Old Winskin - Don't Fear the Label

The other day I listened to a sermon preached by Dutch Sheets regarding Lakeland. You can find it here. (scroll down to under his latest letter to a sermon link given on May 18, 2008) While there is much that I would disagree with Mr. Sheets in issues of theology and practice, I was impressed again by the gentle wisdom that this man displays while still belonging to a group of men and women that I vehemently disagree with. He remains the one voice that I have heard that I can even begin to trust. In his sermon he speaks of the role of wisdom and revelation and how to walk the line keeping both in our lives. He then speaks of Lakeland and what he was seeing as problems. (This was given before the whole thing blew up.) It was a call to get some accountability into the mess that was beginning. I was impressed that he would speak about it while it was going on as that is usually the kiss of death to disagree with something before everyone else does.

I had to sift through the first part of the message but when he begins to address his concerns of Lakeland I fully was with him. The thing that stood out to me though was his comments about being apprehensive of he, himself, becoming an “old wineskin.”

For the uninitiated, the idea of an old wineskin comes from the passages in Scripture (Matthew 9, Mark 2 and Luke 5) where the Pharisees and the disciples of John come to Jesus asking why he does not keep the law…why he is eating his fill with sinners and they are observing the law by fasting. Jesus says that his disciples are enjoying having the bridegroom with them and therefore it is party time. Then he speaks the words that every Charismatic follower fears, “And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.”

See, in the charismatic world, being labeled a old wineskin is paramount to being slapped in the face with a glove and called out for a duel. No one ever wanted to be an old wineskin. It meant that you were clinging to the old ways of God and unable to accept what God was doing now. You were now persecuting the new move of God. You were entrenched in religion and not in the flow of the Spirit. You were stuck in the “logos” word and not in the “Rhema.” At its worst, you were now in rebellion to the authority of whatever “new thing” was being issued from the top.

When Husband put his foot down on the simple idea that he believed that the titles of apostle being demanded were not part of the heart of Jesus and his teachings we suddenly found ourselves with the label of “old wineskins.”

It is again, another one of the straw man arguments that keeps men and women of God, men and women of discernment, quiet and in their respective seats.

It saddened me to see Dutch Sheets so hesitant to bring up blatantly deceptive practices within his own camp and be so afraid of stepping into the label of being an old wineskin.

This is not the heart of what Jesus was saying. At the heart of these verses you can say with certainty that the old wineskin was the Law. He was the new wine - not the next idea of some crazed, authority seeking man or woman who refuses to be questioned. Yes, you can extract at teaching from the passage that the Spirit will do unexpected things and we need to be open to His leading, but the slapping of the faces with the glove of “old wineskin” needs to be addressed.

Men and women of this movement need to get over being afraid to speak up. Wrong is wrong. And if your heart picks up greed, or deceit or pride or false teaching, you can be sure it is. Your heart will tell you the truth. Don’t let those who would label you - quiet you.

I have a feeling that there are those reading my blog who are so afraid of this being true of themselves. Let me ask you a question. Do you long to follow the Spirit to the best of your ability? Do you listen closely to the voice of your Father as best as you can and then try to follow his promptings? Do you gladly receive with wisdom things that might be new to your spirit?

Then you are not an old wineskin. Period. Get over it. Don’t be silenced by this accusation any longer - nor fear it another minute.

UPDATE: Husband insisted I watch the greatest glove slap challenge to a duel ever seen in movie history. You can see it here at about 38 seconds into the clip. Don't blame me for the way his mind works!

Come to Our Missional, Emergent, Post Charismatic, Bible, Barbeque, Worship Center

So I have spent almost a year on the internet reading, researching and pondering what I believe and what others are saying. The people I read are varied – to say the least. I read Calvinist, Reformed, Charismatics, Emergent, Post Charismatics, Atheists, Cult survivors, and so many others. Some know exactly what the ‘Church’ is supposed to look like, some aren’t sure and others just hate the whole institution.

Husband decided last May that we were not going to do anything for a year. We were going to detox and just let things settle. And we have. But there is a shifting in our spirit somehow coming into the Spring season. May is not that far away and we realize that we are no closer to having an idea of what we will do then than when we left a year ago.

One of the first books that we read last year was ‘So You Don’t Want To Go To Church Anymore,” by Wayne Jacobsen. In the last few nights we have revisited the book and read it again with somewhat fresh eyes. Eyes that have had the scales of the institution fallen off. We love the heart of this book but have more questions now than before.

The main question is this; seemingly, in the New Testament, the Body of Christ did intentionally meet together on what appears to be a somewhat regular basis. In these meetings, in whatever format, there was fellowship, teaching, music, encouragement, prophecy and eating together. I think you will agree that to do this, takes some intentionality. It takes someone to ‘lead’ and others to participate. I think that what Wayne puts forth in his book of really letting the Holy Spirit put these gatherings together has to have some purposeful direction from a human being also involved. I don’t think he would disagree.

But to be purposeful in trying to start something scares us to death. The minute you do decide to start something you have to decide what to start. Does that make sense? In the very act of beginning something you have to decide 1) what to begin and 2) what not to begin. Decisions have to be made to decide what to include and what not to include. You can say that you will start something that will have no true purpose other than meeting but I can’t see how that would really happen. Just in deciding to have the meeting, boundaries will naturally be erected.

So, what do you start? Do we call it missional, emergent, bible centered, just fellowship, a gathering for worship, a barbeque, a charismatic fellowship, a home group or what?

A very wise pastor wrote to us the other day. He said this. “In looking around all the church plants before we started our church here in our town, I pondered all that I had seen. It seemed that those churches that deviated from centering their congregations around anything else other than to Love God and to then in turn Love each other, in time became sidetracked and shipwrecked.”

As I thought about this it became so clear to me. To create a fellowship, say around ‘signs and wonders,’ produces either a desire for more of them or a pride in the fact that it is happening and thus became off kilter. It becomes about signs and wonders not about Him. To create a fellowship around gifting and hierarchy produced my story here at this blog. To create a fellowship around the prophetic word produced churches that became unbalanced in their chasing after the newest prophet or making everything a prophetic word and results in the disillusionment of many Christians. It again wasn’t about simply loving God and others.

And here is where I hope I don’t offend many who read here. I’m wondering if even the striving for a more missional model or a emergent type of a structure will again end up in another ditch – just off to the other side of the road. It seems in trying to distinguish ourselves from another group or distinguish ourselves even to ourselves we just build another rigid structure – just out of a different material.

What if our structure was the non structure of having a group of people who gather together to try to encourage each other to love God and love others? Could you take what is true of each of the other camps and include it when appropriate? In other words, if someone is sick then, of course you would anoint them with oil and pray for their healing – but you would not hold healing services. If someone is dealing with a demonic force in their lives, of course you would pray for the spirit to depart and for the Holy Spirit to fill the empty place – you just wouldn’t open up a deliverance tent the next week. If a need became evident of finances or help to the poor that the group could have an impact in, of course a missional model would be seen. And when a couple of guys or girls with a broken sexuality decided to be brave enough to have us love on them, we might even be seen as emergent.

But none of the above would define us. The only definition would be to Love God and Love Others. Whatever flowed in or out of the group would be an example of that statement and not the definition of our group. (One key thing would to not let our statement be rooted in pride or it would become just another structure.)

What do you guys think? Could it be done? Could there be humility in facilitating a group like this? Where are the pitfalls? Am I being too simple? Too naive?

Wineskins-In Response to the Wine

I have a guest writer today. This couple is wonderful. They are wonderful because 1. They have forgiven me for the abuse that I helped to perpetuate while they were here at our CLB and 2) They are just wonderful people. Did I mention that they are wonderful?

Anyway, God is teaching them much about the Kingdom. I wanted you all to read what he wrote about wineskins the other day on his blog. The insights he has on this topic were truly freeing. I hope he keeps writing.

He writes:

My wife and I have been now to about 20 churches in the last year. And to be honest, there have been very few that we have felt did church right. Last Sunday we left our normal church – which is a great church but not super exciting per se – to visit the slickest, most produced church I have ever been to. It was the one of the rare times recently that I have heard real quality musicianship at church, but everything else – from the 20 minute offering talk in which the pastors wife sounded like she was addressing toddlers, “now smile everybody, because God loves a cheerful giver” to the multiple book plugs in the middle of the sermon - was quite disturbing.

That night I had a dream in which I saw a crowd of people wearing goatskins over their clothing and all heading in one direction – so many that they began to look like a herd of animals because of the skins. It was the people of God in mass trying to get God to bless them in the manner of Jacob, by deception and by disguise rather than as sons and daughters. (I admit I was recently listening to Jason Upton talking about Jacob and Esau). The message was: God is not blind, such that he will fall for our disguises. At the same time, he is no respecter of persons and he does not withhold his hand of blessing. Indeed he even blesses those who are disguising themselves, but it’s in spite not because of the disguise.

It’s easy for me to be very critical about the way a lot of churches are run and to think, “I would set things up much better than this.” And while I generally think God agrees with me :) I don’t think He gives the issues nearly as much weight as I do. That night I also heard God speaking about the idea of the “wineskin” (I remember thinking that the people wanted to use their goatskins as wineskins). Everyone is trying so hard to make sure that they have the perfect wineskin, especially in terms of church structure. I’m starting to lean towards the idea that the Bible is not exactly clear on what the ideal church structure is and that is so for a purpose: because church structure is not what He cares about, but rather the hearts of men willingly following Him. There are a few things that he clearly does not like – like lording authority over one another and everything that constitutes religion – but he has not prescribed the ideal ‘wineskin’ that is for all time.

In fact the whole passage in Matthew 9:14-17 (below) that introduced the ‘wineskin’ to church parlance was about originally Jesus’ response to why the disciples weren’t currently fasting. He says they do not fast now, but they will fast when the bridgegroom is taken away and backs this up with 2 examples, that of putting unshrunk cloth on an old garment and that of putting new wine in an old wineskin.

Matthew 9:14-17 – Then the disciples of John came to Him saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but Your disciples do not fast?” And Jesus said to them, “Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast. No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

Taking the approach that we should lend a lot of weight to the simplest, most obvious explanation of a scripture given its context, we would have to say that this talk of a wineskin is not referring to how a church should be structured or should operate but rather is a metaphor that captures why the disciples do not fast now but will fast later. The focus of the metaphor is not about containers, as cloth is not a container of anything. What is common to both metaphors is reading the situation and taking the appropriate measures given the situation: if you have an old cloth use an old patch, if you have new wine, use a new wineskin, and by extension if the bride groom is here don’t fast, but when he is gone then fast. To me the closest scripture that relates to this one is the reference to the Sons of Isaachar who discerned the times and knew what to do.

Now we can also infer from the passage that because it specifically mentions the disciples of John and the Pharisees fasting (both symbols of the old covenant, John being hailed as the greatest of that era), that Jesus may be using the wineskin metaphor to refer to the new covenant, whose wine had not yet been poured out – either by his blood at the cross or at Pentecost depending on your interpretation of what is the wine. In either case the context still seems to speak more to how our hearts respond to the new covenant than to the structure or organization of the church.

I do not deny that God often speaks from a passage beyond its original context so I won’t say that this passage cannot speak about the church, but one thing is clear in the passage: the wineskin is a response to the wine, not the wine to the wineskin. So whatever we want to apply this verse to, it cannot be changed to mean that we should prepare a new wineskin before the new wine comes. Rather, a straightforward reading of the passage indicates that we should choose the right response (wineskin or patch) to the season we are currently in.
In addition, Jesus does not mention that any time is spent designing the wineskin itself. I don’t think that wineskins were complex mechanisms. Jesus seems to indicate that they basically came in two versions: “new” and “old.” Our task is not to pick from a host of options or possible customizations: leather interior seems to be standard. Like many of his teachings, the choice He gives is binary: right or left, old or new, life or death. If he presents us with a new gift we must choose which will be our hearts response: receive it as something new, or try to fit it into the box we made yesterday; follow the lead of the Holy Spirit or repeat what we did before.

“If you build it, they will come,” is often quoted in churches though, perhaps surprisingly, these words do not from the Scriptures, but rather from Field of Dreams. The story of Noah would indicate that God can certainly work this way, so if you hear God whispering theses words, by all means get to the cornfield and start working. But the problem is often the one thing common to many churches throughout Christendom, from house churches to mega churches to virtual churches, is the idea that if they just can get the wineskin right they will get the new wine. Half these churches’ time is spent painstakingly perfecting their wineskin and the other half pondering how the other wineskins out there are getting old.

I am starting to believe that God cares a lot less than we do about whether a church has 50,000 people and a pastor with a botox smile on the cover of his new bestseller or a handful of homeschooling ex-Mennonites in a poorly decorated ranch house. While both of these thoughts make me cringe, He seems to have much more grace than I do and is pouring out wine without measure to whoever will come to Him thirsty. There are things that churches do that probably make Him go crazy. Particularly grieving must be when churches misrepresent His heart towards His people. But, for future church planters, I don’t think the answer is to focus on designing a better wineskin. I think it’s just to get better at wine tasting.