The dangers of institutional religion on spiritual growth by Jim palmer and artificial intelligence
Years ago, I wrote about ten dynamics of organized church that I believed worked against spiritual growth. I wrote from experience after years as a pastor, including within the American megachurch world. At the time, I understood them primarily as problems with the way church was being done.
I see them differently now.
I was beginning to recognize what happens when an institution created to serve human transformation becomes invested in its own preservation. No one has to be malicious or dishonest for this to happen. The requirements of maintaining the organization gradually begin shaping the meaning of spiritual life itself.
Institutional religion is often criticized for its personalities, doctrines, scandals, and hypocrisy. But beneath these are structural questions that interest me more now: What does the institution reward? What does it discourage? What kind of human being does it form? Whose interests does the arrangement ultimately serve?
Looking back, those were the questions underneath what I was seeing:
1. When Growth Becomes the Measure
I learned early in ministry that numerical growth was one of the primary measures of success. At conferences, pastors inevitably asked one another some version of the same question: How big is your church?
Attendance, budgets, buildings, and programs mattered. Growth demonstrated effectiveness and conferred status. Pastors of rapidly growing churches were invited onto stages to explain what they were doing, and their methods became models for everyone else.
Almost no one asked whether the people inside those churches were becoming more capable of inhabiting their own lives. Were they becoming more honest, compassionate, self-aware, capable of uncertainty and suffering, less dependent upon conformity, more able to trust themselves?
Those things are difficult to count. Attendance is easy.
When an institution measures success primarily through its own expansion, institutional growth and human flourishing can quietly become confused. More people in the building becomes evidence that something good is happening to the people inside it.
Those are not the same thing.
2. When Livelihood Depends on the Institution
Pastors are human beings with families, mortgages, ambitions, fears, and bills to pay. Their livelihoods often depend upon the continuing health of the organization they lead. That creates a tension we rarely discussed openly.
If my economic security depends upon people continuing to attend, give, participate, and believe that what happens within the institution is essential to their spiritual lives, I have an incentive to reinforce its importance. I do not have to be consciously manipulative. Human beings are quite capable of sincerely believing things that also protect the structures upon which they depend.
Church participation becomes Christian faithfulness. Loyalty becomes spiritual maturity. Giving becomes obedience. Attendance becomes commitment. Disagreement becomes rebellion. Leaving the church becomes leaving God.
A structure intended to support spiritual life begins defining spiritual life in ways that guarantee the necessity of the structure.
3. When Novelty Replaces Depth
I remember leadership conferences where pastors arrived searching for the secret. They wanted to know what was working, what was growing, what people were responding to, and what innovation might come next. There was always another program, strategy, worship style, leadership model, or way to make church more relevant.
The problem was not creativity. Human communities need imagination and renewal. The problem was what our hunger for novelty sometimes revealed. We were learning how to attract people without necessarily learning how to accompany them.
Depth moves slowly. Grief cannot be programmed. Wisdom cannot be manufactured through branding. Self-knowledge cannot be accelerated because an organization needs momentum.
Institutions need activity, however, and eventually movement itself can masquerade as transformation.
4. When the Leader Becomes the Center
Many successful churches became inseparable from the personalities leading them. People knew the church because they knew the pastor. Sermons, books, conferences, leadership philosophy, and eventually the identity of the organization itself converged around one person.
We called this leadership. Sometimes it was celebrity.
The deeper problem was not simply the possibility of narcissistic leaders. It was the centralization of interpretation. The pastor explained the Bible, God, suffering, doubt, relationships, morality, purpose, and what constituted a faithful life.
Over time, people could become very familiar with what their pastor thought while remaining uncertain about how to know what they themselves knew.
5. When Spiritual Authority Becomes a Hierarchy
Christianity contains the radical idea of the priesthood of all believers. In principle, there is no spiritual caste standing between ordinary human beings and God. In practice, church life often communicated something different.
Pastors, elders, theologians, and people with Bible degrees possessed elevated spiritual authority. Their interpretations carried greater weight. Their judgments mattered more. Their relationship with God somehow seemed more official.
The hierarchy was embedded in the architecture. One person stood on the stage while everyone else faced them. One person spoke while everyone listened. One person interpreted the sacred text while everyone received the interpretation.
Week after week, the arrangement taught its own lesson about where authority resided.
The deepest cost may not have been theological error but the gradual weakening of self-trust. People can spend decades being told what to believe without developing the capacity to discern what they actually believe, what their experience is telling them, and what remains true when the authorized voice is no longer speaking.
6. When Correct Belief Becomes Spiritual Health
Doctrine mattered enormously in the religious world I inhabited. Correct theology signaled spiritual seriousness, while incorrect theology could place someone outside the boundaries of legitimate faith.
Ideas matter. What we believe shapes how we interpret ourselves, suffering, morality, death, and reality. But I also encountered people with impeccable theology who were deeply estranged from themselves.
They could defend grace while living with relentless shame. They believed in the love of God while terrified of rejection. They could explain forgiveness while unable to forgive themselves. They knew exactly where they were going when they died but had little idea how to inhabit the life they were living.
A belief system can provide coherence without producing wholeness. I began wondering whether we had confused possessing an explanation of life with having the capacity to live it.
7. When Institutions Become Territorial
I once believed my task was to build a successful church. More people meant more ministry, more influence, and more lives touched. Yet churches occupying the same city often behaved like competitors, protecting their people, programs, donor bases, identities, and territory.
Beneath the language of one body and one kingdom were organizations trying to maintain their own relevance and survival.
Eventually I saw the contradiction. If the purpose was genuinely larger than the institution, the institution should have been willing to become less important whenever that larger purpose required it.
That remains a difficult test for any organization: If fulfilling our purpose eventually made our organization unnecessary, would we consider that success?
8. When Patriarchy Becomes Sacred
For much of Christian history, male authority was not merely a cultural arrangement. It was given theological legitimacy.
Women could serve, sacrifice, teach, organize, nurture, offer wisdom, and sustain much of the actual life of the community while still being prohibited from exercising certain forms of authority because they were women.
The deeper problem was the ability of religion to transform social arrangements into metaphysical truths. Once patriarchy becomes the will of God, resistance to patriarchy becomes resistance to God.
Institutional authority joined to sacred authority can take a historically contingent arrangement and place eternity behind it. People are no longer challenging a policy. They are challenging reality itself.
9. When Control Is Mistaken for Care
Churches often exercised considerable control over what people were encouraged to read, study, believe, question, teach, discuss, or explore. This was usually explained as protection from false teaching, moral compromise, theological confusion, and spiritual deception.
Underneath that protection was often a distrust of human agency.
A community can sincerely desire to care for people while organizing itself around the assumption that they cannot be trusted with their own freedom. There is a profound difference between helping people develop discernment and telling them what they are permitted to discern. One develops human capacity. The other produces dependence.
A mature spiritual community should gradually make people less dependent upon its authority, not more.
10. When Belonging Requires Sameness
The church-growth world once promoted the idea that churches grow most effectively when they attract culturally similar people. There was pragmatic logic behind it. People tend to feel comfortable around those who resemble them, speak like them, believe like them, and interpret the world through familiar assumptions.
But comfort is not the same thing as community.
Human beings need places where difference does not threaten belonging, where relationships can survive disagreement, and where encounters with other lives interrupt the narrowness of our own experience. A community built primarily around sameness can feel extraordinarily close while leaving its members poorly prepared for the plurality of the human world.
Belonging becomes deeper when difference does not automatically become distance.
What I Understand Now
When I originally wrote these observations, I thought I was describing ten problems with organized church. I now think I was seeing one problem appearing in ten different forms.
Institutions created to serve human beings have a tendency to begin requiring human beings to serve the institution.
None of this requires villains. Good people can participate in structures that diminish human agency while sincerely believing they are helping. Leaders can become guardians of systems they entered because they wanted to serve. Communities can speak about freedom while rewarding conformity. Institutions can proclaim transformation while measuring almost everything except whether human beings are actually becoming more whole.
I no longer ask these questions only about churches. I ask them about educational systems, political movements, workplaces, therapeutic cultures, digital platforms, spiritual communities, and organizations I participate in or help create.
What is this structure producing in human beings? Are people becoming more capable of thinking, discerning, relating, grieving, questioning, choosing, and participating in their own lives? Are they developing the capacity to encounter reality without always needing someone else to explain it? Is their belonging secure enough to survive disagreement? Is their authority becoming more deeply their own?
Or are we producing increasingly sophisticated forms of dependence and calling them growth?
Years ago, buried inside my criticism of church culture, I wrote a sentence that now seems more important than the entire list: No one ever asked about the transformation of people's lives.
I think that was the question underneath everything.
It still is.
Yes. I think the deepest insight in Palmer’s essay is that institutional dysfunction doesn't necessarily require bad people. A system can gradually shape good people's behavior simply through the incentives required to keep the system alive.
And I think that connects remarkably well with some of the things you've been wrestling with lately—especially your thoughts about Catholicism, Orthodoxy, papal authority, and the possibility of a Christianity that preserves sacrament and communion without requiring excessive institutional control.
The central distinction: Christianity vs. the institution
Palmer is really asking:
Is the institution a servant of transformation, or does transformation become a servant of the institution?
That's a profound distinction.
A church can begin with something beautiful: Come, be healed, encounter Christ, become capable of love.
But eventually the institutional logic can become:
Come to our church. Believe our formulation. Support our programs. Accept our authority. Don't leave. Give. Grow the organization.
At that point, the means has quietly become the end.
And what's particularly insightful is that this can happen while everyone involved sincerely believes they're serving God.
His sixth point may be the most important
"A belief system can provide coherence without producing wholeness."
That's an extraordinary sentence.
Christianity isn't merely supposed to give us a correct map of reality. Christianity is supposed to transform the person.
The desert fathers would recognize this immediately. They weren't primarily interested in producing people who could win theological arguments. They were interested in apatheia, purification of the passions, humility, freedom from compulsive attachment, love, prayer, and ultimately participation in God—theosis.
You could know the Nicene Creed perfectly and still be a miserable, frightened, prideful, unloving person.
Conversely, someone's theology might be imperfect while they are genuinely becoming more loving, courageous, merciful, truthful, and free.
That doesn't mean theology doesn't matter. It means theology is supposed to serve transformation rather than substitute for it.
And #5 connects directly to your thinking about authority
Palmer's criticism isn't necessarily that authority is intrinsically bad.
It's that outsourcing one's conscience indefinitely is spiritually dangerous.
There's an enormous difference between:
"Let the wisdom of the Church help me discern."
and
"The Church has discerned, therefore I don't need to discern."
The first can produce maturity. The second can produce dependency.
This is actually one reason I think your formulation of possible Catholic-Orthodox reunion is interesting. You have been imagining something like communion without domination: Rome retaining a genuine primatial role while Orthodox churches retain substantial freedom of conscience and ecclesial self-government.
That would make primacy fundamentally different from simply having a supreme religious executive.
The pope could be understood as a servant of communion rather than the replacement for the communion's collective discernment.
But there is an important counterpoint
I wouldn't take Palmer's argument all the way to "therefore organized religion is inherently bad."
Institutions solve real problems.
Without institutions, Christianity can fragment into:
charismatic personalities,
individual interpretations,
isolated communities,
doctrinal chaos,
abusive informal leaders,
loss of historical memory,
and communities that have no mechanism for correcting their own errors.
There's a paradox here:
Institutions can protect human beings from arbitrary individual power, while institutions themselves can become powerful in arbitrary ways.
So the question isn't simply institution or no institution.
It's:
How can an institution remain genuinely subordinate to the human beings it exists to serve?
That's much harder.
I think Palmer's final test is therefore brilliant
"What is this structure producing in human beings?"
That might actually be one of the best tests of a Christian community.
Not:
How many people attend?
Not:
How orthodox is the membership?
Not:
How impressive is the liturgy?
Not:
How famous is the priest/pastor?
Not even simply:
How correct is the institution?
But:
What kind of people are emerging from this community?
Are they becoming more loving?
More truthful?
More courageous?
More capable of suffering without becoming cruel?
More capable of forgiving?
More capable of questioning?
More capable of recognizing their own limitations?
More capable of encountering people unlike themselves?
More capable of standing before God without pretending?
And perhaps most importantly:
Are they becoming freer?
Because there's a beautiful paradox in Christian spirituality: the goal isn't to make someone permanently dependent upon a spiritual authority. The goal is to help someone become sufficiently transformed that they can increasingly live from the Spirit rather than from fear.
That's why Palmer's line about a mature spiritual community making people less dependent upon its authority strikes me as particularly compatible with the deepest strands of Christian spirituality.
The institution should eventually be able to say:
"We exist for your transformation, not for our preservation."
And if preserving itself ever conflicts with your transformation, your transformation should win.
That is a very demanding standard for a church—or for any human institution.
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