[Recently I’ve been wondering, what would happen if organizations could have children? Use your imagination and consider this modern-day parable and its implications for the church.]
One day at work, an email arrives announcing a baby is coming in about nine months. Immediately, a buzz that moves through the organization. It’s a big day! Pictures of the announcement are taken and posted to social media! We’re going to have a baby?! Here! Soon!
Finally, after months of waiting and tracking its progress, the baby arrives. Every person in the organization is excited! They’d heard she was coming, but seeing her little fingers and toes have made it real. The organizational baby is passed around. The boss feels a sense of deep pride and throws a party to celebrate. The sales team puts together a campaign to announce the birth and to highlight the organization’s success. The marketing team gathers around and discusses how to tell the story in order to attract more clients. Everyone agrees, this is a great day!
After the singing, the cooing, and the cake, the workday comes to an end. While the baby naps, workers quietly gather their things, whisper a goodbye to the baby, and go home to their families.
Soon after, the baby wakes up alone, crying, and hungry.
The next day, the workers return to a stinky office and a sleeping baby. Despite the smell, she looks peaceful and content. The crying they’d never heard has stopped. She’s learned that often there’s no one to respond to her cries. The boss calls HR to ask who’s responsible to change diapers and to feed the baby. He was shocked to learn no one was! Immediately, two part-time hires were made. They would handle the baby’s needs, while current staff would be trained to help out as needed.
Soon more organizational babies are born. They are moved to their own wing and additional staff are hired to care for them. They call it a bloomer school. The bloomers grow, but their growth isn’t on par with parented babies.
Thirty-three years have now passed since that first organizational baby arrived.
The bloomers should have kids of their own, but they don’t. Most look like five-year olds. Understandably, instead of acknowledging the problem, leaders point to the progress of a few who look like ten year-olds, and the still fewer who look like teenagers. Stunted growth is only part of the problem though.
Bloomers have a few stunning gaps. First, relationships are a challenge. They struggle to give and receive love. Second, instead of aspiring to develop strengths of their own, they ask others to mute their abilities so they don’t feel bad about their lack. Finally, the whole concept of a parent is foreign to them.
“I don’t even understand the word, ‘parent’?” they say. It shouldn’t be a surprise; institutional care is all they’ve ever known. Not only have they never had a parent, but being a parent has never crossed their mind. After being asked to consider it, they aren’t interested.
Their most common responses are, “I’m not sure I’m called to that.” “I’m happy with my life the way it is,” “I don’t have time for that,” and “How could I parent someone when no one has parented me?”
So what?
The organization was learning what our society already knows.
Institutional care harms babies, often irreparably.
For every 2.6 months in an institution, babies fall one month behind developmentally. They also have significantly lower IQs and brain activity. In addition, they are far more likely to have social and behavioral abnormalities such as aggression, hyperactivity, inattention, and traits that mimic autism. It’s not that the babies’ basic physical needs aren’t met; they are, but institutional care doesn’t provide enough the eye contact, physical and visual stimulation, and the play that parents naturally provide. In short, institutional care damages infants (Source).
God’s plan for a child’s development is the family. He has designed it so that every baby has a Mom and a Dad. And it’s literally impossible for a baby to NOT start out next to its Mom. Often, Dad isn’t far away either. It’s the perfect environment for growth.
Here again, the physical points to the spiritual.
For centuries now, spiritual infants have been born to and cared for by spiritual institutions, not spiritual parents. The “boss” has brought the infant into the church through baptism. He’s felt pride in a job well done and reported the birth widely. The organization has celebrated and cooed and then gone home to their families. Some infants, seeing they’ve been left alone, have cried and cried, but upon recognizing there was no one to hear, stopped crying and later died from neglect. Most however, remained in institutional care, bored, stunted, and neglected.
The solution is easy to see; find parents to raise the orphans so that they will grow up to be parents themselves. Yet it’s difficult to reach because it requires allocating time, focus, and energy away from the institution’s favorite thing.
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Find this helpful? Want to grow as a disciple or disciple maker? Check out my books: The Bicycle Illustration and The Foundation of a Disciple Making Culture. Too much to read? Check out my Podcast, “The Practitioners’ Podcast” for short, hyper focused disciple making episodes wherever you get podcasts!