New Wineskins work seeks to ‘articulate the future to which we believe God is calling us together
By Craig M. Kibler, The Layman Online, October 10, 2003
PORTLAND, Ore. – Saying that the New Wineskins group “is seeking to articulate the future to which we believe God is calling us together,” the Rev. David W. Henderson provided Gathering VIII with a possible “clear picture of what a shared future could look like.”
Reminding the more than 250 people in the audience that, “as we’ve heard over the past two hours, there are starkly differing opinions about what route we should take to go forward from here. Do we stay and fight for the denomination? Or do we acknowledge that the denomination is beyond repair and make plans to separate? I think it is obvious to all of us that we are deeply divided over the question of strategy and next steps,” he said in reference to presentations on such issues as gracious separation, a stay and fight strategy and others.
“What we in the New Wineskins movement believe has been lacking in our conversation to this point is the very thing that we believe has the potential to unite us and to lead us forward together, and that is a clear picture of what a shared future could look like,” said the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in West Lafayette, Ind. “Once we have laid out a clear vision of what God is calling us to become, then we believe questions of strategy will begin to answer themselves.”
Henderson then likened the transformation of the denomination over time to the history of aviation, beginning with the 100th anniversary of human flight when Orville Wright made his 12-second flight Dec. 17, 1903.
“Every airplane today has the same basic function as the Wright brothers’ craft: to carry a person in flight,” he said. “And every plane has the same basic design elements as theirs did: a source of lift, a means of propulsion, some way to steer, and a safe way to take off and land. But that is where the similarities end. When it was unveiled a 100 years ago, the airplane represented a startling and fresh technological development. Today, looking back after a century of air travel and aircraft innovation, the first plane strikes us as hardly suited to the task, nothing like the sleek metal cylinders that carry hundreds of passengers across thousands of miles at close to the speed of sound.
“While the function of the airplane has remained the same, the form has changed dramatically over the years,” Henderson said. “Lawn mower engines have been traded for jets, swept-back metal wings have replaced cloth wings with wooden spars, and pilots now sit in the comfort of cockpits rather than sprawling on an open wing and hanging on for dear life. As a stroll through the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum makes clear, the history of aviation is really the history of innovation in aircraft design, as the form of the airplane continually changed in response to changing needs and circumstances.”
A similar transformation has taken place in the Presbyterian Church (USA), he said. “As I understand it, our earliest connectional structure as Presbyterians was little more than a loose-knit, relational association of like-minded leaders and like-governed churches that banded together for the sake of greater effectiveness in kingdom ministry. Over time, that association became a more formal structure, the structure evolved into an organization, and then expanded into a multi-layered bureaucratic agency in which the various layers sometimes seem to have a life of their own. We find ourselves today with a form for organizing our shared life and ministry that little resembles our original connectional structure.”
Over the past several years, leading up to the formation of the New Wineskins group, Henderson said “there have been a growing number of us who have come to the conclusion that it is time to direct our attention and our efforts to the next redesign of our denomination. When I first heard the word presbyopia, I thought it was a misnomer, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thought of the words ‘farsightedness’ and ‘Presbyterian’ in the same sentence. I believe it is time for Presbyterians to claim that word for ourselves, to lift our eyes off the fray that immediately surrounds us and to begin to look with passion and prayer toward the distant horizon.”
He said the group, through much prayer and discussion, has developed a vision statement, “a new structural design, a new statement of essential faith tenets, the framework for a declaration of ethical imperatives, an initial draft of a new constitution, the beginnings of an all-new process of preparation and placement for those who will bring spiritual leadership to our churches, and a fresh approach to the task of world missions, among other things.”
“The men and women who are part of the New Wineskins movement believe that God is leading us once again to radically redesign the form of our connectional structure for a new day and a new ministry context,” Henderson said. “The changes we believe God is calling us to are at one and the same time a call back to a simpler relational structure that returns the ministry and mission of the local congregation to the fore, and a call forward to innovative and responsive ministry collaboration for an altogether new ministry context.”
While stressing that the work of the New Wineskins group is in its initial stages, he nonetheless said that, “We believe we are beginning to see, however imprecisely at this point, the emerging of a new connectional structure, a new ‘denomi-network,’ that will allow us to be faithful to the ministry and mission to which God has called us in this new century.”
Henderson made clear that “continuing on as we are is simply not an option.” He said the group believes that the present denomination structure “stands in need of reform in several crucial areas. However it may come about, whether through reform from within, splitting off in response to some precipitating crisis, or a negotiated dissolution of the corporation and the creation of two new denominations in its place, it is obvious that reform is needed.”
He listed four areas for reform:
* How the denomination is conceived. “For whatever reason, we persist in referring to the PCUSA as ‘the church.’ It is not the church. That is a word that should be reserved for our local congregations and for the worldwide fellowship of believers among whom God is glorified, over whom God rules, and through whom God makes himself known.”
The PCUSA, Henderson said, “is a human organization. It is simply a support structure that houses and organizes a portion of the Church. It was created to serve God’s kingdom purposes in the Church and the world, and it is beneficial only in so far as it remains faithful and subject to these. Thinking in terms of its being anything more can lead us to questionable conclusions, such as the idea that leaving the denomination is the equivalent of a divorce, or the idea that a negotiated dissolution of the corporation or our splitting away from the denomination over a moral or theological issue is the same as dividing the church. Confusing the denomination for the Church will bind us unnecessarily to a flawed human structure, and make us reluctant to explore a new future together. The denomination is not the Church. We need to change the way we think.”
* Theology. “Ours is a denomination held together by its polity, but divided by its theology and ethics. Our beliefs lead us apart, not together. We differ in our understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ, we are divided in our approach to the interpretation and authority of the Scriptures, and we are at odds in our understanding of how Biblical ethical standards apply to life in contemporary culture. We find ourselves side-by-side organizationally, but toe-to-toe theologically and ethically. That is not diversity; it is dividedness.”
“Peace, unity, and purity are the watchwords of our denomination,” he said. “But what can peace mean when we share little more than an organizational affiliation? What can unity mean without agreement about what we believe and how we are to behave? And what can purity mean without a willingness to exercise appropriate church discipline? The peace, unity, and purity to which Jesus calls the Church are not to be understood nominally or structurally, but at the level of its most deeply-held faith convictions and practices. Our denomination requires significant theological and ethical reform.”
* Mission. “Not only are we divided over our understanding of the nature of Christ’s Lordship and his relationship to people of other faiths, and over our understanding of the authority and interpretation of the Bible and its relationship to other sources of authority, but we also are divided over our understanding of the nature and purpose of the church and its relationship to the world to which God has called it. What is the primary task of the Church?” Henderson asked, saying that there are many things the Church does, such as worship, education, fellowship and pastoral care.
“But there is only one thing the Church is for,” he said. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer rightly said, ‘The church is only the church when she exists for others.’ The Church does not exist for itself. The church is a called people, a sent people; she points away from herself in mission, carrying the good news of Jesus Christ out into a dying world.”
Saying that the PCUSA has “fallen away from the central Biblical imperative of evangelistic ministry to the lost,” Henderson said that, “in some quarters, we have even become uncomfortable with the idea. We have been content to redefine our mission in church and denominational terms, and we have fallen into thinking that we are the ones who need to be saved: saved from our decline, saved from our failing finances and our fading numbers. We have lost our kingdom mission and moved into denominational maintenance and survival mode.” Quoting Darrell Guder, he said, “The Church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness.”
* Structure. Henderson said “we believe that the ministry and mission of the local congregation should be at the center of all we do, and that the denomination should exist to support and serve the local congregation in its efforts to reach the lost, to grow them to maturity in the faith, and to equip them and send them out into faithful kingdom ministry. What many of us experience today is the inversion of this: a structure that is served and supported by the local congregation.”
He said the most effective way for such a shared ministry and mission to take place “will be in networks of close, covenantal relationships between churches and church leaders who share a common ministry context. Formal organizational charts pressed over broad geographical regions will necessarily be less effective than small companies of churches and their leaders banding together for shared ministry and support. We will be strengthened when we move from formal meetings that maintain the organization to relational gatherings that support ministry and those who seek to undertake it.”
Henderson said that such an overall approach recognizes that the PCUSA “is not what it could be or should be.” As such, the New Wineskins’ work in progress sees “emerging evidence of God’s doing a new thing at every turn, new realities that suggest to us the shape of our shared future.”
He then listed several examples of new things:
* Unity: Through the work of the Presbyterian Coalition and events like this one, God is uniting us and giving us a determination to band together rather than splintering off one by one and going our own way. God is making us one.
* Theological and ethical integrity: The Confessing Church Movement has called us to take a stand around a clear articulation of Biblical and ethical non-negotiables over which we are unwilling to budge, galvanizing us in our conviction that our unity must be found in a common theology and ethic before it can be found anywhere else.
* The ministry of the local church: Renewal ministries continue to keep the mission of the local congregation and the renewal of its disciples at the forefront of all we do.
* Regional networks: Spontaneous relational networks of mutual encouragement and shared ministry are rising up all across the country: in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Texas, California. Could God be giving us in these networks a picture of the presbyteries of the future?
* Theological education: Out of at least two of these regional networks are bubbling up whole new models for theological education that will equip pastors for effective contextual ministry in a changing culture.
* Presbyteries: Fresh thinking about the missional church has led more than a half-dozen presbyteries to radically restructure themselves in order to be more faithful to the kingdom mission to which God has called us, and more are on the way.
* National assemblies: National gatherings such as this one, the Congress on Renewal, and other events hosted by renewal groups give us a picture of what our national assemblies could look like: joyful opportunities for worship, networking, equipping and renewal.
* Denominational faithfulness: At the level of the denomination as a whole, ministries such as The Presbyterian Lay Committee and Presbyterians Pro-Life press us to be a connectional structure that is faithful to its God-given calling to live and minister in faithful imitation of the one who laid down his life for us and bought us at a price.
The work of the New Wineskins group, Henderson said, is “what we hope to be a prayerful and faithful response to what we see God already doing. We are passionate in our desire that we not step out ahead of God, nor are we willing to fall behind him.”
In conclusion, he said, “I believe there is substantial agreement among us about two things: what we have now is not working, and God is doing a new thing in our midst … God has not yet revealed how he intends to take us to that new thing, but that he is doing a new thing is evident to many.”