The Problem of Wineskins - shaunlepage.com

This quote from Howard A. Snyder’s now classic book, The Problem of Wineskins: Church Structure in a Technological Age, shows us a couple things: 1) Smarter people than myself (i.e., Howard) have been talking about what’s wrong with the church for a long time (published in 1977), and 2) It’s nothing new for the “wineskins” of church structure and form to need to change:

God is a God of newness. On the one hand he is the Ancient of Days, “the Father of Lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas. 1:17), and Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). But this does not mean that God is static or stationary. The history of God’s people in the Bible and the history of the Christian Church show just the opposite. In every age the true biblical gospel is a message of newness and renewal.

God has not stopped doing new things. The Bible says, “We wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet.3:13). Many of the Old Testament prophecies already cited were fulfilled in part with the coming of Christ and the birth of the church, but the prophetic fund has not yet been exhausted. Unfulfilled prophecies and promises of new things remain. At the end of the Bible God is still saying, “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

Every age knows the temptation to forget that the gospel is ever new. We try to contain the new wine of the gospel in old wineskins — outmoded traditions, obsolete philosophies, creaking institutions, old habits. But with time the old wineskins begin to bind the gospel. Then they must burst, and the power of the gospel pour forth once more. Many times this has happened in the history of the church. Human nature wants to conserve, but the divine nature is to renew. it seems almost a law that things initially created to aid the gospel eventually become obstacles — old wineskins. Then God has to destroy or abandon them so that the gospel wine can renew man’s world once again.