Finished reading: The Community of the King by Howard A. Snyder 📚

I didn’t find all of Snyder’s arguments compelling, but The Community of the King is still a useful book for thinking about the relationship between community and structure, people and organization. Snyder overreacts—too strongly, in my judgment—against “institutional” models of the church, going so far as to suggest that the church is not an institution (though he acknowledges that the church possesses many of the characteristics of an institution). In my view, it seems better to grant that the church is an institution, but then define it in a way that avoids many of the pitfalls that Snyder rightly identifies. His best advice comes when he counsels that form and structure are subservient to function. While I would probably say there are more normative “formal” elements than Snyder, I agree with him that much in the way of structure must be willing to give way in order to allow the church—understood as the people of God—to function as it should and to exercise the gifts as God allows.