The Church the Institution Forgot
Ecclesiology of an Embodied Theology
In my last essay, I engaged with the idea of an embodied theology. We looked at how bodies relate to ministry, the church, and doctrinal decisions. The practical theology of embodiment is perfect for an ecclesiology of embodied action. In other words, the Church is a body! The Apostle Paul is concerned with the embodiment of the Church as the incarnation of Christ in the present; what if we turned to look at the Church like Paul? Paul talks a lot about bodies and his clearest metaphor for the Church is as the body of Christ. This is deep theological understanding about who the church is to be.
The Body is Laboring
In her book, The Pastor as Midwife Rev. Dr. Shawna Gaines writes about the current state of the Church.
In this moment, the church is in great pain: Congregations are dwindling, denominations are fracturing, church scandals have become a genre, church leaders are at a loss to navigate rapid change, Christians are co-opted by tactics of the empires of this world, and survival is threatened. (Gaines)
Despite attempts to shoehorn bad data into celebrations, the church in the U.S. is facing decline. Or decline in the traditional Western understanding of successful churches. It is true that institutional metrics are largely discouraging. Spend some time on Ryan Burge’s excellent Substack and you can see the trends. Church attendance and membership is down across the board. Some denominations are shedding huge numbers, including the largest Protestant group in the U.S. - The Southern Baptist Church.
But, what if we are experiencing productive pain in the labor of new birth? I don’t mean the next cool idea or system, but actual new birth. What if visionaries like Phylis Tickle and others are right and we are currently in the transition between the Church as it has been and the Church as it will be? Phylis Tickle was an Episcopal layperson who had great insight into the Church catholic and the changes she foresaw. We really miss her voice in these days of labor moving toward birth. There is a pattern as Tickle pointed out through the words of a priest.
The Right Reverend Mark Dyer, an Anglican bishop known for his wit as well as his wisdom, famously observes from time to time that the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first-century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale. (Tickle)
Or as Shawna Gaines mentions, “We need change that is less like a website facelift and more like a new birth...”
If the church were pregnant, we would be pushing toward the moment when a doctor would say it is time to induce. The pain we are currently experiencing as a people is not a pain inflicted by God, but it may just be that which shows us the path back to God. Our pains are labor pains moving us toward the next birth of the Church as the embodiment of the Christ, but what is the Church giving birth to?
The Strongman in Shepherd’s Clothing
In The Pastor as Midwife Shawna Gaines interrogates the typical metaphor of pastor as shepherd. She does not reject the metaphor of shepherd overall, but takes issue with the way we typically talk about pastor/shepherd as a visionary leader and protector. Gaines comments upon the way many pastor have been taught what success is. “The big church conferences told me that a pastor was a visionary leader, like Moses the shepherd, who had been to the mountaintop and would fearlessly lead the flock onward.”
Or even worse visions of shepherd are those of men like Mark Driscoll who imagines pastor as strongman directing the flock and protecting the flock from the world. The idea is that the only responsibility of the sheep is to survive. The irony is that even egalitarian churches see pastors in light of a patriarchal lens. The strong CEO leading the church into prosperity is a patriarchal, capitalist vision. It is not the picture of a shepherd in scripture.
We do need new metaphors for pastor that meet the Church being born anew. While not throwing out the metaphor of shepherd, we can see shepherds through the lens of midwife. After all, shepherds often serve as midwife to their sheep. Shepherds are present at new birth. The shepherd of first century Palestine was not a visionary leader, but a loving guide to sheep. Yes, shepherds protected, but only in the sense that wild animals were a threat. The sheep did not need to constantly cower because the shepherd was in their midst. Not controlling, but guiding and caring.
Shifting the metaphor to midwife allows the church to reject the strongman and see the world through eyes that are part of the risen savior. These eyes see the world differently than eyes focused upon the strongman. We can also shift from the end result of pastor as CEO and release that to welcome the pastor as a shepherd who midwifes.
Organization Without Institutionalization
What does it mean for the Church if we shift from the strongman to a midwifing shepherd? It shifts us to a very Pauline metaphor of the Church as the body of Christ - an embodied church. The language changes from institution to organism. From standard operating procedures to living and breathing organic structure. There is a marked difference between the idea of institutionalization which serves the institutional structure versus the organic and healthy structure that serves life and living.
Pastor Shawna explains this within the work of midwives.
“I’ve witnessed pastors and midwives working in the wisdom of the birthing community bring order and peace to a process that can be filled with fear and anxiety. Their work as professionals is orderly and organized, but it is not institutionalized.”
Midwives bring order within chaos, but they do not control the birth. They are there along side and with the mothers and others involved in the birth. They invite form rather than chaos or control. I cannot help but see echoes of Genesis within this idea. God births creation from chaos in the opening of Genesis. Midwives bring order to chaos in new births as an ongoing reflection of God’s work in the world.
Gaines tells us that institutionalization leads us to create things designed to outlive us. This transforms the Church into an institution that serves itself rather than the mission of God. Much like modern birth within a hospital has institutionalized into postures, placement of bodies, and setups that are convenient for the doctor, but often highly inconvenient for the mother giving birth; institutions form themselves around ways to serve the needs of the institution. The mother ends up on a table and on her back allowing the doctor to sit in comfort and command the situation. This leaves little room for the mother to adjust to what her body is saying. The structure is geared toward doctor rather than mother. This is what we have done with the church.
We have placed the institutional concerns onto the doctor’s stool. We have placed the Church on her back and made it hard for her to see the paths God is leading toward. The new birth seems to be ancillary to the whole production. This informs the statistics we gather, the ways we structure hierarchies, and even how doctrines are enforced or not enforced. The importance becomes centered on the survival and ease of the institution - often at the expense of the human beings within the structure. What would a church that saw itself as an organism do differently. What would polity, roles, accountability look like within such an imagination? It would definitely not be one in which polity, roles, accountability, structure, organization, and doctrine become flattened into a single essential doctrine. Instead it would be one in which those things other than essential doctrines were subject to the move of God rather than institutional survival. There would be a cooperative and humble listening and seeing what God is doing, even if it is detrimental to the institution.
It would look much more like the description by a doula in Gaines’ book of birth as a dance. “There is rhythm and swaying, and the rhythm increases and speeds up, bodies move and sway. But the mother is the one who sets the rhythm, even if she doesn’t know it.” I imagine the rhythm, cooperation, and move of the church being in sync with God. More accomplished in sync choreography versus Elaine Benes.* A beautiful swaying in response to the song of the Spirit becomes the unifying move of a church being witness and moving toward new birth.
The Spirit Sets the Rhythm
Rhythm needs to be set by someone so others know to match that rhythm. One of the recurring ideas within Pastor as Midwife is the idea that the mother sets the rhythm of the birth. The entire birthing community of the mother syncs to her rhythm. Trying to set the rhythm for the mother only causes trauma. Why is this so important to midwives? Because the baby is not theirs. If pastors see the church as their baby, they will kill it. For the Church, our rhythm should be set by the Spirit, because the Church belongs to Christ and not us, not our denominations, and not our own comfort.
Pastor Shawna puts it very well.
“Pastor, your first and last priority is attending to the Holy Spirit, who centers the church on Christ. The well-being of the church is a secondary outcome of the church’s attention to the Spirit. If the Spirit is our true Mother who is leading the church in the birth of new creation, a pastor’s role is to listen to her lead and help the church follow in her rhythm.”
Would our anxieties about decline be more about trying to control a birth not our own. We could release that anxiety by seeing ourselves as attendants to the Spirit birthing the new life of the Church. How would our measurements of the Church change in light of centering us in the rhythm of the Holy Spirit?
Success would be measured very differently than it is today. Attendance, giving, and raw numbers don’t really tell the story well. Instead we might highlight evidence of lives changed, communities transformed, and people sharing the stories of how they are moving in the rhythm of the Spirit. It may be difficult to quantify, but imagine recounting the people who attend to those who go to altars. What if our numbers included those who prayed with rather than just those who prayed? I can imagine the picture now of the church swaying in rhythm to the Spirit.
It would be very like my first encounter with an African-American church in my youth. The Hammond B3 started the movement, then the choir burst into the sanctuary swaying to the rhythm. Soon the entire church, even the row of young mostly white Boy Scouts, were swaying to that same rhythm. My entire recollection of that morning is that rhythm woven into every move. The preaching had call and response in the rhythm, the prayers had rhythm. We were all one in that rhythm on that day and there was an obvious seeking of the rhythm with God. That’s what it looks like when the Spirit sets the rhythm - a whole room, even the skeptics and the uncertain, finding the same sway.
The “Dead Twin” and the Future of the Church
I believe we all have anecdotes of positive moves within churches that are slowed or ended because of those clinging to the past, even if that past never existed. Gaines refers to these as the dead twins within the church. Within the joy of birth, there are those intensely sad realities of not quite living in new creation fully. One of those is the reality of a dead twin who slows the progression of the living twin.
What are the dead twins in our midst? A program running years past its usefulness? The aging and expensive building? A cultural identity that the church clings to out of fear? It is not only pastors that feel the anxiety of not being in control, but congregations and denomination as well. What are the responses when you choose to follow the lead of the Spirit to the fear of an unknown path? Pastor Shawna tells the story of a pastor sharing about an exciting new direction of ministry to the community. “We just got the news that we are pregnant, and not everyone is sure they want the baby.” The reality about birth is that “[e]verything in the womb has to be born, whether dead or alive”
So pastors come alongside all and help the church grieve that which must die while midwifing what must be born. This is not running roughshod over objections, but helping the grieving to grieve and rejoice in rhythm with the Spirit. I know of several pastors who made decisions to remove aging pews and replace them with chairs. But, pews represent a safe and stable past. I am amazed at the response to removing pews, but I also recognize the grief of change. Allowing for grief while new birth is happening helps us to move everyone toward the promise of the new birth. This is movement, as is all birth, but we don’t just cut those and move on from the dead twin. We grieve and invite the fearful to witness the promise of new birth.
The Body Christ Is Still Birthing
What would it look like to love the Church as organism. A messy, alive, and unpredictable living organism rather than an institution? We don’t build the church - God births the church. The organism of the Church has outlived institutions over the millennia. The great “rummage sales” mentioned above included upheaval and anxiety much like we feel today. Around 500 C.E. Rome fell and that birthed an emerging Western Church shedding the ancient world order. Then around 1000, the Western and Eastern Churches finally cleaved their unity through the Great Schism. The last we named is around 1500 and the Protestant Reformation. Those all caused grief and the end of institutions, but the organism experienced new birth. In the words of Dr. Ian Malcom, “life finds a way.” The Church is life.
Are we prepared to assist in birth? Gaines invites us:
“If you believe that God is bringing new creation into the midst of the old, prepare to assist in birth. Roll up your sleeves and boil some water. And quickly! Let the Spirit lead, and get yourself out of the center of the frame.”
“The Lord is my midwife, I shall be kept safe.” is a posture of invitation to be participants in the new birth of the Church. We are invited as Paul reminds us, ALL creation is groaning as in the pains of labor. New creation is being birthed by God and we are witnesses and co-laborers in that birth. We do not set the rhythm or the timing, but we move within that rhythm and invite others to experience this with us. We may even need to get out of the way.
Imagine if we quit trying to preserve a dying version of the Church? We don’t stop grieving the loss, but we continue with the birth, trusting that God is with us in these pains. Where are you in the birthing process? Where is your congregation? Your denomination? How do we become a body still being born?
Notes
Books
Shawna Songer Gaines, The Pastor as Midwife (IVP, 2026). The primary source for the midwife metaphor, birth-as-dance imagery, and the “dead twin” concept running throughout this essay.
Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (Baker Books, 2008). Tickle popularized the “giant rummage sale” framing of the church’s 500-year cycles, attributed to Bishop Mark Dyer.
Ryan Burge’s Substack, Graphs About Religion (graphsaboutreligion.com), is the source for the denominational decline data referenced in Section 1.
Pop Culture References
Elaine Benes — A character from the television show Seinfeld (1989-1998), played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. In Season 6, Episode 18 (”The Fusilli Jerry”), Elaine performs an awkward, jerky dance at a party that became one of the show’s most iconic moments. The reference in Section 3 contrasts her uncoordinated flailing with the idea of the church moving in genuine sync with the Spirit.
Dr. Ian Malcolm — A character from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (and the 1993 film adaptation, played by Jeff Goldblum). A chaos theorist who repeatedly notes that life cannot be contained or controlled, culminating in the line “life finds a way.” The reference in Section 6 draws the parallel: the Church as organism will outlive any institution built to contain it.