OK, I will try this ONE MORE TIME. I will stick to small words so that my thoughts may not cause your head to hurt. When the church went from an out of the mainstream (oooops two syllables, bear with me) MOVEMENT AND LIFESTYLE, something that people of faith did, despite being being turned into lion chow for it, into what HAD to be done for wealth, status, power, and privledge, it polluted the spiritual with the worldly.
Not a hard point to grasp is it?
Church = People of faith, on edge of society = What Jesus Did.
Church = All kinds of people, even those putting on a show for status = What Jesus Preached AGAINST.
Sorry if I seem rude, but after two posts I expect people on this forum to grasp fairly simple concepts. Of course, in any age, a remnant exists. If you are ever in LA, look me up. I'll take you to some wonderful worship and first class preacing in a building which began as a BOWLING ALLEY.
If you think the Church should still be on the edge, try the Church: we Orthodox (who confess our communion to be indeed the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, founded by Christ in the Gift of the Holy Spirit to His Holy Apostles on the day of Pentecost) are quite out of the mainstream--we fast, confess our sins, use a different calendar than the rest of the world, use bows and gestures to try to get even our bodies to participate in the worship of God. We still have the mechanism Christians developped for staying on the edge when the Church ceased to be persecuted: monasticism. Indeed most of our spiritual tradition, even for ordinary laymen, is shaped by monasticism. One Sunday during Great Lent is devoted to St. John Climacus, whose notable contribution to the faith is a book "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" whose whole purpose is to instruct the reader in the kind of living in the world while not being of the world you seem to yearn for. Another Sunday of Great Lent holds up as an example of repentence St. Mary of Egypt, who abandoned the world in penance for her former life as a nymphomanical prostitute, and lived as a hermit in the desert. We have a whole class of saints venerated as "Fools-for-Christ" whom society at large saw as going over the edge, but whom the Church sees as exemplars of the Life in Christ.
I think you really need to go back to see what the Church actually looked like after the Peace of Constantine, rather than relying on protestant critiques of Rome's later abuses which accept the false papal claim to have been the head of the Church and use it to read the later abuses back to the time when the persecutions ceased.