In the summer of 1980, I traveled about 40 miles south from my family’s home in Springfield, Missouri to Kanakuk Kamp on Lake Taneycomo. I was 12 years old. Kanakuk blended military, evangelical, and athletic cultures into a potent cocktail of Christian masculinity. It wasn’t an easy combination for me. I wasn’t raised as an evangelical, and I had theological questions Kanakuk did not want me to have. I was wary, even a little scared, of the hoo-rah gun culture. And I had to work hard to pass as an athlete. I never felt completely comfortable there. And I loved it.
Corbie Grimes was one reason why I loved it. He wasn’t as sporty as the other counselors. But he was a charismatic worship leader. When he sang and played guitar, the whole camp followed his lead. Even though he wasn’t my counselor, he always took time to talk with me. He would listen as I asked the questions other counselors tried to tamp down. I knew he cared.
Grimes worked at Kanakuk from 1978-1989. Rumors about the counselor who came to be called “Creepy Corbie” circulated for years. Finally the camp dismissed him after finding that he had ordered a boy to pull down his pants and then struck the boy’s penis repeatedly with a stick. While camp directors fired Grimes, they made no public report of his offenses. Grimes went on to serve in other youth ministry positions. He was convicted of sexual abuse in Texas in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison.
Grimes was gone, but the abuse of children at Kanakuk did not end with his firing. A website that gathers testimonies of survivors accuses ten other Kanakuk staff members of sexual assault. One of them, Pete Newman, was convicted of sexually assaulting six boys between 1995 and 2009. The prosecutor in the case estimated that the actual total could be in the hundreds. Documents disclosed in civil court reveal repeated warnings to senior camp leaders about Newman’s behaviors. One former Kanakuk staffer who supervised Newman recommended that he be fired in 2003. But Newman was retained and even promoted to director of a special camp for younger children. After Newman’s assaults burst into public view, Kanakuk launched a widely publicized safeguarding initiative and positioned itself as a leader in the field. It reached settlements with survivors and their families that included non-disclosure agreements. It also got itself declared by the IRS to be a “church,” a status that exempts it from the financial disclosures nonprofits normally must make. In failing to protect children and prioritizing its own ongoing existence, Kanakuk made these sins its own.
These are not secrets. The Springfield News-Leader has run multiple investigative pieces, and USA Today has taken many of them to a national readership. Stories ricochet through online and evangelical media. But still Kanakuk thrives. This summer it celebrated its 100th anniversary. Waiting lists still run long. With over 20,000 kids attending each year, Kanakuk makes a credible claim to be the largest Christian sports camp in the world.
If the wages of sin is death, sometimes it takes a long time for payment to come—especially for institutions. In the time opened by the deferral of divine judgment, we exercise human judgment. And as we try to make judgments in this time between the times, we find ourselves faced with a jumble of problematic institutions and underdeveloped theological and moral vocabularies for thinking about them.
In Structural Sin and the Death of Institutions (Routledge, 2026), Susannah Cornwall begins to offer the vocabulary we need for thinking about institutions. Even more, she expands the imaginary in which our moral reasoning occurs. She makes it thinkable that institutions, even ecclesial institutions, can sin—not just that some “bad apple” individuals within them can sin, but that the institutions themselves can sin. And not only can they sin: they can die. And some of them should.
Cornwall’s argument unfolds through a sustained analogy between individuals and institutions. “A church is not an individual patient,” she writes, “but there are ways in which institutions—churches among them, but not churches alone—do functionally operate as though they are individuals” (99). In making this argument, Cornwall is building from a base that is firmly established in law. Corporations operate as legal persons. They can outlive any individual within them; they can also pass away before their founders. Institutions have lives of their own, and those lives can come to an end.
Cornwall goes on to consider these mortal institutions as moral agents. While they are alive, they take actions that have real consequences. They speak through press releases, advertisements, and political donations (which the United States now protects in the same ways it protects the speech of individuals). They bear legal responsibility for the actions of indemnified officers. That legal responsibility suggests the need for a deeper moral responsibility. And so it makes sense to speak of institutions as capable of sin, just like individuals. And it makes sense to ask how we should deal with sinful institutions as institutions.
Here Cornwall insists on the limits of the analogy. Learning from movements for the abolition of prisons, Cornwall writes that “penal abolition is precisely about the irreformability of structures and thereby the necessity for a focus on community rather than on continual institutional reform: it says that some types of institutions must be terminated, but that people never should be” (8). In this logic, institutions are like individuals in that they can sin and die. But there are also significant differences between institutions and individuals. Specifically, individual human persons are valuable in ways that human institutions are not. And so, in Cornwall’s reasoning, institutions sometimes should be put to death, but individuals never should be.
This is a real transvaluation of prevailing values, especially in the church. It is an exact reversal of the worldview in which preserving the institution is so important that it can justify sacrificing some individuals. That dominant worldview is performed at one level when church institutions cover up sexual assaults, sacrificing individuals to preserve institutional life. It is performed in a more mundane way when volunteers and pastoral leaders burn themselves out trying to sustain a dying institution we have conflated with God.
I would join Cornwall in insisting on the moral priority of individual human lives. And I would stress even more than she does (e.g., on 48) the need for reflexivity about this stance. We need to see it as part of a wider historical process of individualization which is thoroughly mixed with the acids of neoliberalism that have dissolved conceptions of the common good, trust in shared public knowledge secured by institutions, and the voluntary associations that are the substance of civil society. These dissolutions have undermined democracy and left billions of people in precarious states. Calls for the death of institutions need to remain mindful of how many institutions—not all of them so sinful as to deserve death—are already facing death. And affirmations of the worth of individuals over institutions need to be distilled from the toxic cocktail of neoliberalism and blended into more life-giving solutions.
Those of us who value individuals over institutions also need to see that the boundaries between them are not always clear. Terminating an institution can cause real harm to individuals—and not just bishops, CEOs, and other leaders, but also grounds crews, administrative staff, and maintenance workers. Indeed, in the actual, lived process of bringing an institution’s life to an end, vulnerable people who depend on an institution are often harmed more than those most responsible for perpetuating the harm that justifies terminations. Consider the senior leaders who close a seminary and escape with golden parachutes of financial security and new reputations as thought-leaders, even as faculty and hourly employees lose their jobs.
In naming these dynamics, I do not mean to argue against terminating institutions. And I still want to join Cornwall in insisting on the moral priority of individuals. I just mean to extend and refine the work of moral reasoning within the expanded space of possibility that Cornwall helps us imagine.
Once we recognize that institutions—even church institutions—can die, and that institutional life should not take priority over the lives of individual human beings, we can begin to ask if institutions should die for their sins. That requires a sharper diagnostic vision. That sharpening begins, I think, with a strong distinction between abolition, or the active termination of an institution, and cessation, by which I mean choosing not to sustain a struggling institution. Practically, this maps onto the morally significant distinction between killing and letting die.
Cornwall makes a strong case for the abolition of ecclesial institutions that have become so aligned with sin that they are beyond reform, like Chris Bain’s Nine O’Clock Service or the lay ministry of serial abuser John Smyth. “Not every institutional structure can be successfully reformed and uphold justice,” Cornwall writes. “Some will need to be allowed to die or even be put to death” (71). When institutions become what feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed calls “antilife,” they may need to be brought to an end. Even one as deeply committed to the church’s institutions as former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams can ask, when ruminating on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, what should happen when “the routine pattern of relations has become so corrupted that it actively blocks or subverts the possibility of redirection towards Christ” (quoted on 87). But how could we recognize that an institution has reached that state and is not just entangled with sin in more ordinary ways? Cornwall offers a taxonomy of institutional sins and some preliminary criteria for when a church institution might need to die. But the most important work she does is to expand our collective imagination to include this possibility.
Cornwall does distinguish these antilife institutions from struggling institutions that “we must terminate only with regret” (248). That’s an important distinction to sustain. There are all too many abusive institutions and structures that it might be appropriate to abolish. But there also many congregations—often in areas and serving people that global financial capitalism has rendered disposable—that are dying but not deserving of termination. Cornwall acknowledges the category. But she also undermines it, writing that, “Churches die not because they have been threatened by an invading power (even if some theorists want to construct the forces of secularism that way), but because those who were in some sense their own people have lost trust and faith in them” (104). That diagnosis skips over cases like Kanakuk, in which an antilife institution continues to thrive. And it blames the dying institution for its own mortality. Institutions have surely squandered trust in many cases. But one need not posit secularization as a hostile, invading force to say that many church institutions are dying for reasons unconnected to their sins. Indeed, I wouldn’t describe the most powerful dynamic as anything like what classical secularization theory describes. It is rather the same individualization that is dissolving voluntary associations of every kind, from bowling leagues to political parties—and that is tightly intertwined with the valuing of individuals over institutions that animates Cornwall’s project. Discernment about ending the lives of institutions needs always to reckon with this complex intertwining.
It is important to retain this category of institutions that are coming to an end but not deserving of the death penalty, both because it describes so many institutions and because it invites a distinctive mode of Christian moral reasoning. The great risk of dying institutions is that they can become antilife in their attempts to stave off their deaths, like a seminary that lives, vampire-like, on the debt of students, or the congregation that uses a massive endowment to sustain what has become a family chapel. The sin in these cases is less in the past and more in the present and the future. As German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, “Once the state of human consciousness and the state of social forces has abandoned these collective ideas”—once history has moved on—“these ideas acquire repressive and violent qualities” as they try to keep themselves alive. It takes violence to prolong life beyond what would be its natural end.
The most important work for dying institutions is to refuse the kinds of domination that promise to prolong their lives and instead die well, trusting themselves and their missions to the grace of God. Cornwall helpfully invites readers to think of a dying church “as a terminally ill patient who helps others, rather than preserving its own future, even whilst accepting that it is in what looks like terminal decline” (102). Framing the reality in this way opens up a necessary field for ecclesial discernment. What would it mean for a congregation, a seminary, or even a denomination to die well, even to offer faithful witness in its passing away?
Cornwall also invites readers to see the same situation from just outside, asking those who care about dying institutions what it would mean to offer “palliative care” for them. Again, the analogy to an individual can be generative. If palliative care of a dying person involves “amelioration of physical pain … support for practical matters … [and] acquisition of necessary tools or equipment to make the end of life more livable,” what would it mean to care for a dying institution?
The answers to these questions, as Cornwall sees, depend on the nature of our hope. Working through conversations with thinkers like Miguel De La Torre, Marika Rose, Azariah France-Williams, and Linn Marie Tonstad, Cornwall is clear in resisting the cult of “reform” as a means of dealing with sin and death of institutions— and rightly so. Efforts at reform—like the Child Protection Plan that Kanakuk displays so prominently on its website—too often prioritize the life of a sinful institution over the lives of the individuals it serves. “Reform tends to shore up existing systems,” Cornwall writes, “too often dealing in window-dressing rather than going back to first principles underpinning how systems came into existence. Reform can therefore act to perpetuate injustice and militate against a more thoroughgoing reconception of knowledge” (7). Reform’s “impulse to fix” can race past the responsibility simply to “bear witness to the horror” (43). We need to recognize that “some things are just beyond repair” (31).
Reform can colonize even calls for the death of institutions. Such calls can be justified as one step along the way in a plan for reform that ends in a better future. A diocese, for example, may close particular parishes as part of a larger restructuring plan aimed at assuring institutional vitality at a higher level. Such moves might be cloaked in the rhetoric of hope, even resurrection, even as the diocese reallocates resources in ways that any for-profit corporation would recognize. Cornwall presses us to imagine something more: “What … if we could conceive of death—including the deaths of some institutional structures—without immediately looking ahead to resurrection?” (6).
This critique of instrumentalized redemption of death might expand into a more thoroughgoing critique of resurrection. For some of Cornwall’s interlocutors, it does. But she works through the critique to refine a notion of resurrection that is discontinuous with the present order. Death—whether of an institution or an individual—marks a real break, not just a moment of transition (or, worse, what consultants might call a “pivot”) in a larger process of reform. Resurrection is on the other side of that break. This new life does not forget the past—the risen body still bears its wounds—but it “is not a return to life as it was before.” It is not a marginally improved and endlessly extended version of the status quo. It is rather an “entry into something more than what the previous circumstances had allowed us to be thus far” (249).
The practical corollary to such resurrection hope is not reform, but something like what John Cassian calls “renunciation.” Distilling traditions of the Egyptian desert, Cassian attributes a threefold renunciation to Abraham and makes it a model for Christian life. Like Abraham, the believer renounces country, kinfolk, and the house of the father—which Cassian translates as wealth, the habits of our upbringing, and, finally, the mind’s attachment to the visible world. The renunciations are not instrumental actions towards some goal of self-improvement. The third renunciation, especially, is undertaken in hope for an end that cannot be imagined before the renunciation is made. Such renunciation is not a project of reform, but an act of faith.
While Cornwall does not use language of renunciation, we might use the concept to extend her thoughts on the death of institutions. Beyond reform—the high-minded institutional self-preservation that Donald MacKinnon’s theology of kenosis critiqued more than fifty years ago—a deeper mode of renunciation might dissolve an institution, put its resources into some kind of trust, and wait for a call to use those resources in some new and faithful way for the life of the world. Perhaps even deeper, a church institution might renounce its life and give all its resources away recklessly to those who need them most in the moment or those who have been harmed the most by the institution— all in joyful trust that God’s work will continue in ways that are beyond what we can ask or imagine. This is abolition not as the grim satisfaction of moral imperatives but as the free, joyful gift of kenotic love.
Cornwall does not imagine that the death of sinful institutions will deliver us into a paradise without sin. Nor does she imagine that even the most faithful kenosis could open into the “antinomian free-for-all” of a world without institutions (48). She does not hope, she takes pains to say, for anything like anarchy. If we can only imagine the end of the current constellation of dominant institutions as anarchy—if we cannot imagine that any other kinds of institutions might be possible—it reveals how deeply our minds have been captured by the present order. Old institutions will pass away. New institutions will arrive. And they will have sins of their own. The impossibility of making sacrifices to bring in a purified utopia should not paralyze us. It should rather refine our sense of what we are called to do.
Abolition, Cornwall suggests, is not a single event that delivers us into paradise. Nor is it a long-running process of reform that builds on past mistakes to make steady progress over time. Instead, it is a pragmatic process of renouncing our hold on the sin that holds onto us so closely, even in the institutions of the church. It is a living “otherwise,” an enduring process of conversatio morum. We can only renounce the attachments that we have; we can only dissolve the institutions that destroy lives in our time. And when we have done that work, as Cornwall writes, “We will make mistakes, but not necessarily the same mistakes made before” (136).
