Our institutional weakness

This post is from the defunct blog "Dying Church"

As long as the church is primarily committed to its own growth, well-being, and strength, it will find it difficult to see much beyond its own borders...Since Constantine we have been tempted to become fixated on the ultimacy of the church, even declaring that without it there is no salvation. We continue to plant local units in every community, which look much like the ones that are slowly fading. We act as if the church can still image itself as the institution God has ordained "to bring in the day of brotherhood and end the night of wrong". But the gates of the Constantinian world are slowly closing; not closing for repairs, just closing! The church increasingly finds itself not in the world of Christendom, but in a world more akin to the apostolic period, where it had little public power and exercised no social control. Our institutional weakness may provide the occasion for a new encounter with the Spirit of God and for a recovery of the ministry of reconciliation that the Spirit mandates and elicits. It may be that in our weakness we can discover the strength to be heralds of the redemptive and reconciling plan of God for the entire household, the world's oikoumene.(Charles H. Bayer, A Resurrected Church