But Jesus didn’t seem like he was after control. In fact the best thing about him was that he left. He put the kingdom in the hands of a small group of people who were willing to follow the Holy Spirit.
I wonder if the fear is that we aren’t teaching people how to follow the Holy Spirit’s leading and thus the ability to adapt on the fly.
Comment by Jim_Rapp
8.30 pm on 14 Dec 2007
The imagination of Thomas Munzer may have benefitted from a little institutional peer review.
My perception of the question whether institutions help or hinder “good practice” is that the issue is a matter of spectrum and scope, so that my imagination of an institution’s effect (on imagination) deserves stretching toward both poles.
In the case of hospitals and medical science, the discipline of organic chemistry and its pharmaceutical descendants got off to the races because Kekule paid attention to a robust imaginal dream, leading to the discovery of the benzene ring.
From which Kekule advised, “gentlemen, let us dream.”
Intervening between the dream state of liquid imagination and the factual confirmation of the ring structure of benzene – were thousands of preceding and subsequent steps of institutional inquiry and institutional discipline.
A long journey. With many peers.
The prerequisite for the institutional discipline, of course, was the existence of an institution in the first place (in this case, the institution of biochemists), some institution adequately disciplined in a form of peer review, which shepherded a single dream into the institutional canon.
Dream and test.
And get your peers in on it.
Unless you don’t want peer review — see the comment on Munzer, above.
There’s no reason why “church” cannot qualify as a dreaming-testing institution. Whether it’s with as few as two or three gathered in an emergent process of dreaming-testing, or in larger numbers, agreed on the process and discipline.
But, any setting with any number of peer-reviewing partners can retard or promote the Life of the process.
I’m not so sure that any theology of church can settle what is felt to be a proper balance and compliment between imagination and the discipline necessary to make imagination yield practical fruit.
What the church of the “Synagogue of the Freedmen” could not accomplish in killing Stephen’s dream (vision: Acts 6:9), the congregation of peer reviewing believers almost killed via internal dissent (Acts 15:5ff), with the result of compromised camps, that is, compromised on the question of what imagination (imagination of proper faith) should prevail.
In a church setting, it’s not clear whether our favorite peer-reviewers are much more than state-of-camp.
Unless, you can imagine ….
Comment by Jason
8.58 am on 16 Dec 2007
Thanks everyone for your comments, Jason.
Comment by Eskil
1.48 pm on 16 Dec 2007
One important aspect to me is the intended time-frame for which we build institutions. A few years ago I planted a church. To get it “up and running” we needed some sort of organisation. (Although most “already Christians” found it to be much too un-structured to their taste). However, my goal has always been to leave the church and hand over the leadership to some-one younger than me. This has just happened.
The question is: What happens next? Will they keep building “my” church – or will they hear from God and build something fresh? And what are my expectations? Do I want to have something to “show for it”? Something I can point to in 10 years time and say: do you know that I – I – I – founded that church? Or will I be happy if all that is left is whatever of Christ I have imparted to those young people.
I hope the fruits of my ministry will prove to be transformed hearts and minds – and not a successful organisation. Transformation has eternal value – organisation only temporal value.
Comments are now closed.