(Most of this article is taken from Neil Cole’s book, Organic Church.)

In the movie, Shawshank Redemption, an old guy named Brooks was a well-liked and respected person in the inmate com­munity. He ran the library, loved books and people, and was no one's enemy. A senior citizen of the prison populace, he had been in the Shawshank institution longer than anyone could remember. And he was about to be released.

Suddenly and without any warning, Brooks goes crazy and threatens to kill another inmate with a shank to his throat. The other cons try to figure out what went wrong with the normally calm and likeable old guy.

Listening to a later conversation in the prison yard, we get the sense that this is about more than just a literal prison.

Andy, played by Tim Robbins, remarks, "I just don't understand what happened in there. That's all."

Another inmate chalks it up to the old man going crazy, but Red, played by Morgan Freeman, takes issue with the remark. "Would you knock it off? Brooks ain't no bug. He's just ... institutionalized. The man's been in here fifty years, Hayward, fifty years! This is all he knows. In here he's an important man. He's an educated man. Outside he's nothing. He's just a used-up con with arthritis in both hands. He prob^­ably couldn't even get a library card if he tried. Do you know what I'm trying to say?"

Like Brooks, many people have been insti­tutionalized in the Church. Because the church as a whole has moved from a living organism to a legal organization, it has become an institution and its leaders and members are much like Brooks. Inside the institution they are important people, educated people, familiar people and routine activities. Outside they are nothing; strangers with no clout, no power, nothing impressive.

The truth is Christ did not come to establish an institution. His kingdom and his church are meant to be relational and spontaneous movements, not organizations. It is his followers who created the "church institution" with layers of authority and solidified programs and routine practices that take on a sacred nature in and of themselves.

What is the Institutionalized Church?

Frank Viola provides this definition: “A church that is created by human organization, chain-of-command styled leadership, and institutional programs. It's marked by a weekly order of worship (or mass) officiated by a pastor or priest. It's controlled by a top-down hierarchical organization and human social conventions (called "offices" or “positions”) that people fill. The institutional church has often been called "the traditional church," "the organized church," and "the audience church." Congregants watch a religious performance once or twice a week, and then retreat home to live their individual Christian lives.

Leadership is hierarchical in the institutional church, and Christians are divided into "clergy" and "laity" (or their equivalent-"pastor - people", “shepherd - sheep”, “minister - saint”).

When God's people assemble together on the same basis of the organizational principles that run General Motors and Microsoft, we call it an institutional church. But when God's people assemble together on the basis of the life of God, we call it an organic church.

In the traditional church the institutional concept would look like this:

1. God is the owner.
2. Jesus is the C.E.O., Chief Executive Officer.
3. The pastors or elders are the board of directors.
4. The deacons and ministry leaders are management.
5. Members are the work force.
6. The workers only come to the plant (church building) 2-3 times a week and put in around 4 hours, basically just sitting and listening!

The institutional concept creates territories or turfs with certain understood laws:

1. Law #1: You shall at all times correctly identify territorial boundaries.
2. Law # 2: You shall at all times respect those boundaries.
3. Law # 3: You shall not, for any reason, invade the territory of someone who occupies a position higher than yours.

As Rick Meigs observes, “Jesus told us to go into all the world and be His ambassadors, “but many churches today have changed the ‘go and be’ command to a ‘come and see’ appeal.” They strive to have the best show in town.  Many in the institutionalized church have fallen in love with buildings, programs, icy professionalism, multiple staffs and a varied menu of goods and services designed to attract and entertain people but with very little redemptive value.”

Christ did not establish an institution. He would never allow his church to be defined or deployed as a material building in a single location, with lots of professionals leading and implementing many programs to keep the people involved in perpetuating the institution.

Roger Thoman writes, “Jesus invited us to join him, organically, in the reproduction of life.  His church is a living, thriving, reproducing organism (Mark 4) that allows life-in-the-Spirit to spread virally from one disciple to the next.  His church is alive as illustrated by a seed (Mark 4) that brings forth 30, 60, or 100-fold reproduction. That is the life of the kingdom. His life in me is passed on to the life of another (2-fold) which is passed to the life of another (4-fold) which is passed to the life of another (8-fold), etc. That is the way of organic/viral life and this is what the kingdom IS. This is ultimately what Jesus invited us to become part of: discipling viral ( viral means highly contagious and rapidly multiplying) disciplers.”

The Kingdom of God is meant to be decentralized, mobile and ever expanding, having reproductive impact by personal contact. In contrast, institutionalized church people tend to centralize, localize, immobilize, and develop a fortress mentality with most of the emphasis on coming instead of going; turning the church building into the place for ministry instead of the base for it. As to be expected, with little contact comes little impact.

Decentralizing, mobilizing, sending and going are the ways of Jesus. The gospel says, “go”, but our church buildings say “stay.” The gospel says, “Seek the lost” but our churches say, “Let the lost seek the church.”

The Gospel says (in Luke 14:23), “Go into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be full.” But institutionalization says, “Let’s launch a new public relations and advertising campaign to attract the right ‘profile’ or ‘demographic’ of the prospective church attendee we are currently targeting.”

Carl Richardson writes, “Institutionalization is marked by inflexibility, immobility, insensitivity, and inconsequentiality.

Chanting the “party line” and reciting proven “trigger phrases,” the perpetuators of the institutionalized church give primary lip service to the Great Commission but only secondary action.

Often the most zealous among them actually perceive themselves as preservers of “the faith.” Imagining themselves to be among God’s most favorite people, they are expert at self-deception and self-righteousness, artifice and guile. Within the ultimate framework of the institutionalized church, the Great Commission is not resisted. It is ignored. It is quietly displaced with lofty sounding substitutions and high-gloss new programs void of much of anything of eternal consequence.

The bottom line is the only line. The mission of the church is surrendered – then forgotten. Meetings replace mission. Focus on the letter of the law unsparingly replaces the life-giving anointing of the Holy Spirit of God.

Servicing the institution becomes primary. Kingdom ministry becomes secondary.

Christ is no longer Lord of all. He is not Lord at all. Jesus is no longer Savior. He is relegated to and referenced as merely a partner in the “business” of running the church.”

One seminary professor wrote, “The real trouble is not in fact that the Church is too rich, but that it has become heavily institutionalized, with a crushing investment in maintenance. It has the characteristics of the dinosaur and the battleship. It is saddled with a plant and program beyond its means, so that it is absorbed in problems of supply and preoccupied with survival. The inertia of the machine is such that the financial allocations, the legalities, the channels of organization, the attitudes of mind, are all set in the direction of continuing and enhancing the status quo. If one wants to pursue a course which cuts across these channels, then most of one’s energies are exhausted before one ever reaches the enemy lines.”

Scripturally, individually we are each God’s Temple and corporately we are also His Temple. Why then do we work so hard to raise up professional priests to lord over believer priest and try to do all the work of the ministry, centralized buildings in which the majority of ministry is done, and institutionalized sacraments (Baptism and the Lord’s Supper) whose practice is governed by the heads of the institution?

Our definition of church without the centrality of Jesus is a key to our problem of believing it is quite all right to have the church be attractional, institutional, stationary, and non-reproducing. Most common definitions of the church do little to even mention Christ.

As seen biblically, the church is not structured the same way a business corporation or university is. Rather, it is structured like the human body—on the basis of life. At its most basic level the church is a community, not a hierarchy; an organism, not an organization (Mt 18:20; Rom 12:5-8; 1 Cor 12; Eph 4:1-16; 1 Pet 4:10-11).

Most of the metaphors and explanations of the Kingdom of God and the Church in the New Testament use natural concepts for identification and description:  the Body, the Bride, the branches, the field of wheat, the mustard seed, the Family, the Flock, leaven, salt, and light.  When the New Testament uses a building as a metaphor of the Church, it is quick to add that it is made up of Living Stones (1 Peter 2:5).

We would do much better as leaders in the Church to learn at the feet of the farmer rather than study with the CEO of a corporation. It is time we see that the Church starts in the fields, not in the barns (Prov. 24:27).  We spend so much time building nice barns with padded pews, air-conditioned halls, and state-of-the art sound systems, yet we have neglected the fields. We are as foolish as the farmer who builds a barn and then stands in the doorway calling all the crops to come in and make themselves at home. It is time for the Church to get her hands dirty in the soil of lost people’s lives.

When we become part of the perpetuation of the institution so that our own identity and security and ministry are found there, we have become insti­tutionalized like Brooks.

Of course, God may well be working in and through the organized expression of the church, but I guarantee he is also at work outside of it. His kingdom is bigger than any church, denomination, or institution.

It is dangerous when the institution becomes the leaders’ and the peoples’ source of identity and purpose. (Ask the typical Christian what and where their church is and they give you a building’s name and street address.) After being in this type of environment for a while, the leader feels compelled to give his life to maintaining the institution, while utilizing the people in the building to assist him in keeping the organization’s machinery well-oiled and running smoothly. In essence the leader and the typical church member is a prisoner to a made-made institution and cannot imagine life on the outside.

Back to the movie, Andy asks Red, "You think you'll ever get out of here?"

Red looks down, almost in defeat. Unable to see the possibility be-cause the reality of the prison walls is truer for him, Red replies, "I don't think I could make it on the outside, Andy."

As he gazes up at the high, cold stone walls that have imprisoned him, he goes on, "I've been in here most of my life. I'm an institutional man now, just like Brooks was."

After Red has given his response to Andy’s question, he assumes that he is about to choose to surrender to life behind the walls and give up on Mexican fantasies, but Red is wrong. Andy is unsinkable. He summarizes in one sentence the choice all of us have to make if we are to break free from being institutionalized. Our simple choice is the same as Andy's: "Get busy living or get busy dying."

Andy would not surrender to the walls. He would be free. He was free before he was in prison, he was free while in prison, and he would be free outside of prison.

And you can be too.

Andy saw great potential in Red, more than Red himself could see. And eventually, they would both realize the freedom that Andy always had on the inside.

Will you be free of the institution and involved in a living, moving, virally infectious, reproducing, glocal church (glocal = both local, national and international)? The choice is yours. Get busy living in a growing organism or get busy dying in the institution.