If they weren't there, we would create them. Life creates structures. Think of the ingenious constructions life invents to protect its seeds, of all those husks and hulls and pods, the shucks and burrs and capsules found in an autumn hedgerow. Crust, rind, and chaff split open and are discarded. Our social structures, however, have a tendency to perpetuate themselves.
Religious institutions are less likely than seed pods to yield to the new life stirring within.
Those closest to the mystical core of religion will often be uncomfortable agitators within the system. These are the men and women who sense when the time has come for the structures to yield to life. They can distinguish between faithfulness to life and faithfulness to the structures that life has created in the past, and they get their priorities right. This process is as painful as life, and equally surprising. One of the great surprises is that the fire of mysticism can melt even the rigor mortis of dogmatism, legalism, and ritualism.