![]() ![]() Keep doing this, and you’ll be looking for a new job!” Some of you might now be thinking: “Wow, pastor, you’ve stepped on enough toes here today for a year’s worth of preaching. Echoing the insights I had once learned from Howard Snyder, I called our church to a costly, scary openness to the new wine of Christ and the new wineskins required to contain that new wine. On Thursday, February 8, I wrote the sermon called, simply, “New Wine.” In this sermon I warned folks about the fatal disease of “Oldwineskinitis,” what which kills churches and debilitates disciples. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. The second week in February brought me to Luke 5:37-38, a passage about new wine and old wineskins:Īnd no one puts new wine into old wineskins otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. ![]() Meanwhile, I was working my way through the Gospel of Luke in my weekly preaching. Leaving Irvine Pres to become pastor of another church, even a larger and more influential one, simply wasn’t something I seriously considered doing. But I quickly sent a note declining their interest. I scanned their material for a couple of minutes and noted that they were a fine, evangelical church. They were looking for a new senior pastor, and asked if I would be a candidate for the position. I thought this would happen in the context of my being the pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church, where I had served for over fifteen years, and where I had hoped to minister for many more years to come.Įarly in January of 2007 I received an impressive packet of information from a leading Presbyterian church on the East Coast. If you’re just now joining this series, let me say that in 2006 I was trying to discern with greater clarity how best to use my gifts for the work of God’s kingdom. Church folk tended to be unhappy with this book, while collegians like me loved The Problem of Wineskins.Įarly in 2007 I had my own, personal problem of wineskins, but it didn’t have to do so much with the church as with my own discipleship. Snyder had the gall to suggest that many common church structures did not adequately contain the new wine of the gospel, and must change. When I was in college, The Problem of Wineskins by Howard Snyder stirred up lots of controversy. ![]()
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