If I were to leave a given religion, it would be because I found it wasn’t consistent with God’s word, not because some person professing the same faith was a disappointment, or because leaders of the religion were found to be human after all. We each will give account to God for our own faithfulness, not the faithfulness of others.
Having said that, nothing wrong with a little human organization, as long as you don’t take it too seriously. Jesus will keep track of his own sheep very effectively. But some organization is helpful for our sakes. But it doesn’t have to be a massive, centrally controlled bureaucracy. This is why the distributed network model is preferred among many of us so-called Protestants; a top down human hierarchy based on a history of formal membership wrapped around a centrally controlled “oracle” can create some degree of uniformity by sheer force of bureaucratic will power, but it is equally capable of propagating uniform error as uniform truth.
By contrast, a distributed model based on shared belief in and subscription to the Biblical text avoids the faux uniformity issues, but has the problem of individuals seeing things as individuals do, through their own unique prism of experience and understanding. But that’s really a net advantage, because it amounts to peer review, as in science, which is beneficial. Inferior interpretations and practices can be identified and weeded out, with no one human person or organization having the power to prevent discovery or proclamation of the truth.
So organization is only as bad as the people in it, and as we are all sinners, that can be pretty bad. Therefore smaller is better, because local congregations promote local accountability. We have to keep each other honest by comparing our beliefs and practices to God’s word, and that will work better if we don’t give any one human or group too much power. But what will work the best is simply this:
2 Tim 2:19 Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.
Peace,
SR
Good post.