Israel's request for a king is usually taught as a failure of faith. It was. But read the request carefully and you will find something more specific — a mechanism that has operated on the people of God in every century since.

Next, make us a king to judge us like all the nations. (1 Samuel 8:5)

Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations. (1 Samuel 8:19-20)

Like all the nations. Twice. The people didn't say "we need better government." They said "we want what everyone else has." The form of the surrounding cultures had become the standard of legitimacy, and Israel's own form — a people governed by God through judges, with no standing court — felt, by comparison, deficient.

Samuel's warning: the six "he will take"

God tells Samuel to grant the request and to warn them. The warning is a catalogue:

He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself... He will take your daughters to be confectionaries... And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards... And he will take the tenth of your seed... And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants... He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. (1 Samuel 8:11-17)

Six times: he will take. The form Israel was borrowing came with costs built into it — costs that were invisible from outside, because from outside the king looked like strength. Samuel is describing not a bad king but kingship, the form itself, and what it extracts by its nature.

And the people's reply is a very instructive line: Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king (8:19). They heard the costs. They wanted the form anyway. I say this because the form was what the nations had, and being like the nations was the point.

Deuteronomy had anticipated this exactly — When thou art come unto the land... and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me (Deuteronomy 17:14) — and had fenced the office with restrictions: no multiplying horses, wives, or silver; the king to write out the law and read it daily that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren (17:20). God didn't forbid the form. He limited it, because he knew what it would do.

The mechanism, named

What Israel did has a name in the study of institutions. Organizations that share an environment come to resemble each other, not because resemblance works better, but because it is legitimate. An institution that looks like the respected institutions around it's trusted; one that looks strange is suspect. So institutions copy — under pressure from those they depend on, by imitating whatever seems successful when they're uncertain, and by absorbing the assumptions of the professionals they hire.

None of this requires anyone to decide to conform. It happens through a thousand reasonable choices, each of which makes the church look a little more like the culture that hosts it. And it's invisible from inside, because the borrowed form arrives with the borrowed vocabulary, and the vocabulary makes the form feel native.

The church has done what Israel did four times. In the Greek world it became a school, because the school was what respectable Greeks respected. In the Roman world it became a government, because the empire's forms were the forms of legitimacy. In medieval Europe it became a territory, because land was what power looked like. In America it became an enterprise, because the business is what Americans trust. Each time, the church said, in effect, make us like all the nations — and each time the form came with six he will takes that nobody read until later.

Why the bend is invisible

Four reasons the bend can't be seen from inside.

First, it's gradual. No one voted to turn the household into a corporation. Each change was small, sensible, and reversible in principle; the cumulative result was neither.

Second, it's reasonable at every step. Hiring a professional is reasonable. Building a building is reasonable. Adopting management practices is reasonable. The borrowed form doesn't arrive as a temptation. It arrives as best practice.

Third, the vocabulary changes with the form. When the meeting became a "service," the word made the audience form feel biblical. When the leader became a "senior pastor," the title made the hierarchy feel pastoral. Borrowed words baptize borrowed structures.

Fourth, the host culture's assumptions are the water. Nobody in America thinks it strange that a church has a brand, a budget, a staff, a marketing plan, and a growth strategy — because everything in America has those. The strangeness is only visible from outside the culture, or from inside the text.

Paul knew the mechanism and commanded resistance to it:

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. (Romans 12:2)

Conformed is syschematizesthe — to be shaped according to a schema, a pattern or form. The verse isn't about individual morality only. It's about form. Don't take the shape of the age. And the alternative isn't a different shape from the world's catalogue; it's transformation from within, by the renewing of the mind — which is what happens when the text is read again with the host culture's water drained out.

The asymmetry

This is the sobering part. The church changes cultures through convictions, slowly, at great cost, one person at a time. Cultures change the church through forms, for free, without anyone noticing.

A Christian who wants to persuade his neighbor must argue, love, wait, and suffer. The culture that wants to reshape his church only has to exist. Its forms are the default. Its vocabulary is the air. Every organizational decision the church makes under uncertainty will drift toward what the culture already does, unless someone is actively pulling the other way.

That asymmetry is why the four captivities happened without a single council deciding them. And it's why recovery can't be passive. Drift is free. Design costs.

Three tests

How do you tell corruption from legitimate contextualization? Paul contextualized — I am made all things to all men (1 Corinthians 9:22). Not every borrowing is a bend. Three tests.

Does the borrowed form make the mandated commands easier or harder to obey? A translation into the local language makes teaching easier. A building designed as an auditorium makes every one of you harder. The first is contextualization; the second is a bend.

Does the form serve the church's stated end, or import a different one? A form that serves edification and outreach is adapted. A form that quietly redirects the church toward attendance, revenue, or institutional survival has brought its own end with it.

Can the church still see the form as a form? Contextualization is chosen and can be named. A bend feels like nature. When a congregation can't imagine church without a building, a salary, and a Sunday program, the form has stopped being a choice and become the water.

The end state

The last thing to know about like all the nations is where it ends. The historian of Israel's northern kingdom, describing the populations that Assyria resettled there, wrote the verdict twice:

They feared the LORD, and served their own gods. (2 Kings 17:33)

Both at once. The name of the LORD on top; the old gods underneath. That's what a people looks like when it has taken the nations' form and kept the LORD's name — and it's where the church arrives, four times, at the end of each captivity: sincere, devout, called Christian, and shaped like something else.

The remedy is Samuel's, and it is Paul's. Read the warning before you take the form. And when the form has already been taken, do what Deuteronomy told the king to do: write out the law, read it every day, and let it tell you what you have become.