Walking along the National Mall in Washington, D.C., last spring, I overheard a tour guide on a passing bus say the U.S. Department of Agriculture now has more employees than there are farmers in the nation. Snide comments about such a booming bureaucracy could also be heard from taxpaying tourists on board.

The guide quickly added, however, that the agency has a broad assignment that includes protecting our nation’s food and water supply — a subject very much in the news today.

But his comments got me thinking about the many ways we have institutionalized the faith and built a Baptist bureaucracy over the years—for good or bad.

That thought resurfaced this fall when interviewing Will Campbell for this month’s cover story. His “institutional flings” as pastor, university chaplain and National Council of Churches official were short lived.

He is also convinced that the radical call to follow Jesus cannot be sustained institutionally.

Addressing the Whitsitt Baptist Heritage Society in 1995, Campbell gave this warning: “All institutions, every last single one of them, are evil; self-serving, self-preserving, self-loving; and very early in the life of any institution it will exist for its own self.”

True soul freedom, he said, can never be found in any institution.

“If they will pay you, let them,” said Campbell. “I did it too. But never trust them. Never bow the knee to them. They are all after your soul. Your ultimate, absolute, uncompromising allegiance. Your soul. ALL of them.”

Of course, Brother Will has the unique ability to write books alone in his cabin that provide royalties to sustain his life. Most other ministers work within churches or related institutions or agencies.

But Will’s warning to watch where you commit your soul is a good one — no matter how deeply entrenched we may be in institutionalized church life.

The downside to institutionalized faith is obvious. We’ve all seen institutions and organizations that are top heavy and seek self-preservation above all else. We know what it is like to see a need and then have to go through a weighty approval process that takes too much time and too much wasted energy.

On the other hand, institutionalization seems inevitable. The shift in leadership at Habitat for Humanity International is a good example.

Founders Millard and Linda Fuller brushed up against the radical Christian Clarence Jordan for too long to create a bureaucracy. Habitat came out of their own deep spiritual commitment — and was rooted in the soils of Koinonia Farm and Zaire, Africa.

For a quarter of a century they have spoken of this worldwide ministry in terms of a “movement of the Spirit.” But the very success of Habitat has resulted in the kind of institutionalization that often bumps up against the free-flowing idea of a spiritual movement.

A massive corporate headquarters has replaced the small house where a handful of volunteers and staff would start their days with prayer and encouragement from the founder. Corporate partnerships have helped Habitat build a staggering number of needed houses while taking away the more personal relationships between volunteers and homeowners. Conflicting opinions between the Fullers and Habitat directors have distracted from the remarkable success of this Christian housing ministry recently. The situation has raised questions about if or how a ministry can be institutionalized without losing its defining purpose.

In a November letter to those charged with finding his successor, Habitat’s founding president Millard Fuller expressed these concerns: “The danger, I fear, is that Habitat for Humanity will become a bureaucracy. If we lose the ‘movement mentality’ we will not go out of existence, but we will stagnate and become just ‘another nonprofit’ doing good work across the country and around the world.”

Whether that happens, I might add, may be determined more by how we and other Christian leaders plug into local Habitat affiliates than by what transpires at the headquarters in Americus, Ga.

But I understand Millard’s concerns. Those are the questions we all should be asking when ministry is institutionalized.

However, a complete rejection of organized faith seems shortsighted to me. Baptist institutions (and those of other faith groups) have positively influenced my life too often and too deeply to reject the concept completely.

I have too much gratitude for educational opportunities as well as mission and ministry experiences that have come through well-organized, well-funded efforts.

In an excellent article on the Emergent Church Movement (Christian Century, Nov. 30, 2004, page 20ff), Scott Bader-Saye looks at these postmodern Christians who resist old models of “franchising church life.”

The writer insists that “emergents” and mainline Christians need each other, but “a lingering distrust of the ‘institutional church’ has made the partnership with mainline denominations difficult.”

It is a conversation most of us would welcome. We readily admit that too often we have wrongly treated our systems as sacred.

For many of us mainliners, we know the shortcomings of institutionalized faith. But the better alternatives, for us, have yet to emerge.