The core thrust behind faith and work movements like AWOP is the belief that our work can become an expression of the Kingdom. That our businesses, leadership, creativity, and labor are not separate from spiritual life, but are themselves places where discipleship, formation, and worship can occur.
Lately, though, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about the inverse.
What if the modern American Church, at least in many of its prevailing forms, has itself become deeply shaped by industry?
Not intentionally, necessarily. Institutions require structure. Buildings need maintained. Staffs need paid. Ministries need coordination. None of that is inherently wrong. In many ways, structure is necessary for sustained impact. But over time, systems do more than support mission. They begin shaping it.
That’s because systems eventually optimize for what sustains them.
In industry, that often looks like efficiency, scale, predictability, and growth. None of those things are inherently bad, but when those incentives remain dominant long enough, they begin influencing how success itself is defined.
And that tension exists in the Church more than we often realize.
The Biblical mission of the Church is discipleship, transformation, community, and participation in the life and rhythms of Christ. But institutional pressures can subtly shift attention toward a different set of metrics: attendance, bottom lines, stability, retention, and scalability. The part of the work some pastors colloquially refer to as “butts, budgets, and buildings.”
Now, the next leader I meet who doesn’t feel this tension will be the first. Whether businesses, non-profits, ministries, or any other organizational structure, systems naturally drift toward self-preservation unless they are intentionally designed otherwise.
The question is not whether structure exists. The question is whether the structure itself is helping form people into deeper movement toward Christ, or whether it is quietly rewarding passivity and predictability instead.
The closest parallel I can think of is a gym like Planet Fitness.
Plenty of people experience growth and transformation there. But there are also two different realities operating simultaneously. On one hand, the understood mission is physical development through strength, cardio, discipline, and healthier rhythms of life. On the other, there is a business to sustain. And those two realities are not always as aligned as they initially appear.
If every Planet Fitness member showed up at once, the model would collapse under its own weight. In purely economic terms, the ideal customer is often not the person radically transformed by disciplined engagement, but the person who remains connected enough to keep paying while never fundamentally changing their lifestyle at all.
Whether we realize it or not, similar tensions can quietly emerge within the Church.
The mission of the Church is discipleship, transformation, participation, and movement toward Christ. But institutional systems often reward a different kind of engagement: consistent attendance, predictable participation, low-friction involvement, and financial stability. In other words, systems can subtly drift toward optimizing for passive engagement rather than active formation.
Consumers are significantly easier to sustain, measure, and claim than disciples.
Discipleship requires movement. It requires surrender, challenge, sacrifice, growth, and participation in the life of Christ. But movement creates unpredictability. It decentralizes activity. It sends people outward. It becomes harder to measure and harder to control.
Institutional systems naturally resist those things unless they are intentionally built to support them. Over time, people are not only shaped by what we preach. They are shaped by what our environments consistently reinforce.
Eventually, people begin mistaking proximity to movement for movement itself. Imagine how damaging it would be if people conflated their $20 Planet Fitness membership with physical health, regardless of whether their daily decisions reflected that commitment. Because we can see physical health fruit more easily, that idea becomes farcical. But in the realms of spiritual, mental, and emotional health, we can easily find comfort in that reality, while churches fear for the institutional repercussions of challenging or rebuking that thought.
If you step into a river, movement is intrinsic to the environment itself. You are pulled into that movement whether you want to be or not. The current carries you somewhere. Participation requires responsiveness. There is direction, momentum, and continual motion built into the nature of the system.
A lake is different.
Movement can certainly happen within a lake, but it must constantly be generated against the natural tendency toward stillness. Left alone long enough, stagnation becomes normal.
I sometimes wonder if many of our churches unintentionally function more like lakes than rivers.
Not because people lack sincerity or leaders lack faithfulness, but because institutional systems often prioritize stability, predictability, and sustainability in ways that naturally reduce movement over time. Participation becomes increasingly passive and formation becomes informational rather than transformational. Community becomes attendance-adjacent rather than deeply integrated into everyday life.
But the Kingdom has always seemed more river-like to me.
Jesus rarely invited people into passive observation. He invited them into participation. Into movement. Into lives continually shaped by surrender, growth, service, sacrifice, and transformation. The early Church was not simply organized around gathering people together. It was organized around forming people and sending them outward.
The answer is not abandoning structure entirely. Rivers still have banks. They still possess form and direction. The goal is not less structure, but structures intentionally designed to keep people moving toward deeper participation in the life and rhythms of Christ, even sometimes at the expense of self-preservation.
Because every system eventually produces something naturally.
The question is whether what we are building naturally produces movement toward the Kingdom, or merely ongoing proximity to it.