2. Find an organic life within the church institution(s).
The problem is real - for many of our church institutions, there is hardly an organic life within. The people go through the religious notions and prescribed rituals, and then dive right back into their own private lives as if their faith and life were two separate issues all together. But remember, the church is the church. Nothing can take away the role relegated to the church of being the necessary means to bring you towards the eventual and full partaking of Christ’s nature. This means that you’re obligated to continue partaking in the life of the church institution. But it also means that you have to somehow find an organic life within the said institution.

One main difficulty the Protestant Christian has to grapple with is which church institution I’m referring to here. Because in reality, we’re talking about many fragmented institutions which often disagree with one another, not one universal institution. Unfortunately, this is part of the irony which has emerged from 600 years of protesting against… erm, I understand what we were protesting about, but what are we protesting about now?

So here’s the thing: If you were a Roman Catholic or an Orthodox Christian, the organic community in which you participated would also belong to the one institution, because the entire Roman Catholic Church is one, and the Orthodox Church also sees itself as one based on a universal theological agreement on the Tradition of the church. But as a Protestant Christian, it would be difficult to have any one particular institution contain the organic body for the simple reason that we are legion (in authority structures and in theological positions)! Imagine, what if your organic community – people who journeyed with you in spiritual intimacy – consisted of a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Lutheran, and a Pentecostal? Which institution would you expect to contain this organic community? To have one institution contain it would mean the exclusion of the other three.

So for the Protestant Christian, I’d suggest that you find spiritual friends who can journey with you in a deep intimacy in the environment of an organic community, but not seek an organic community solely found within one institution. The people in your organic community may come from various institutions, and that’s okay. But as they commit themselves to a life within your organic community, they must also be deeply committed to a participation in the life of their respective institutions. As soon as the organic community begins to think that it can exist apart from the institution(s), it has theologically invalidated itself within the scheme of the Kingdom. If you stand outside the institution, you stand outside the body of Christ. There is no Christianity outside the church in its institutional form, for she is the body of Christ enfleshed, which contains both the visible structure and the invisible organic dimension. If this fact seems over-emphasised, it is only because it cannot be emphasised enough.