Institutional entropy is the idea that all institutions tend toward apostasy. I didn’t invent the phrase but took to it the first time I heard it. It describes why Harvard, created to be a bastion of faithfulness to the gospel, soon became a beacon of secularism. Yale was created out of that fall, only to fall itself. Then came Princeton, for the same reason. No one, wanting an education grounded in God’s Word would think of attending any of these schools. The same principle applies to denominations (see the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church in the United States, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ ad nauseum), para-church ministries (see the history of the YMCA, for instance) and even local churches. Sooner or later moorings and mission get swallowed up by drifting and drivel.
Why? Because while Jesus is making all things new and is washing His bride with the water of the Word, we yet remain sinners. The more immediate cause is virtually always the same- when institutions prosper they soon find themselves courting the favor of the world. We like being liked. Typically it starts with academics. That is, professors crave the approval of their peers and so adopt the thinking of their peers. They in turn pass this along to their students who carry the hornswaggle to the local church and feed it to the sheep. They, too often, drift away and are replaced with hungry goats who likewise want to be seen as respectable citizens of the world. There’s nothing secret about the process. It happens all the time, right out in the open, right where we all see it.
What is the solution? Dying to self. I was blessed to attend the Cambridge meetings of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. There godly men gathered to hammer out a statement in defense of the biblical gospel in response to the growing downgrade in the evangelical church driven by the misguided ecumenism of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. While I saw the men there as fighting on the side of the angels I also saw the seeds of destruction. There was a level of academic posturing that was palpable. I suggested to some of the men, “Why can’t we just announce to the world, ‘There’s nobody here but us fundamentalists’”?
Now I have never bought into fundamentalism’s posture toward the scope of Christ’s kingdom. I’ve never embraced their odd ethic of second-degree separation. I have, however, always admired them their utter indifference to the approval of the world. During the Fundamentalism-Modernist controversy in the early 20th century my theological ancestors were selling their grandmothers down the river while those unsophisticated prairie-hymn singing rubes were fighting the good fight. I want to be on their team.
Jesus promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church. He also, however, warned particular churches that if they did not give up their love of the world He would remove His lampstand from them. Institutions tend toward apostasy. The church of Jesus Christ moves toward glory.