There aren’t many words less popular in our world than institution. We remember with horror when persons with mental illnesses or cognitive disabilities were “institutionalized,” cut off from families and communities in a life that was less than life. Many people declare their appreciation for spirituality, but their distance from “institutional religion.” Many of my own generational cohort, so-called Generation X, have avoided positions of institutional responsibility long after previous generations had settled into them, and until very recently I was one of them.
The well-known Christian speaker and performance artist Rob Bell spoke for many of us when he rhetorically asked a group of pastors in October 2010, “Do you ever feel like you signed up for a revolution and ended up running a corporation?” Implicit in Bell’s question was a deep suspicion of institutions—both in the ideal of being a radical revolutionary and in the horror of being a mere bureaucratic functionary. Perhaps it is not surprising that a year later, Bell left the church he founded for a less institutionally constrained life in the City of Angels.
But institutions are essential for flourishing.
Institution is the name that sociologists have given to any deeply and persistently organized pattern of human behavior. “A football” is a cultural artifact, but “football” is a cultural institution: a rich and complex system of behaviors, beliefs, patterns and possibilities that can be handed on from one generation to the next. And it is within institutions, in this broad sense of the word, that our most significant human experiences take place. Institutions are at the heart of culture making, which means they are at the heart of human flourishing and the comprehensive flourishing of creation that we call shalom.
This does not mean that institutions are always beneficial—quite the contrary. Just as institutions make image bearing possible, so they also make possible, and perpetuate in the deepest and most lasting ways, the twin distortions of idolatry and injustice.
If we want to make creative and conscious choices about the institutions we invest our lives in, we will have to decide whether we believe they produce image bearing or merely idolatry and injustice. So if we want our power to be used for the comprehensive flourishing of the world, we will have to understand institutions—which have four elements.
Take the game of (American) football. It depends on particular artifacts—the football itself, helmets and pads, and upright goalposts. These artifacts are produced in profusion for all the different places the game is played, from Pee Wee football and backyard pickup games to the Super Bowl. Nearly every fully developed institution, in fact, has an artifact or two that are so closely associated with it they can serve as symbols for the entire game.
A second kind of cultural good, though, is also part of the institution of football, it is the stadiums where major football games are played. Like the smaller-scale artifacts, these are tangible results of human culture making, but they are distinctive in their scale—larger by orders of magnitude—and in their role, which is providing the arena within which the game is played with the greatest intensity and significance. An arena provides the context where all the participants in a football game, not just players but coaches, crew, referees, broadcasters and fans, can participate most fully and wholeheartedly, and where the artifacts associated with the game are used most skillfully and meaningfully.
The institution of football requires a third kind of cultural good, this one entirely intangible: the rules of the game. These may be written down in tangible form in a rulebook, but they exist primarily in the minds and expertise of the participants in the institution (not just the players, coaches and referees, but the crowd as well). They describe what is allowed and what is forbidden, what is rewarded and what is punished.
Finally, the rules prescribe roles, the different parts played by different people within the institution. And the rules describe or at least suggest what it means to be a flourishing participant, one who is fulfilling the expectations of their role—for example, the un-written but ironclad rule that at the end of the game, one player will be selected as Most Valuable.
Artifacts, arenas, rules and roles—these are the essential ingredients that make an institution.
Interestingly, often these ingredients can be separated from one another and the institution will still function, at least to some extent. You can take away the football arena and play the game of football in a back yard, and it is still truly a game of football. You could even take away as central an artifact as the football itself: if a group arranged themselves in two facing lines on an unmarked field and one player in the center hiked a ball made of old rags to someone standing behind them, who then handed it off or passed it to one of their teammates, anyone familiar with the game would recognize it as football. Just the constellation of rules and roles would be enough to make it such a game.
The greatest risk to human flourishing, is not institutionalization but the loss of institutions.
Institutions are the way the teeming abundance of human creativity and culture are handed on to future generations. There is nothing quick about shalom. True shalom endures—and it seeks to serve posterity.
One of the great tragedies of the church in America is how many of our most creative leaders poured their energies into creating forms of church life that served just a single generation. Even when these efforts were built around something larger than a single personality, they were doomed to seem dated and “irrelevant” even to the children of their founders. Perhaps a new generation of leaders will arise who want to build for posterity, to plant seeds that will take generations to bear fruit, to nurture forms of culture that will be seen as blessings by our children’s children. If we are serious about flourishing, across space and through time, we will be serious about institutions.
Join Andy Crouch and 250 cultural leaders in New York City, September 17 - 18 for a powerful 2-day event on the significance of being IMAGEBEARERS. Watch a preview of the event below and register today.
Imagebearer | Your Part in God's Plan for Creativity, Justice, & Flourishing from Q Ideas on Vimeo.
