The Best (and Worst) of What We Are

It's fairly obvious to me that people need God or gods, inasmuch as religious activity has always been central to human society in one form or another.  Even Atheists, if you pay attention closely enough, deify something, be it logic or simply the human spirit.  We are inherently religious creatures, meaning that one of our most primal activities after procuring the necessities of life, is to search for God, gods, meaning and purpose.  So the question is not do we need God?  It is do we need the Church, defined specifically for my purposes as the institutional expression of faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Incarnation of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
I will stipulate that there are many "churches," out there that do not share this identity and I suspect that they probably would do well to wrestle with the same question, but that is really up to them, I have no standing to speak for any other religion or worldview.  I also cannot really honestly say any of this applies to Christianity as a global religion, it is more or less a consideration for Western, industrialized, educated and mostly comfortable people.  In short, the people for whom the Gospel has always been a bit of hair in the soup.  There is no way around it: life has worked out okay for most of us, we were lucky enough to be born in a time and place where life is as good as it has ever been for any group of people ever.
Do we have things to complain about?  You bet.
Are we living in a utopia?  Not yet.
But we're also not dying in droves from some unknown plague that seems like the very wrath of God.  Most of us aren't living in soul crushing poverty (even if a truly just economic system is still just a pipe dream).  We don't live in fear of a barbarian horde or a foreign empire suddenly appearing on the horizon to rape and pillage (though some seem to be willing to reach out and stretch for that fear).
In short, life is good enough that we don't particularly need the God that Jesus tells us about.  The God who is good news to the poor, and the blind, and the lame, and the prisoners, we're actually doing just fine on our own.  Or at least we can convince ourselves that we are.
One of the few reliable historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth is that he was a threat to the status quo.  We know this because his challenge to the way things were and to the power structures of his world, were precisely the things that brought about his execution.  If you "believe" nothing else about Jesus, you can trust that he was an agent of change, a stirrer of the pot, a rabblerouser and a revolutionary.
The Church that claims a mystical union with Christ, has not always embraced the fundamental challenge of Jesus' life and teachings, instead we have embraced the varied cultural moral paradigms which surround us and, each in our turn, have claimed that Jesus would agree with us.
The problem is that, in the course of time, those cultural moral paradigms change, leaving an institution that had so skillfully woven those standards into it's dogma, holding a bag full of stuff that nobody wants anymore.  In times of change people want stability and so the last stand of the institutional church is simply giving people the familiar and the time tested, which is basically where the Western Church stands right now.
People have begun to migrate to other forms of church that seem less infected by the status quo.  They call themselves Emergent, progressive or they don't call themselves anything at all, preferring to shun labels and shed what they can of the "old" institution.  These movements appropriate whatever they feel the "best" of the traditions of the church happen to be, and try to jettison the rest.  I admit, that sort of selective iconoclasm is attractive.  On days when institutional maintenance seems tiresome or tedious; like when the furnace goes down (that happened this week during the cold snap) or when there is trouble in the congregation (and there's almost always some sort of ripple going on), the idea of just getting together at a coffeehouse or a brewpub to talk about Jesus without all the baggage really seems like a great idea.
It's attractive because you can see that it's probably what Jesus would have actually done in our current cultural setting.  His life and ministry had that wandering itinerant sort of character to it.  But it is also a fact that without the institution of the Church, for all it's warts and flaws, none of us modern and postmodern folk would have any idea about who Jesus of Nazareth was.  If we had not established the traditions and the institutions of the Church, Jesus would have been lost in the sands of time.  It's easy to forget that, in world where you can access the whole of Scripture through scores of websites and can find Bibles almost anywhere you go.  It's easy to look at the excesses of the church and forget that, for instance, at the precise moment when we were at our crusading, inquisitioning worst, we had just managed to keep the light of reason and learning burning through the dark ages, by carefully protecting it and, in many ways hiding it, behind thick abbey walls.
History is complicated, and this moment in history is no less so, and so I would offer a few prayers for where and who we are at this moment.  For the believers that run ahead and embrace the new thing, I pray that your youthful exuberance will not run you onto the rocks.  For the reserved adherents to the traditions, I pray that you may take a break from protecting the light long enough to look at it every once in a while.  For all of us, I pray that we would remember that the Church is more than a building or a set of bylaws, but it also sometimes needs those things.  For those who are frightened by uncertainty, I pray for peace.  For those who are frustrated by the logjams, I pray for patience.  For the Church, which has continued a three year ministry for two thousand more, I give thanks.  For all the work that still needs to be done for the kingdom of heaven to draw near, I pray for strength.