Organizing Spirit: Communities, Movements, Institutions

A prominent strain of contemporary theology associates the Holy Spirit with communities and social movements. By contrast, the Spirit’s relation to institutions (complex formal organizations) is either passed over or portrayed as antagonistic. In this paper, I examine the pneumatological-sociological picture that underlies this strain of theology, assessing its strengths and weaknesses and proposing an alternative picture of the organizing Spirit. The paper’s method is indebted to the late Wittgenstein’s suggestion that unexamined pictures are often embedded in our language, pictures that can captivate and mislead us; exploring these pictures and considering new ones can lead to a transformative shift in perception.

The first section of the paper presents several specimens of contemporary pneumatological discourse in which the Spirit is connected positively to communities and social movements, and in which institutions are either ignored or contrasted with the Spirit’s work. These specimens come from a range of theological approaches. Postliberal theologians such as Eugene Rogers, for example, strongly coordinate the Spirit’s activity with the formation of eucharistic communities, with little or no discussion of ecclesial institutions. More antithetical postures are found in liberation theologians such as Nancy Bedford, who contends that when a Spirit-led justice movement “becomes a fixed organization, possibilities for flexibility, creativity, and unconventional leadership decline.” Evangelical theologian Pete Ward similarly describes informal “connections, groupings, and relationships” as “a kind of network where the Holy Spirit is at work creating the church”; Ward distinguishes this Spirit-inspired “liquid church” from the institutionalized “solid church.” Looking carefully at these and other specimens suggests a picture in which the Spirit either avoids or challenges institutions in order to spark communities and movements.

The contours of this picture come into focus by examining its historical context. Theologians since the 1970s have worked in a cultural context defined by neoliberalism. If political economy strongly shapes (without completely determining) culture, then the neoliberal attempt to shield global markets from democratic contestation can be understood as contributing to a culture that has prized the local, communal, and fluid over and sometimes against democratic national and international institutions. Scholars of recent mass protest movements, for instance, home in on overriding movement commitments to horizontality, spontaneity, and prefiguration as befitting their neoliberal cultural conditions and, therefore, as offering little resistance to those conditions. The pneumatological-sociological picture at issue in this paper is, I argue, heavily marked by these traits, most obviously in the priority given to prefiguration but also, for some of the theologians discussed here, horizontality and spontaneity.

As many recent social and political theorists see institutions as offering neglected resources for resistance to neoliberalism—such resistance is assumed to be a good in this paper—it is worth getting clear on the reasons some theologians put forward for opposing Spirit and institutions. One set of reasons are moral and political objections aimed at some purportedly intrinsic characteristics of institutions: impersonality, pliability before power, and self-protectiveness. By contrast, the Spirit is said to form communities and movements that, by virtue of their non-institutional characteristics, are best suited to prefigure the authentic personal relationships and moral and political integrity that typify God’s reign. This line of reasoning is based on a simplistic, if not dualistic, sociology and can be countered by theoretical and empirical considerations that affirm the existence of a great variety of interrelated and overlapping organizational forms. Assessing organizational forms qua forms on moral and political grounds is far from straightforward.

A second set of reasons requires a more straightforwardly pneumatological response. These reasons highlight the traditional imagery of Spirit as wind, breath, dove, fire, and other images redolent of movement and change, along with the New Testament association of Spirit with eucharistic community—surely this evidence is sufficient to validate the contemporary pneumatological-sociological picture? However, the interpretation of this material as indicating an exclusive affinity between the Spirit and communities and movements is suspect. Consider, for example, the Spirit’s partnership with the divine Word; role in the complex and dynamic organization of creation; connection to the formation of Israelite institutions such as the Temple; and inspiration of prophetic speech intended to reform such institutions. Reading the gospels and Paul “within Judaism” also suggests that New Testament pneumatology needs to be understood not as supporting anti- or non-institutional movements and communities, but rather as developing within a theological horizon in which the legitimacy of institutions such as the Temple in mediating divine presence is taken for granted.

It must be acknowledged that there are at least two pneumatological pictures available to incorporate this material. One is the picture in some Catholic and Orthodox theology that positions institutionalized church hierarchies as privileged locations of the Spirit’s work. Another is derived from Ernst Troeltsch’s sociology and has recent been developed by Sarah Coakley to depict the Spirit as reforming institutional churches through the pneumatological receptivity of mystics and sects. Although I appreciate elements of these pictures, as well as of the neoliberal-era picture, I sketch a different picture in which the dynamism and complexity of the Spirit’s organizing work is potentially reflected in human efforts to generate organizations of various scales, forms, and durations. Here David Graeber and David Wengrow’s description of political organization as “ritual play” responsive to ecological and social patterns is called upon to envision a sacramental account in which organizational activities can aim to participate in the Spirit’s work without ever being identified with that work.

Bedford, “A Narrow Gate? Proceeding along the Way of Jesus by the Spirit,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92, no. 4 (October 2018): 495.

Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

Rogers, After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

Ward, Liquid Church (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 3.