One Church Fits All?

In response to an insightful comment on my post “Church Cocoon” I wrote the following:

It may be that we are being unfair to individual churches when we expect them to be everything Christians need throughout their lives. Maternity wards are great places to be born, but may not be the best places to grow up.

A recent post at Internet Monk explored a similar point.

What do blog readers think? Can any one institution or community, whether a church or something else, provide everything that a human being needs to navigate childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and the changes that ought to occur in one’s worldview over the course of one’s life?

If not, it is natural that people should move between them, and perhaps also in and out of them.

The biggest problem, in that case, are those communities which try to keep their members infantile and immature in their view of things.