Of Wineskins and Garments

I've written in the past about the fact that one of the challenges of leading a traditional church through the transformative process of becoming a missional/incarnational church is the need to nurture both simultaneously. A decision to go missional and, from the get-go, leave traditional behind is, to my mind, a denial of responsibility. Becoming missional is, almost by definition, a process, a movement of people from one way of living--not just one way of being church--to another. As such, it takes time: traditional and missional will exist side-by-side, and the timetable for coexistence is up to the Holy Spirit, not to me.

But...I've been spending time in Luke 5 lately and there is that business of the parable of the new wineskins. Jesus clearly is talking about new ways of being God's people and while he never mentions the word "church" how can we read his words and not think about the organizations and institutions of the faith? And if we do, it seems equally clear that Jesus is telling us that the old and the new cannot exist simultaneously without compromise at best, damage at worst.

Jesus, first in terms of garments, then wineskins, sets out that there is the old and the new. Further, he acknowledges that the old is torn which, read in terms of the church, can refer to the old ways wearing out or to actual splits in congregations and denominations. In either case, the new cannot be patched on to the old because that both disfigures the new and results in an old that is no longer of a piece. Shifting metaphors, Jesus makes it plain that old ways of being cannot hold new ways of being without ruining the old.

What Jesus' parable suggests to me is not that we must abandon traditional ways of being church but that we must not make the mistake of thinking that somehow we can piece together a viable expression of the Body of Christ using some traditional here, some missional/incarnational there. Or, to put it another way, we can't mend tears in old ways of being church with bits and pieces of new ways. And Jesus also reminds me that those who've always known the old will likely always prefer the old.

Damage is something I want to avoid, certainly to minimize. Maybe, therefore, for a time compromise is inevitable. But hasn't compromise always been inevitable? Indeed, any expression of the will of God that utilizes broken human beings can hardly be otherwise. But if we must compromise, let us do so faithfully, expecting that garments and wineskins old and new are to be in service not to comfort or vision but to the Kingdom.