Questioning the System

One of the really challenging things I have been working through of late is the obvious yet difficult to explain decline of the institution of the Church.  The problem is widespread and multi-symptomatic.  It manifests in the institutional evil that I talked about last week in the Roman Catholic church, it manifests in the crisis level decline of mainline churches, it manifests in the raw materialism and catering to consumerism of the "megachurch," it manifests in the misbehavior of the cults of personality that call themselves pastors. I think I may have gotten to, or at least somewhere near, the rotten core of the problem.
Institutions, given time and a certain level of success, inevitably become more and more invested in protecting and perpetuating themselves. Eventually this replaces their core vision, and they are essentially hollow systems, with no other goal than staying alive. It has been noted that the only way the Roman Catholic Priesthood could abide the level of corruption that it took to conceal so much abuse was that the system itself feared that the truth would destroy it.  Truth can set you free, if you are righteous, but if you are corrupt it will burn like the dickens. And by the way, being righteous is not the same as being perfect or pure.  Wisdom says that the righteous will take reproof and correction, they will repent and turn back from their errors, it is fools who do not heed the lessons of wisdom.
In my own tradition, the great fear that infests my Mainline congregation and the Presbyterian system as a whole is that we are a fading and increasingly irrelevant expression of what it means to be followers of Jesus.  This leads us into silliness at best and conflict at worst.  The silliness manifests when we rush to employ consultants and what amount to essentially marketing strategies.  We hide our failing vision under some very intellectual verbosity indeed.  Every time I hear that we (a church or a governing body) is going to spend some number of thousands of dollars on a consultant, I wonder how long it's going to take before we end up longing for the food the pigs are eating.
This prodigality is rooted in fear rather than licentiousness, but the end result is the same: famine and desperation. As we experience stress on the system, agreement becomes more difficult and conflict is easily raised. The Body of Christ begins to turn on each other as we "compete" for scarce resources, which in the case of the church, are simply people to attend and participate in our congregations.  Often there is an underlying belief that if we "just did X," sometimes maybe even, "if we just believe X," people would come flocking back to the institution and we would not have to struggle so much for survival.  I suspect this narrative has a tragic ending on the horizon, and indeed it may already be upon us.  We have become too invested in our institutions to allow them to be sanctified by the consuming fire of God, and thus the life-breath has left them.
What this means, in slightly less arcane terms is that we have lost the driving force that made the institutions important in the first place.  This happens in Churches and corporations and governments.  When the institution becomes more important than the purpose behind it, you become easy prey for those who would use your infrastructure for their own ends.  Your hierarchy becomes an enabling environment for pederasts, your business becomes a "corporation" that spends most of it's resources on administration, while the productive core of the thing is full of unhappy and perhaps resentful employees. Your government is vulnerable to take over by vain demagogues who are willing to promise anything but capable of fulfilling nothing.
I'm wondering if perhaps the church isn't a canary in a coalmine for our culture as a whole, as the things that afflict us are also causing dissolution and suffering other areas as well. I suspect that if we can figure out a way to recover the light that is supposed to be shining in us, we might just help cure a multitude of ailments.