For many people it is not the complexity of God’s design in Christ’s body that overwhelms them, rather its simplicity. People clamor for organizational structure because they seek safety. Church leaders comply by structuring it because leadership seeks significance. The body of Christ does need structure, but, when structure leads to institution, and people chose safety over their purposed engagement of the world with the Gospel, and leaders chose institutional significance over the empowerment of Christ’s people into God’s grace design, then, they have both succumbed to sin. Worse, they have cut off the single most important instrument besides the Holy Spirit that God has to engage the world with his message of grace . . . people.

The church used to see the communities that surrounded them as a mission field from which disciples are made. Instead of acting as a guide to challenge and direct the culture, the church is isolated and drifting with the current. This approach forfeits the very influence Christ calls us to have on the world. In a paper presented at the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism held in Berlin, Samuel H. Moffett warned against the “sin of self-containment”:

The church that is turned in upon itself has turned its back on the world to which it was sent by Jesus Christ . . . There may be worse sins than self-containment, but few can more quickly blunt the growing edge of the Church of Jesus Christ. The Bible counts it as the accursed sin. This is no light condemnation, its sign is the barren fig tree (Mark 11:12-14), heavy with leaves for its own self-beautification, but sterile and without fruit. When Jesus saw it, he cursed it.

In short, when the church becomes institutionalized and self-contained, it has abandoned its calling as a missionary.