Institutions Don’t Maintain Themselves

Of the church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, we should come to expect everything and nothing: everything because it is Christ’s body on earth and nothing because, even so, it is composed of broken, sinful people. 

For all that brokenness, the church is the institutional context in which we come to understand God, ourselves, and the world. But it is not the only institution that shapes us—we are shaped too by marriage, family, our local communities, state and national citizenships, schools, professions, summer camps, athletics, and more. By the same token, the church is not the only institution that disappoints us.

At their best, all these institutions can have lasting, meaningful influence on their members. They can call us to a higher standard of character and orient our lives. But the flip side of that kind of investment is that when things go wrong, the fallout can be immense.

The United States (and the West more broadly) is undergoing a long crisis of confidence in almost all our institutions. For many this includes the church, but it also goes much further. Revelations of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy were shocking decades ago, but now it seems there’s always some major institution in the midst of some horrible scandal. 

The result is a vicious cycle: We spot decay in our institutions and so lose faith in them. Once we lose faith, we become less interested in reform and renewal. Decay further proliferates. Now we’re at a nadir of institutional trust, and the higher our hopes for an institution, the worse the disappointment when they’re not met.

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James Diddams is the managing editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy. His website is jamesdiddams.org.