I find the way some people talk of churches to be slippery to the point of dishonest.
In particular, many people elide the difference between a (typically small) group of people bound by a personal (often familial) relationship; and very-large, bureaucratic (hierarchical, sub-specialized, explicitly regulated) organizations.
To me; this resembles another common - and deplorable - merging-conceptualization; which is to call marriage and the family 'social institutions'. This phraseology is a gross reduction of fundamental aspects of the proper and ideal human life, to a simple abstract model of functionality.
To equate a family/ extended-family with a bureaucratic institution, on the basis of a few analogies, or a shared functionality; is an extreme of prejudiced modernist positivism, which is itself anti-spiritual and materialistic.
This is important because the large, bureaucratic, corporate 'Christian' churches have become net-corrupt, net-harmful.
Which means that the possibility of a genuinely Christian group life needs to move away from socially recognized and sustained institutions - and towards non-institutional forms of the Christian life.
For there to exist non-institutional forms of Christian life (i.e. outside of the totalitarian System), there must be a recognition that some human groups are (or can be) not institutions.
And this is where familial forms of Christianity could and should come-in - by which I mean groups that cohere because of love between a particular set of persons, rather than because they are structured organizations.
Unless we distinguish such love-based Christian groups, and conceptually separate them from the corporate Churches; we are colluding with the powers of evil - who aim at treating all forms of human association as formal institutions; and thereby bringing all kinds of human association under the purposively-evil control systems of totalitarian bureaucracy.
