Specialization

The Church, or at least the American Church, is having an identity crisis.  We don't know what we should be.  This manifests itself in many ways from picky disagreements about style and procedure, to misguided pharisaic zeal.  There are many diagnoses of the cause and often those diagnoses are contradictory: lax morality or over-rigid morality, letting go of our roots or clinging too tightly to tradition, not doing enough or trying to do too much, worship that is too dull or worship that tries too hard to entertain.  The problem is that all the diagnoses have a certain validity.
There is a Narcotics Anonymous group that meets in our church social hall once a week.  They are there in force every week, rain or shine, even last night, when the snow was beginning to fall.  And they can fill our parking lot like it's Sunday morning.  It's tempting, as a church, to look at the 12 step programs with a bit of envy, because they seem to be doing something really valuable: saving lives, changing bad habits, helping people cope with addictions.  There is a certain Jesus-ish quality to their gatherings.  There is a very non-judgmental, supportive sort of ethos to support groups.  You could look at these groups and make a presumption that they are doing God's work of helping the people who are broken and suffering, which they do very well.  You could also envy the way they're doing it on an organic level that doesn't require membership, only commitment, that doesn't build up an institution, only a community.  And you can make a pretty good argument that the church ought to be more like that.
Maybe it should.
A similar argument could be made about charitable organizations, if the church is supposed to engage in charitable work, surely there are more efficient ways of going about it.  Imagine what we could do if we just did away with all the messy arguments and developed a single minded focus on charity.
Did I mention we're having an identity crisis?
We live in a world of specialists.  If you go to a doctor and he or she actually finds something wrong with you, the first thing that happens is a referral to a specialist, for your heart, for your kidneys, for your stomach, for your feet etc, etc, etc.
The good old family doctor is just there to point you in the right direction and sort of oversee your care.  He or she has no pretense of being capable of treating your specific problems as well as a specialist.  I know that if I run into someone fighting addiction, as a pastor I refer them to AA or NA or whatever A group happens to fit their needs.
You think I'm about to say that the church should be like the family doctor, but that would just be contributing to the identity crisis.  We've gotten way too comfortable with the therapeutic model, we have become way too adept at comparing ourselves to all sorts of worldly archetypes that flutter around the edges of the deep reality of what the church actually is.  We are prone to classify things based on what they do, and since the church does often dabble in social work, in activism, in psychotherapy (sometimes disguised as spirituality), in education, in entertainment, in community organizing, and in any number of other good and just pre-occupations, we often identify our problems as being caused by not doing one or another of those things as strenuously as we can.
Jesus said we are Salt and Light, and sometimes, in specific circumstances being those things leads us to do things to help people with their trouble.  The straight fact of the matter is that we are always amateurs and dilettantes at those things and we really can't compete with the specialists, nor should we try.  As long as there are specialists to do the sort of work that, for instance, a 12 step program does, why reinvent the wheel?
The identity crisis has appeared as we cede more and more ground to the specialists and fail to refocus on what we should be.  This question of identity has to hammered upon, repeatedly.  Remember, we define things by their function, but what if, as Jesus seemed to indicate that following him is both a matter of who we are, (i.e. my sheep hear my voice), and what we do (i.e. bearing good fruit).
Perhaps the contradictory nature of the diagnosis is a result of the dual nature of our identity.  Other groups don't have to deal with this complexity, and they are able to succeed because of it.  Some would prescribe the same simplicity for the church: just pick a pill.  Take one and get to work doing things to help people.  Take the other and focus yourself on your own spiritual journey.
It is my conviction that true Christian discipleship only happens when you take both.  It gets complicated to be sure, and it's easy to crave the simplicity of a specialist.
It's a lot harder to live with the tension, trying always to find that balanced identity, which is at the core of Christian discipleship.  An identity that is only revealed when we allow God to shape us and lead us.  An identity that allows us to be found because we are lost, that allows us to be forgiven because we are sinners, that allows us to be resurrected because we are dead.  It is an identity that is necessarily in crisis.  As David Bosch pointed out so well in Transforming Mission, the Chinese character for crisis is created by the characters for danger and opportunity together.
Come to think of it, when you look at the history of the Church, indeed the history of God's people as a whole going back to Abraham, there was always this struggle for identity, always this ongoing crisis of trying to figure out who and what we are created to be.
Support groups might help people deal with a crisis of addiction or grief, charities might help people deal with an economic crisis, doctors might help people deal with a medical crisis.  While the church might dip a toe into those waters from time to time, the essential crisis that we deal with is existential: what are we? Who is God? Is there a purpose for all this mess?
There are no experts in these fields, no easy answers or simple steps, there is only faith, hope, love and a bunch of other people wrestling with the same questions.  That's who we are.