The Organization Church

U.S. Protestantism--once famous for its diversity--is homogenizing into what is almost a new faith, and if it continues in its present direction, it will be stone-cold dead in a couple of dozen years. This thesis comes from no hot-eyed prophet of doom but from a coolly analytical professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School named Gibson Winter; and he supports it in a well-documented book titled The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (Doubleday; $3.50).

America's new form of Christianity is what Episcopalian Winter calls the "organization church"--the church that is centered not in its creed, or its liturgy, or its pastor, but in activities and organizations ranging from nursery schools to Softball teams. And the organization church has followed the organization man to the suburbs--or, rather, pursued him. "Denominational leaders have watched the new residential areas surrounding the central cities with greedy eyes. These are largely middle-and upper-class residential areas; they have adequate resources for constructing church buildings; their residents are responsive to religious programs; in fact, denominational leaders call these 'high potential areas'--and they do not mean potential for prayer."

The New Salvation. The result, says Winter, is that low-income groups still living in the "inner city" have been left churchless (in Boston, for instance, five inner-city Methodist churches have folded up in ten years), while the new suburbanites are as poor in what constitutes real Christian community as they are rich in community centers.

Like many a Christian critic before him, Author Winter pillories the suburban church's frenetic busyness--its elaborate fund raising, telephoning, canvassing, cooking--but he brings to it a new insight in his suggestion that all this drudgery has become "a Protestant system of penance . . . Members atone for their guilt by performing unpleasant tasks for the organization; to this extent, the organizational network becomes a secularized penitential system." By rejecting sacramental penance in favor of activity, Protestantism, Winter feels, is draining off energies "which could flow into creative ministries" and is becoming a vehicle of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace (TIME, May 9, 1960).

The "new style of salvation by works," says Winter, is especially hard on young ministers. "This new ministry has been indoctrinated with existential despair, the rediscovery of the Bible, and the recent emphasis on 'last things' as the only 'important things.' Preaching what it considers to be Biblical orthodoxy on Sundays, during the rest of the week it rushes about to oil the organizational machinery. Six days a week it enlists laymen for activities which promise salvation through good works. On Sunday, salvation is by faith through grace."

The Call to Mission. Thus U.S. Protestantism is cutting itself off from the lower economic levels of society, not only by moving physically away from them but by adopting a middle-class pattern of committee-work which has nothing to offer the "blue-collar" worker. It will not be the first time that the church has lost its mass base, Author Winter notes, but it bodes ill for the future. He blames the loss of the masses for Christianity's 7th century disintegration before the onslaught of Islam in North Africa and for its decline in modern England, Sweden and France. "Where Christianity has become identified with upper-class elites, it has lacked a substantial base in the working population and has been unable to weather social change."

Author Winter sees signs of hope--a new, vital Biblical theology, the influence of depth psychology on pastoral care, a renewed Protestant interest in liturgy, new ministries to hospitals, universities, industries, and above all the concern and responsibility of laymen, who have in some cases begun to work in inner-city churches though living in the suburbs. This is Winter's main requirement for reformation--a sense of mission. "Laymen who sense the emptiness of the organization church will discover fullness of faith only by sharing the ministry of a missionary Church, not the mission of co-optation which they have known . . . Difficult as it is to face the call to mission . . . the Church-as-Ministry, or the Church-as-Mission, is the only obedient and true form of the Church."

A drastic prescription for the organization church's organization minister is offered by Pastor Floyd Doud Shafer of the Salem Presbyterian Church in Salem, Ind., in last week's issue of Christianity Today: "Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the door and nail on the sign: STUDY. Take him off the mailing list, lock him up with his books--get him all kinds of books--and his typewriter and his Bible . . . Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God . . .

"Set a time clock on him that will imprison him with thought and writing about God for 40 hours a week. Shut his garrulous mouth spouting 'remarks' and stop his tongue always tripping lightly over everything nonessential. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley, fire him from the P.T.A. and cancel his country club membership . . . Rip out his telephone, burn his ecclesiastical success sheets, refuse his glad hand, put water in the gas tank of his community buggy [and] compel him to be a minister of the Word."

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