August 12, 2007

• The last plenary session of the Christians for Biblical Equality conference was awesome!!  The preaching was done by Jeanne Porter, Ph.D.  I found myself saying amen! aloud.  I think you had to be there.  However, here is some of the notes that I took...

  "New Wineskins for New Wine: 
  The Work for Gender Justice in the 21^st Century"

  Matthew 9:14-17
  The question we need to ask as we contemplate this passage: What
  do the new wineskins look like for the 21^st century? 

  Jesus was doing radical stuff and yet John’s disciples approached
  him to ask about fasting.  This is irony,
  since He has been doing all kinds of miracles, including feeding
  thousands.  In this dialogue, we see that
  Jesus refused to engage into this conversation. 
  He knew that John’s disciples weren’t just asking about fasting but were
  challenging His nontraditional approaches. 
  They were asking, “How dare you do things differently than we do?” 

  Jesus responded by shifting the conversation to the broader
  issue of the Kingdom by talking about the wedding banquet.  It was a time for worship and celebration and
  not a time for mourning.  It was as if he
  was saying to them that the gospel message of the Kingdom is like new wine with
  such fermentation that the old structures that you are holding onto, your old
  mindsets, and your old ways, and your old rules and your old paradigms can’t
  hold what I’m bringing in. 

  Their old wineskins served a purpose but it could not
  contain the power of the gospel and all the abundant blessings that Jesus was
  bringing in.   

  At that time, new wine was poured into new wineskins to
  complete the fermentation process. 
  During the fermentation process, the new skins could stretch to contain
  the wine without bursting.  Once the wineskin
  had been used, however, it became an old wineskin and had no more capacity for
  stretching.  Fermentation of grape juice
  will still happen if put in an old wineskin, but because it is now old
  wineskin, it will inevitably pop its seams and all the wine would burst. 

  New wine in old wineskin when burst will hurt both the wine
  and wineskin.  What we are referring to
  in this analogy -- the people on the move following God and the old church structures.  The structures have not changed enough to
  contain the movement of God at this time.  You may have been committed to working within
  the church to make changes toward gender justice, but there’s a limitation, a
  glass ceiling (and for some of us, a stained-glass ceiling) for moving into a
  higher position of influence even if God has given you a greater vision.  The old structure of the church is
  institutionalized, hierarchical.  And
  unless you have a husband or a father who supports you, you might not have a
  chance of fully fulfilling this greater vision.

  Perhaps it is time to put this new wine in new wineskin.

  Some examples of new wineskins in the last few years…

  Emmaus Community, Chicago
  A post-modern, emergent church that meets in a café and
  followers of Jesus can sip their cappuccino while singing their love of
  Jesus.  A man and woman started this
  church. She left her old church because they would not allow her to serve in
  this capacity.  When it started looking
  and acting like a traditional church, the leaders got nervous.  When they had so many people that they needed
  a building and were going to get pews, the leaders got nervous.  The fear was that it would not reach out to
  the post-modern generation.

  CARE
  CARE is an organization that sends care packages to help
  with poverty – all over the world.  They
  are now making ads that have a picture of a woman from a developing country and
  say, “She has the power to change her world. You have the power to help
  her.”  CARE is now focusing on empowering
  women.  They know if they want to have
  lasting impact on a community, they need to empower women.  As the familiar saying goes, “If you educate
  a man, you educate an individual.  If you
  educate a woman, you educate the entire community.”  They are zeroing in on the cause and needs of
  women.

  The Nat’l Consortium for Black Women in Ministry
  A place where black women in ministry could have support,
  band together to mentor the next generation – health, education and poverty as
  it affects black women.  They created the
  “decency initiative,” where they organized women and men to mount public
  pressure on the music industry to adopt a universal respect for all people, especially
  the women of color.  Hip hop and rap
  music has affected an entire generation of women, taking away their value and
  their dignity with the constant use of the N-word, the H-word, and the B-word
  in their songs, etc.

  These are examples of new wineskins, agents of change.

  Five things we can take away from this paradigm shift that
  we are seeing:

  1. Shifted
     from church focus to Kingdom focus. 
     The move of God is bigger than the four walls of the church.  Go out and be placed strategically in
     every arena of society (to bring His Kingdom to gender, race and
     class).  When the church loses its
     voice in these arenas, then men and women of God need to stand up.  Sometimes old wineskin gets so old, not
     only can it not change society but it ends up colluding with the society.   When the church loses its prophetic
     voice, it ends up colluding with the culture.  (e.g. a church (I missed the
     name/location of it) that participated in the slave trade; they colluded
     with the oppression)
  2. Inclusion
     is at the heart of what these women do. 
     Must keep the models inclusive. 
     Create the ferment, the tension. 
     
  3. Expand
     the definition of what it means to be a leader.  These women are leaders, trained and successful
     in their own right who saw a need to take it to another level.  They are change-makers.  Change your words, change the world.  They are changing the meaning of this
     word.
  4. Everyday
     transformation.  These women didn’t
     just write about it; they worked on everyday leadership.  They went out and did it.
  5. Each
     had a heart of legacy leadership.  They
     invested in raising up the next generation of leadership, transformers,
     agents of change.  Yesterday’s
     agents of change can become today’s status quo.  We can become too comfortable with the
     changes that we made and want stick to them and resist any further change.  We don’t want that.  We need to equip the next generation.

  God is always the God of change.  He says, “Behold I do a new thing!”  Can we see it?  

  The traditional structures of the church cannot hold this
  new elixir of God’s empowerment to women and men.  We need to follow him and create new wineskins.

  Here's a short video clip of the message (the text is in the third paragraph):

  • 8:52 pm
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