A Playground of Institutions

A few years ago, I tried to get back into baseball. Not the watching kind — I have followed that faithfully for years — but the playing kind, in the more athletically accessible form (for middle aged men) of slow pitch softball. While walking out onto the field, I realized how this kind of play is impossible to do alone. I cannot pitch to myself. I cannot hit a ball that anyone would field. To play softball, I need my team, an opposing team, a league, a field, and a set of lights powered by Pacific Gas and Electric. I also need a bat I do not own, which means I will be visiting Dick’s Sporting Goods, which itself depends on a complex supply chain of various other companies. 

I tell this small story because it illustrates something we rarely notice and almost never theologize about: human play, like human work, is a profoundly institutional activity. So is almost everything else that matters to us. And our theology is mostly silent about it.

The Faith and Work movement has done valuable work asking how individual Christians live faithfully in their vocations: To what am I personally called? How do I act ethically in my particular job? How do I share the gospel with a coworker? Those are real questions. But they are individual questions. The vast majority of Christians spend their working lives and their playing lives inside organizations: corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, schools, agencies, and churches. If our theology gives us no way to understand what God thinks about these organizations, then it has left a vast portion of our lives unaddressed.

And our cultural moment, of course, makes this harder. We live inside a deep suspicion of institutions. That suspicion is partly earned, by failures we can all name. But it has hardened into a posture that treats every organization as a problem to be circumvented rather than as a collective expression of humanity, and thus as a kind of being that possesses inherent worth.

Some of my theologian friends will push back here. They will argue that humans create organizations to enable human activity, but organizations are not themselves beings. They are tools. In this view, naming our softball team is more like naming my favorite hammer than naming my child.

But consider what is actually being named. A hammer is composed of metal and rubber, joined by chemical and mechanical relationships. But Pacific Gas and Electric and Dick’s Sporting Goods are composed of human beings, joined together in living activity and relationship. If I throw a hammer in the trash overnight, I lose a thing. If the above institutions were demolished overnight, the losses would be profoundly human in nature: meaningful work, financial provision for workers, the relationships between colleagues, the responsible stewardship of a region’s power, the basic functioning of a city. And even when institutions fail, the moral language we instinctively reach for — that we have been betrayed — is the language we use about human beings, not tools.

The Genesis narrative tells us that the first assignment given to humans was the act of naming. Adam names the animals. Naming is the granting of identity in a self-aware way, and Scripture treats it as one of the distinctive activities of the image-bearer. Our softball team followed exactly this pattern. The city initially listed us as “Team B.” Our first agenda item, before anything else, was to come up with a real name. Our second was deciding who would order the t-shirts, so that The Graying Giants could come properly into being.

Every human institution comes into being this way. When a corporation charters itself, when a new law forms a government agency, when a nonprofit files its paperwork or a small business hangs a shingle, something fundamentally human is happening. Humans are naming themselves into new collective forms. To call this “just a tool” is to miss something profoundly human that Genesis describes. 

This recognition does not flatten the difference between an individual and an institution. The individual remains a more precious expression of humanity. If a company suddenly shutters tomorrow, there would be real trauma, losses, but they would not be the same as the losses sustained when one of its employees suddenly dies. The individual carries spiritual weight that an institution does not. But the converse is also true: a set of spiritual meanings is reserved for the institution. For instance, the “go forth and multiply” mandate to humans is now made possible only through institutions: symphonies, hospitals, universities, schools and other entities that multiply human flourishing. This kind of flourishing is not incidental to God’s purposes for human beings. Rather, it is core to them.

The biblical scholar Kavin Rowe has documented that the early church, in response to Jesus’s death and resurrection, did not just preach. The early church created. The first Christians invented the orphanage, the hospital, the university. They built new institutions because the gospel demanded forms of human flourishing that no individual, however faithful, could sustain alone. They understood something we have largely forgotten: that loving our neighbor sometimes requires loving the structures our neighbor depends on.

So what would it look like to take this seriously now? 

I believe it would mean treating the institutions we work in, volunteer with, and depend on as objects of love rather than targets of cynicism. We would pose to the company that employs us or the school that teaches our children or the power company that keeps the lights on a question very different from the traditional consumer’s question: “What is it doing – or failing to do – for me?” Rather, we would ask the image bearing question: “What does it look like for this being to flourish, and how can I serve it?” We would refuse the easy posture of detachment from organizations we find frustrating, and instead we would invest in their well-being and dignity. We would recognize that when an institution sins, we are called to the same patient, hopeful work we would bring to a person who has wronged us: not abandonment, not blind loyalty, but the harder labor of forgiveness and repair.

This work is not glamorous. Institutional faithfulness rarely is. But it is one of the places where the image of God in us shows up most clearly. We were made for collective forms of being, made to name and be named, made to build the kinds of structures through which neighbors can be loved at scale. The early church understood that. And the God who called Adam to name the animals and flourish in the Garden wishes us to understand that now. We are all called to this understanding and this work. 

Even we, the Graying Giants.

Onward,

Curtis

An earlier version of this essay appeared in City as Playground, a compilation of essays and conversations by Leadership Foundations.