Flipping the Box: Why Church Still Matters

TL;DR:
We’ve mistaken the purpose of church. It’s not a box turned upside down, sealing us off from the world—it’s a container with an open top, meant to hold us while keeping us open to God, grace, and one another.

Church should be like the box on the left, not the right

Too often, people think of the church—or organized religion—as a box turned upside down: a structure with its lid sealed shut, keeping everything inside contained and everyone outside excluded. But the church was never meant to be a closed box. It’s meant to be a container with an open top—something that can hold and shape what’s inside while remaining open to what’s above, to God’s Spirit, and accessible to those outside it.

James Fowler’s Stages of Faith outlines how people’s spiritual understanding evolves over a lifetime, from Primal Faith in early childhood to Conjunctive Faith in adulthood. Each stage reflects a deepening awareness of faith shaped by cognitive growth, emotional maturity, and life experience.

I somehow ended up with two copies of Fowler’s book, and when I first read it several years ago, it was both enlightening and instructive. But in the time since—especially as others have written their own “stages” frameworks, like Brian McLaren—I’ve noticed an assumption creeping into progressive Christianity: that healthy spirituality inevitably means leaving the institution of religion altogether.

I’ve written before about how, in my view, progressive Christianity often moves people out of church. I won’t repeat those arguments here (I’ve linked a few related posts below, including one that’s been read over 17,000 times). The point is this: we’ve misunderstood what Christianity—or “organized religion”—was meant to be about.

In Hunting Magic Eels, Richard Beck writes that “the ultimate test of enchantment” is “how we discern the spirits—sacrificial love, giving yourself for others” (225). Beck isn’t explicitly talking about organized Christianity, but it’s clear that this “enchantment” of self-giving love is what he has in mind. He warns that when enchantment becomes something we choose for ourselves, it turns “narcissistic” (214). When “we’re baptizing everything we already think and believe,” Beck says, “we’re worshiping ourselves rather than God” (220).

Andrew Root makes a similar point in Evangelism in the Age of Despair, calling it “demonic” to remain closed off, sitting alone within our pain and sorrow. In The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticism, he contrasts that isolation with “the mysticism of confession and surrender,” which “places the self in a position of reception. Only in a life of reception can the immanent frame be opened and the self made attentive to the arriving of revelation” (216).

Sticking within my metaphor, Root is saying two important things: first, the top of the box needs to stay open; and second, confession and surrender—while not limited to institutional religion—find their shape and rhythm in the life of the church. Christianity, in this sense, provides the framework, or “box,” that helps us keep the lid open.

It’s when we assume we can close up the lid upon ourselves that we get in trouble. As Root puts it elsewhere, “Faith rests solely and only in a life of reception, in an openness to receive. Faith is only and finally a gift; faith can only be received” (214).

Maybe this is the challenge of what Root calls the “immanent frame.” We’ve flipped the box over, assuming that faith is what happens only beneath the lid—what we can see, measure, or control. But perhaps what we need now is to flip the box back right side up: to rediscover Christianity as a vessel, not a vault. A framework that offers shape without sealing us off. Boundaries that protect us while keeping us open to the Divine.

The church was never meant to be a lid—it was always meant to be a space for grace.

into Letting Go