Should We Avoid Gathering with Other Folks Trying to Follow Jesus?

Dave and Abby raise the intriguing question in their comments to Charles' post from two days ago that perhaps churches will never be a good idea for folks hoping to pursue stage 4 faith, because stage 4 is, by definition, individualistic.  Institutions, by necessity, need to be stage 2--they need to set limits, draw lines, create structure.  Or perhaps, as Dave suggests, they need to be stage 1.

So what do you think?  Do we need to avoid others in this journey lest we institutionalize?

I see it pretty much the other direction.  Yes, institutions can rigidify in stage 2 (or stage 1, I suppose), but that's why we're talking on this blog at all, so we can figure out how to transcend that.  In Peck's view of the stages, it's not that you or I are in one stage and thereby have left the others behind.  His point is that, as we move through the stages, we retain the previous stages as we move on.  So a parent would be a fool to play the stage 4 card with their four-year old.  It's stage 2 all the way, baby!  And wisely so.

Over the years our church has seen some neat things happen with people, usually men, who were formerly homeless or nearly so.  One thing we often need to help these often middle-aged men with is boundaries in terms of how they relate to young women.  On the street, these men were often very direct with such women.  In our church small groups, they would sometimes creep such women out.  What was needed was clear structure and boundaries on our part.  Stage 2.

Just yesterday I got in touch with some noteworthy anger at one group of people I regarded as unreflectively stage 2, to disastrous results.  I wasn't sad about their alleged failings, I was angry.  Seems remarkably like stage 3.

And my take on churches is that the ones we're describing here will need to play the cards of each stage well.  (Stage 1 is always the hardest to talk about here, but it seems to me that the healthy church and the healthy spiritual leader will always be very in touch with and transparent about their stage 1 side.  It's as we're open about our stage 1 selves that we win trust, it seems to me, even as, of course, we're doing our best not to live there.)

Of course a church will need to establish structure and draw the occasional line.  That's a card that will have to be in their deck.

The key, it seems to me with the communities we're describing here, is that there will also be other cards they can play.  If the only card is the stage 2 one--as I believe is often the case--then, yes, we are dreaming here that there would be more to a church community than that, that that would be a community without the kind of transparency, honesty and spiritual depth to attract and hold the kind of stage 3 people that fill the towns of many of us reading this.  But even those stage 3 people are going to want to know that the community does have some structure and some standards, however enlightened.

And, to my mind, with Charles I'd agree that the fundamental nature of God's universe is that it's relational.  Relationships that work--between people, between us and God and between us and ourselves--are a bottom-line good thing, the greatest good thing.  Alienation is the ultimate bad thing (CS Lewis picked up on this with The Great Divorce's vision of hell as isolation.) 

So, with Charles, I'm a church guy.  Going our own way is not a stage 4 choice, as I see it.  We do need connection and partnership--something this blog is shooting for as well.

Yes, again, I'd like these churches to be places that can serve all people, not least those in stages 3 or 4.  And so we talk about such things.  But I wouldn't want to abolish them.

Your thoughts?