2| Boxing Up Good Wine
How we sucked the life out of the greatest movement that you’ve never heard of
This is part two of the Boxed Wine & Bad Ideas series on how we killed a church movement and how we can get it back.
Old Wine
“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. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” Matthew 9:16–17
At the ripe age of 86, John Wesley writes: “In religion I am for as few innovations as possible. I love the old wine best.”
How did an Anglican priest committed to his old tradition end up founding a new movement encapsulating 72,000 Methodists in Great Britain and 57,000 Methodists in America by the time of his death?
Over 52 years, John Wesley is estimated to have traveled over 225,000 miles (mostly via horseback), preaching in the fields over 40,000 sermons, while fanning into flame the revival that God was bringing in England and eventually in the United States.
In The Shaping of Things to Come, Alan Hirsch writes, “The missional church… does not create sanctified spaces into which unbelievers must come to encounter the gospel. Rather, the missional church disassembles itself and seeps into the cracks and crevices of a society in order to be Christ to those who don’t yet know him.”
This is what the early Methodist movement did. Their faith affected their waking, eating, vocation, and leisure. They started businesses and mission projects that changed society and funded their work by adding value to the marketplace and going to where the people were. They gathered in homes, gathered in large groups, gathered two or three in secret with an intense focus on personal holiness that eventually leaked into the streets of London and beyond.
What are the new ways with the old gospel that God is trying to reach your friends, neighbors, co-workers, spouse, or that one person you’ve never quit praying for who isn’t likely to step into a church building any time soon?
When we celebrate the histories of a movement, but run out of present stories of how God is drastically altering people’s lives right now, we lose our effectiveness. Great histories, theologies, or denominational structures that are not paired with great churches, constant stories of life change, growing baptisms, radical generosity, sustainable service to the poor, salvations, and unapologetically cultivating the gifts of the individuals within to serve others become an obsession with the means while ignoring the end. The Church should be the world’s greatest force for good.
After all, what is a wineskin if it’s not full of wine?
The box begins to build around the flow of good wine to the rest of the world as we restrict the permission that Jesus has given for all to go and make disciples while unintentionally reserving that task for the “professional” ministers. History tells a story of an effective church. A church of “unqualified” believers bringing salt and light to the ones who needed it most.
The Rich Young Ruler Who Said Yes
“Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.” — John 12:23–26
He’s gone down in history as “the rich young ruler who said yes.” Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf was a German Lutheran Pietist who had enough freedom with wealth and time to make any American with a dream envious. Yet instead of using those resources to live a comfortable life, he gave every ounce of himself to the cause of Jesus. He did this by taking up the faith baton in full stride from a martyr who was burned at the stake 300 years prior.
It’s a story worth retelling, even if it’s in a few oversimplified paragraphs.
1415 | Cooked Goose
Jan Hus spoke out against the Catholic Church’s hypocrisy and greed. He was almost immediately labeled a heretic and was burned at the stake as punishment. The Catholic Church didn’t completely get rid of the problem, however, considering “Hussites” would rise up after his death to continue his legacy and try their best to carry that torch of reformation forward.
On the day of his death, Hus spoke to his executioner, “You are now going to burn a goose, (referring to the meaning of Hus in the Czech language) but in a century you will have a swan that you can neither roast nor boil.”¹
1517 | 95 Thesis
That goose showed up right on time, and so did the swan. A century later, Martin Luther appeared on the scene. You know, 95 arguments on the bulletin board, Protestant Reformation and all that. Even Luther had thought Jan Hus was a heretic until he learned the details of what Hus actually stood for.
1700's
This is where we will spend most of our time through the rest of this series. Some followers of Hus were persecuted in Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). Around 1722, a bunch of these Hussites wound up on a piece of property in Germany called Herrnhut that was owned by Count Zinzendorf. That property was developed over the next handful of years to accommodate around 500 Christians living together in one place with one focus. This group of Jesus-followers, which we now know as Moravians, started to shape the world as we know it.
1727 | The never-ending Prayer
They started a 24/7 prayer meeting where there was always someone praying. Non-stop. For 100 years.
1732 | Missions
The modern missions movement began as missionaries flooded out of Herrnhut to the Caribbean, Greenland, America, India, Africa, and “many other lands.”²
1738 | Beginning of the Methodist Movement
John Wesley’s life changed and his ministry caught fire from a Moravian church service where they were reading Martin Luther’s introduction to Romans. Wesley felt the need to attend the Moravian church after he was on a boat with a group of Moravians and he saw them singing hymns with joy as the ship was seemingly going down in the Atlantic.
Wesley and Zinzendorf then began working together.
“Zinzendorf later released 12 Moravian missional communities in England into the hands of John Wesley, whom he recognized had the leadership gifting to plant churches. This helped to serve and establish the Methodist movement in England.”²
They called themselves the “church within the Church”:
“Zinzendorf encouraged the Moravian believers to stay connected to the Lutheran church in Germany and yet maintain their pietistic gatherings and small missional communities. The goal for Zinzendorf and his friend Christian David was to form “little churches within the Church” — to act as a leaven, revitalizing and unifying churches into one communion.”²
Many of the Moravian missionaries would build their own caskets before setting out on their adventures. Two Moravian men even sold themselves into slavery in order to minister to slaves.
All this led to a global phenomenon of hundreds of thousands of believers serving the poor and changing culture.
The Heartbeat of Movement
This is a movement. It’s renewal. It’s revival. It’s all the stuff that we say we want to see and be a part of.
So what do we typically do in response to jolting statistics and stories like these?
We try to replicate. We set up the same prayer schedule that they had. We try to buy land and invite people to live there and tell them to go do their own funeral before they go to South America for nine days.
We gather up the pieces that seem doable for us and hit “Command V” (or Control V for the windows users) and we beg God to “do it again.”
And that’s not all bad — it’s just insufficient.
Trying to blindly replicate the actions that were taken hundreds of years ago is like trying to play a new game of chess with the same move that worked in the previous match. The move was good, and there’s an off chance it might work again, but that particular move was not the reason for its success. The point of the move was the progress made toward checkmate. The efficacy of the move came from the countless variables at play in that particular moment.
It’s no different now than it was when Jesus walked the earth: the followers and the seekers of Jesus were/are constantly tangled up in the pragmatism of what He was saying while missing what He was/is actually saying.
Have you ever noticed that the “wineskin” comment that we quoted at the start of this chapter was made by Jesus in reference to him being questioned about fasting?
We all generally get the reference as to why he’s talking about old wine vs new wine and old wineskins vs new wineskins — new covenant, Kingdom come and all that. But why teach this when asked about fasting?
To answer this we need to ask the question, why do we fast?
Isaiah can help us with this. “Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying in sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?”
He continues:
“Is this not the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, and set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter — when you see the naked to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood.”
Pay attention to this last part:
“Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; and your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help and he will say: Here am I.”
We fast for his justice and his presence.
Besides missing the heart of what Jesus was saying, the majority of the people waiting for the Messiah simply missed His presence altogether. The bridegroom they once loved was finally before them yet they had somehow fallen in love with the waiting.
“And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?” Matthew 15:3
The means are the methods by which we work and the end that we are after is fidelity and freedom that comes from the salvation of our souls. If the means to which we are so stubbornly latched onto are not currently producing our desired end, isn’t it time that we at least un-clench?
In the old wineskins of our tradition and our ritual, we mistake the means for the end. We become blind. We forget the love we once had and we forget the original purpose of all of our efforts.
They did it then, and we do it now.
Is the American Church in a mid-life crisis, or does it have stage four cancer?
Here are a few stats to give an idea of where we stand currently:
A Barna study shows that 50% of baby boomers attended church weekly. Yet less than 27% of Millennials and Gen Z are turning up. They called Gen Z the first truly “post-Christian generation.”
“According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon Conwell, less than 1% of Christian revenue is spent on evangelism to the most unreached peoples. All costs of ministry divided by the number of baptisms per year in India in 1999 were approximately $9,800 per person. Meanwhile, the cost per baptism in the United States was about $1.5 million per person.”³
I’d imagine that number is even more shocking today.
Eugene Peterson called the pastorate the most contextualized vocation on the planet. This is true for Christians in general. We will not reach the lost and change these stats by one strict methodology.
The argument of “big church” or “small church” or which “process” or “pipeline” we should all adhere to is a rigid, prideful, and over-generalized prognosis. Each community is different; what we’re in need of are specialists. We’ll see in the coming essays a creative flexibility in reaching people and starting churches that found the people in hard-to-reach places.
We all want to be Paul, but I think we’d do a lot better if we realized that we’re actually the woman at the well.
We ought to stand in awe that we get to be a part of the story rather than always trying to be the fourth member of the trinity with all of the answers. We’re living in the reality of a grace to which we cannot reconcile and the promise of a Kingdom that sounds far too good to be true.
And whether it be by Messianic ritual, simple family traditions, RV park bonfire church, jiu jitsu gym “grapple chapels”, California beach communion, missional pressure washing companies — or whatever else people are coming up with to go to the ones to which they are called— we must remember and hold onto the heart behind the practices and do whatever it takes to keep it in our marrow and in the front of our minds.
Humbly tapping into the Spirit of Jesus allows us to soberly observe the reality in which we live and let every part of our lives shout about the fact that our Messiah had the audacity to come and find us rather than wait for us to come home — and that He’s invited the scientists, hobos, strippers, strangers, surfers, gamers, outcasts, and the people you can’t stand to the party as well. It’s our job to go and find them.
Then, in the end — especially if faced with persecution or death — we can finish the race as gloriously as a man being burned at the stake prophesying that God’s movement will not relent until the work is finished.
A goose for a swan.
[1] John Foxe, Foxe’s book of Martyrs, 170
[3] (Center for the Study of Global Christianity) World Christian Trends, AD 30-AD 2200 (2001)
