![]() It’s the path of the Pharisees, not the way of Jesus. It’s a move that allows those in power to invoke the name of God in order to control, marginalize, and oppresses those without any power. This addiction to dogmatism is expressed in manifold ways – marriage to politics, radical personalization of the faith, the pursuit of converts rather than disciples, an apparent inherent anti-intellectualism, a hyper focus on the next life to the detriment of the present, adoption of business practices as guiding principles for the church, and a glaringly un-Christlike valuing of orthodoxy over people.īut perhaps most problematic of all is evangelicalism’s dangerously high view of scripture that disingenuously acts as if interpretation is not involved in the reading and application of the Bible. These central commitments are not to the way of Jesus, but to a fetishized list of beliefs. In other words, evangelicalism may be an expression of Christianity, but it doesn’t exhaust Christianity as if there were no other way to be Christian.īroadly speaking, the problem with evangelicalism is that it has become a culture unto itself with central values and concerns that are not actually central to the gospel, despite claims to the contrary. As the hundreds of millions of non-evangelical Christians in the world would be quick to remind us, that is simply not true. Too often we confuse evangelicalism with Christianity as if the two were one and the same. I am not at all calling for the abandonment of the Christian faith. Today, I’m convinced the need to abandon that culture is more pressing now than ever before. Two years ago I wrote a series of posts entitled Abandoning Evangelicalism. The Spirit is alive and needs room to breathe in the church, to expand the gospel to people who desperately need it. But evangelicalism is a old wineskin that clearly can’t handle the expansion of the Spirit. It was a new wineskin once and served the church well for a time, but it has become dry, brittle, and broken. I believe the church is in need of new wineskins.Īs the past few years have hinted at, and last week made crystal clear, evangelicalism is an old wineskin that is long past its expiration date. If you pour new wine into it, the gases will expand, pressure will build, and the wineskin will burst, destroying it and ruining the wine. But the days of expansion have passed for an old wineskin. A new wineskin has the ability to expand to make room for the breath of the spirit. ![]() It’s not quite alive, but as it ferments it gives off gases. That’s not a good thing when you’re trying to transport wine. If you’ve ever had anything made of leather and kept it around for very long, you know that it can very easily become dry, brittle, and cracked. These leather bags, as you probably guessed, were called wineskins. Unlike today, in the Ancient Near East wine was sometimes carried in leather bags made of animal skins. Related: Is Evangelicalism Headed for a Split? After all, if you poured wine back into the bottle or into an old glass neither of them would break. Now, if you didn’t grew up in the church or you’re not a time traveller from the Ancient Near East, that metaphor may not make a bunch of sense. It’s that image of wineskins that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind for the past few days. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved. If they do, the skins will burst the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. ![]() ![]() Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Then he starts talking about sewing and drinking. Jesus responds in his typical cryptic Jesus way, talking about the bridegroom and not mourning while he’s around. In the scene the gospel writer describes, John the Baptist’s disciples have come to Jesus asking why he isn’t more like them and the Pharisees who devote themselves to the ancient spiritual discipline of fasting. It’s one of those odd, seemingly out of nowhere sayings of Jesus that are sometimes hard to understand and apply to modern life because they’re full of archaic language and images that have little or no bearing on the modern world. In the time that has past since that epic fiasco, I’ve found myself returning over and over again to a verse I admit I rarely visit. It was repugnant and exposed the hate of so many that for so long has been hidden under the guise of “a difference of opinion.” The zeal with which so many Christians abandoned their sponsored children in the name of theological purity wasn’t just embarrassing. Not just for World Vision, but for the church. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |