Why the Institutional Church Keeps Failing: We’re Fixing the Wrong Thing

Years ago I worked for a small manufacturing company. We made, well, let’s call them widgets. It was a very “dynamic” environment — I held seven different titles in eighteen months. So did many others in leadership. The owner would “tweak” things every time he finished a new management book.

At some point in this whirlwind, he called me into his office with a new “opportunity.” I was occupying the role of Quality Manager at the time. He asked me to study our return process — inefficient and confusing both for clients attempting to return defective widgets and for the internal team trying to process them and issue credits.

I thought for a moment and asked, “Would the time be better spent finding the cause of the defects and eliminating them?”

That did not go over well.

Sadly, this pattern — making the wrong thing better — is alive and well in the modern church.

We have taken the corruption that began with Constantine and embraced it as sacred. We work diligently to make what was never designed to work, work.

We chase the “3,000” — growth in numbers — rather than depth of individual transformation.

“Works” serve the building, the grounds, and the institution as often as they serve those we are actually called to serve.

A quick query of ChatGPT turns up 1,385 books published in the last fifty years on “Church Growth,” 437 on “New Church Development,” and 269 on “Church Renewal.” Thousands of titles in English alone, all focused on improving the institutional church.

We have allowed two millennia of drift to become the gospel of our modern spiritual efforts.

Consider: how many evangelical churches you know proclaim the Great Commission as their primary objective? How many times does the Great Commission appear in Scripture? Three or four. Now ask how many times Scripture calls us to be born again — or to die to self in order to live. That number is north of fifty.

We place community ahead of individual surrender. We mandate church attendance and tithing where no such mandate exists in Scripture. We are trained to consume teaching rather than provide it. Before you push back, go read Scripture — not to justify what you already believe, but simply for the words written there.

– Hebrews 10 says to meet together. No cadence. No weekly mandate.
– Acts 20 is descriptive of Paul’s practice — not prescriptive for ours.
– 1 Corinthians 16 speaks of setting aside for a later collection — no mention of ten percent.

Scripture clearly calls each believer to share their faith when gathered. When was the last time you were invited to do that on a Sunday morning?

Even in the modern era, “Church” was held in a Sanctuary — a place one entered to be sanctified. Many churches today meet in an Auditorium — a room one enters to listen.

It surprised me to learn that the earliest church was composed only of believers. Those who had not accepted Jesus were not included in communal gatherings. Evangelism happened outside of gathered worship. And that worship, for the first two hundred years or more, happened in homes. Shared life. Not ninety-minute weekly attendance.

For centuries, “seekers” were those who had already accepted Christ and were pressing desperately toward God — seeking his presence, not merely comfort with the idea of him.

Let me be direct: I am being critical of the modern church and of myself. I have accepted and promoted many of the ideas I now see as misguided.

The reason we struggle to grow believers is because we are focused on the wrong things.

– An altar call cannot substitute for a call from God.
– Without that call, there is no salvation.
– Without the Holy Spirit, there is no being known.

We need to prepare each person for the individual journey they are called to take with the Holy Spirit — toward unity with God. We need to abandon the cookie-cutter approach and commit to the individual.

Yes, I know that does not build ten-thousand-seat megachurches. But the Gospel was never meant to. Those 3,000 at Pentecost? They dispersed. They went home and carried the message with them. They did not return once a week to hear someone else speak. They did not outsource worship to a band.

They lived their faith.

We need to stop outsourcing ours. Stop relying on others to do the work we are each called to do — virtue by proxy, I call it. Growing close to God takes real work: the work of surrender, obedience, and trust. Dependence on the Holy Spirit.

Give believers any other message and we set them up for confusion at best, failure at worst.

Step outside your current thinking. Read Scripture again with an open mind free of familiarity and confirmation bias.

If you cannot accept that everything you hold tightly might be wrong, you will never allow God to work in those places of your heart. Open your hands. Release everything to God. And if you do not yet know the Holy Spirit, start there.

Nothing else matters until you do.