Hillary Clinton stirred up some dust in her interview in The Atlantic by saying, “Great nations need organizing principles and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” She’s right. Your organizing principle defines you, for better or worse.
A political party’s organizing principle is to win an election, which is why consultants and strategists are concerned about the disenchantment of evangelicals with the Republican Party and their candidates:
“Their absence could mean fewer votes for the Republican nominee in closely contested swing states. And perhaps more important, it could also mean fewer campaign volunteers to staff phone banks and knock on doors. Active churchgoers can be among a campaign’s most effective ground army.”
Shortly after reading that, I had a conversation with a Christian leader whose firm’s organizing principle is increasing conservative influence.  He was interested in strategies to increase church attendance. That sounds fine until afterwards when I realized there was an assumption that more people attending church would create more conservative voters – and this will bring back our kind of culture.More people in church means a return to “the way things should be” and, ideally, will impact the 2014 elections. It’s good for the country and good for God at the same time. What’s not to like about that?
Well, that’s not the organizing principle of the Church.
From almost the beginning of the Church we have too often turned the Church into a means to an end. We confuse what it means to obey the singular command of Jesus, “Love each other as I have loved you,” with whatever we need to re-make the world in our image.
Instead, the kingdom is like a seed – a seed that falls into the ground and dies. Unfortunately, we want to be large and beautiful seeds. Polished and attractive seeds. We want to lead thousands of other seeds into being better and more strategic seeds. Seeds that people admire and want to emulate. Famous and influential seeds.
The kingdom is also like salt and light. Salt has to dissolve before it works. It loses itself. Light does not draw attention to itself; it makes other things visible. No one says, “Turn on the light so I can see the lamp.”
Just as everything in us resists falling into the ground and dying so everything resists serving invisibly to make others visible.
I am reading a fine biography of Pope Francis by Paul Vallely titled, Pope Francis: Untying The Knots. Vallely describes with great care and severe honesty the complex personality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the incomprehensible (to me) task of leading what may be the most sophisticated, extended and ponderous organization in the world.
How does Pope Francis articulate the organizing principle of the Catholic Church?
“The only purpose of the Church is to go out and tell the world the good news about Jesus Christ.”
However, it is not a crusade. It is not conquering. It is offering the invitation that is unique to the Gospel. The organizing principle of the Church is not the power to conform the world to our image but by living out the Gospel in such a way that wins the respect of the outsider as Paul says in Thessalonians. This is to be our ambition and our principle.
In the end, Christianity may well be, as Wendell Berry writes in Jayber Crow, an “unorganized religion,” but not without a compelling mission.
 “As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here.”