Reformation, wineskins, and the search for a more authentic faith
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“In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”
~ Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the United States Senate
Boiling down 2,000 years of Church history to five sentences is usually not a good idea. Doing so often makes parts of our history appear purer or terribly worse than they were. Halverson’s point is accurate in a narrow sense though, even if he wrote off most of Christianity with his words.
An enterprise. That certainly rhymes with a lot of what I see in the American South, where Protestant church culture often feels as stifling as the hot and humid summer days here. The more you read the Bible with just about any other lens than the heavily-enforced default one we have, the more doubts you’ll have about some of the theology and church culture that comes with it. You start noticing elders and church staff sound more like corporate execs, tithing is about the budget, and the “unsaved” are talked about like a market to be cornered. Communion is hyper-individualized and lacks much of the collective aspects of meals and shared spaces that felt so sacred in the early Church. And congregational meetings are about “church business.”
It’s not all bad off, course. There is a real sense of community for some folks, although that can veer quickly into tribalism. Even in unhealthy churches you will usually find a handful of faithful believers loving others. Theology is often overtly narrow, but that doesn’t make every bit of it harmful or wrong. Still, for an already large and growing number of people in my generation and younger, church ranges from meh to I’m outta here.
My goal here is twofold: to try to articulate the deeper spiritual longing in my generation (and younger) that is driving us out of churches and to try to work out if we are in the early beginnings of a reformation of sorts here in the United States. I’ve been considering both for a while. Let’s see where this goes.
Death by a thousand Protestant cuts
These days I feel what many people my age and younger feel: something important is missing from much of American Protestantism. Like we’ve lost our soul, which I suppose makes sense if many of our local churches are enterprises. Considering our historical legacy with white supremacy here in the American South where I live, maybe we never had much of a soul. Church doesn’t feel authentic because it doesn’t sound like what the Church is supposed to be according to the New Testament. Today, we’re a business with interests to protect, and the sacraments, theology, and worship are products being constantly repackaged and resold. How…capitalistic of us.
We’ve been masters of this for decades. In the 1970s, after a lot of folks began realizing a specific interpretation of Scripture wasn’t necessarily the same thing as “what the Bible says,” the concept of biblical inerrancy was created to reinforce the cultural status quo. By the 1980s, patriarchy had become unpopular (because it hurts people) and was rebranded as complementarianism, which has produced equally evil results. In the 1990s, a “biblical sexual ethic” was poorly repackaged into purity culture and destroyed any straightforward path to a healthy sexuality for my generation. The Young, Restless, and Reformed movement (aka New Calvinism) swept through evangelicalism in the 2000s. That’s blowing up now, too. Turn Sunday morning into a concert and B-grade TED talk with a coffee bar to try to make a fundamentalist posture more appealing, then act shocked when the younger folks see through it and walk away.
This won’t keep young people around. Sorry. Photo by Rachel Coyne on Unsplash.
The Killers have a repetitive line in their hit song All These Things That I’ve Done. “I got soul but I'm not a soldier.” We’re the opposite: we got no soul but we’re soldiers. Fail, repackage, resell, repeat…fail, repackage, resell, repeat…soldier on.
The stories of abuse and communal destruction definitely don’t help, but even those feel like severe symptoms of losing our soul. Sometimes it’s also just…boring? There’s an intellectual ceiling in American evangelical culture especially that comes with a clear message: we’ve figured everything out, now don’t ask questions and feed our product to the masses. But consumer culture cannot replace discipleship and spiritual formation. Those are journeys that never end. It’s why when folks who love Jesus start asking deeper questions, it all goes up in fire and smoke.
At least we can repackage again in the aftermath, right? Many are trying; but, at this point, it is for rapidly diminishing returns, just as it would in any business with a poor model and unimaginative product. The jig is up. More and more Christians want Jesus and his Church, and we’re willing to depart from the broken parts of American Protestant culture —and post-truth white American evangelicalism— to find it. In his beloved book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote:
Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerers have been; how gloriously different are the saints. But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all.
There’s a lot of wisdom here that applies to the institutional church. Sameness and monotony are the name of our game. We have our tyrants and conquerers and are in short supply of saints. This is an old problem that Protestant reformers sought to address; but, in our American context, Protestants have always struggled to escape from.
The Reformation: What a beautiful letdown
In 1517, Martin Luther released his Ninety-Five Theses, a list of what he saw as abuses and corruption by Catholic clergy and theological failures. Thus began the Protestant Reformation, history many of us on American soil look back on with rose-colored glasses that downplay just how ugly things got. While divisions in European Christianity were not the sole driving factor behind conflicts during the Reformation, such as the Thirty Years’ War, they did play an important role. It’s estimated anywhere between 4.5-8 million people died during that conflict alone (yikes), and there was the persecution and radical social upheaval in the wake of the reformers as well. I’ve often wondered if we should call our beginnings the Protestant Revolution instead. From the very beginning, our empire was being built on our own blood and the blood of others, just like all empires are.
Mass killing and chaos aside, the Reformation did fix or improve on real problems over a longer haul. Literacy rates skyrocketed as Protestant families were encouraged to read the Bible directly. Although far from perfect or inclusive in belief and embodiment —Luther was an antisemite and many Protestants used a narrow lens of Scripture to condone slavery for centuries- Reformation theology did usher in a higher and broader ideal of human dignity. The printing press allowed for the mass-production of bibles and books, helping to make education a higher priority and encouraging modern democratic ideals. The Reformation even helped make the Catholic Church better, which saw a series of reforms beginning in 1545 with the Council of Trent.
Wartburg Castle, where Luther translated the New Testament into German. Photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash.
Regardless of what you think about this turbulent history, no one can deny how transformative the Reformation was for Western Christianity. But the Reformation also planted the seeds of new problems. Problems that, when mapped onto our hyper-individualistic American culture today, become quite destructive. To provide just one example, today’s hot button issue of women being “allowed” to preach and teach in church (why do I still have to write this?) has roots in decisions made by the reformers centuries ago. As the Reformation progressed, women began to receive a much higher level of respect as human beings (yay!) and for their work in the home, but they could still not access the pulpit due to the new theological role that was forced upon them (ugh). In some cases, women were no longer allowed to pursue any vocation at all. There’s still quite a few folks in my neck of the woods who hold to all of these beliefs. The results are predictably evil.
For our purposes though, one of the chief problematic seeds sown by the reformers is the idea of sola Scriptura. I’m going to try to thread a tough needle here: what sola Scriptura means, even though not everyone agrees, and how it is often practiced in damaging ways in our American context. I’m sure someone will be angry by the end of this, but whatever.
Sola Scriptura states that the Bible is the inspired, infallible, and authoritative source for Christian belief and life. Basically, the Bible is super important and provides all the knowledge we need, explicitly or implicitly. It’s supposed to be the backstop and work in unison with the structures of the local church, faith confessions, creeds, and common sense. There is a spectrum of belief and practice when it comes to sola Scriptura, ranging from those who recognize that the Bible should not always be taken literally to those who claim the Bible is inerrant, or without factual error. Some Protestants —much more healthily, in my view— understand that this all hinges on interpreting Scripture properly and having a heavy dose of humility as you do it: separating out metaphor and parable from historical facts and propaganda and understanding the writers of the Bible never envisioned our world today, much less our reading their words nearly 2,000 years later.
The challenge here is that, even in healthier and more loving expressions of sola Scriptura, we still often miss critical parts of what the Bible even is. We fail to see the ongoing conversation throughout Scripture that is trying to get at who God is and who we are. We sometimes miss that the writers of both the Old and New Testaments have serious disagreements with each other because we have been trained to look at the Bible mostly for theological meaning, moral rules, and social guidance applied specifically to our own context. We often don’t embrace the importance of the stories Scripture tells and fail to see where its metaphors come up short.
As they often do though, many American evangelicals take this challenge, pump it full of steroids, and then railroad anyone who gets in their way. Sola Scriptura in evangelical spaces is often misunderstand as the Bible being the only authority in our lives. The local church, faith confessions and creeds, and common sense and experience are shoved aside in favor of modern and postmodern populism. And because these important things are severely downgraded or absent, evangelicals often act as if the Bible were written to them in their very specific cultural context, not to the ancient people Scripture was actually addressed to. Ironically, the result is that the Bible gets downgraded to being a mere rulebook and sometimes even becomes an idol that replaces God. American evangelicals who champion this “all I need is me and the Bible approach” are unaware that both the early Church leaders and reformers did not hold the views they do, and in some cases would describe today’s evangelicals as heretical (i.e. the resurgence of Arianism we see today).
Why do I bring this up? Because the reformers set us up to read the Bible in a reductive way. I believe they were sincerely trying to and hoping we would hold Scripture up higher and take it more seriously; however, roughly 500 years later in the American context, just the opposite has happened. Many Protestant churches today —again, especially evangelical ones— have a self-centered view of Scripture, which the Bible itself would cure us of if we had been trained even modestly to see the disagreements, conversation, and the story the Bible invites us to participate in. The intellectual result is that we say we have a “high view” of Scripture when, in reality, we have a very low one. The resulting embodiment is even worse: today’s evangelicals are known chiefly for their arrogance, culture warring, and abuse, all stemming from a lower view of the image of God (people) rooted in a lower view of Scripture.
A metaphor. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.
Longing for a more authentic faith
Our family is currently in between churches like a lot folks my age and younger. These days I’m mostly just saddened by the church landscape. The hurt people and the toxic positivity of abusers. The placement of cultural idolatry above Jesus, love, and the sacraments. The aggressive incompetence of leaders and the pride they take in it. It’s disheartening.
But behind the sadness is a deep spiritual thirst that I struggle to articulate and find harder to quench. I’m far from alone here. This is a broad comment, but the local church is not feeding and caring for a lot of people my age and younger because it simply does not know how. One reason is outlined above: the theology is watered-down and self-centered. There’s little to nothing new to learn because we’ve kneecapped the Bible by making it something it isn’t.
The reason that is felt most viscerally though is that many local churches are not built on faith. They are built around ideas and beliefs. Faith is about obedience to the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Ideas and beliefs are how we try to sort out some things at a practical level. Many churches put their ideas and beliefs far ahead of faith, to the point their communities are built around those ideas and beliefs. Seriously, just look at most churches doctrinal statements. It should be the other way around because what we think and believe does not save us. Who we love saves us (Philippians 3).
This to me is the Achilles’ Heel of much of Protestantism in the American context, and I say that as a devoted lifelong Protestant who loves being one. We’ve tried to make every little belief bulletproof and made so many silly rules —and unspoken sets of rules for different groups of people— that we’ve lost sight of the bigger story of Jesus and the conversation the Bible invites us into in community with others. Oh, we’ll read the Bible and do our little 8-12 week studies, but it’s all done in hyper-narrow intellectual frameworks that elevate our individualism and prevent us from truly loving Jesus and our neighbors, especially people who do not think, believe, or look like us. We have a lot of religion, but little spirituality.
Sing it with me: “we got no soul but we’re soldiers.”
How many Protestant denominations do we have now? How many people have left our churches wounded and broken? How many folks have left church for good, not because they “fell away” or whatever, but because they believe we don’t take Jesus seriously? How many have left the Christian faith altogether?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, the answer is A LOT. It feels like church isn’t working because it isn’t. Younger generations especially are tired of being told how we have to agree to narrow ideas and beliefs about Jesus. We long to be in community that encourages us to live for and be like Jesus as we love others. We want faith, but most of our churches can only offer us the depressingly low bar of agreeing to a set of ideas and beliefs.
We can and must do better.
What wine and wineskins tell us about faith and reformation
Our family is currently visiting a small, historically-Protestant church that serves real wine in a quiet communion, something I’ve never experienced. It’s been jarring in the best way (oh Lord, how much of my southern American evangelical past remains to be dealt with?). It feels a lot more spiritual, authentic, and historically-rooted and nothing like the free market-watered down-cultural conservative-corporate America blob that is communion in many evangelical spaces.
It’s the little things, I suppose.
Why yes, I’ll have a full glass of wine for communion, please and thank you. Photo by Phakphoom Srinorajan on Unsplash.
It really does feel that the things we’ve made small can help save us from the cultural evangelicalism we are trying not to drown in. So much of the American evangelical fold relentlessly tries to drive out the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith in favor of “absolute truth” and absolute cultural certainty, which is probably why the sacraments are often rushed through or downgraded in importance. Replacing an expired cup of grape juice and cardboard wafer with a bit of real wine and fresh bread can go a long way, at least if it’s done to help explore a true spiritual and historic connection, not as a gimmick.
Speaking of wine and the story Scripture invites us to participate in, let’s talk about the Jesus part of the Bible. Jesus was all about wine. The guy could keep a party or dinner going. In John 2, Jesus is even recorded as turning at least 120 gallons of water into what was probably the best wine ever tasted. Silly me, I forgot to send Jesus an invite to our wedding.
Jesus also used wine in what is one of the most overlooked parables of our time. He is recorded in Matthew 9 as saying:
”Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are ruined, but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”
Back in Jesus’ day, one of the best ways to take wine on the go was to use a wineskin. These were essentially leather bags that were tied shut at the neck and often fashioned with a carrying strap. Wineskins were reusable and lasted for a long time, if properly cared for, but eventually they would need to be replaced.
When Jesus mentions wine and wineskins here, he was answering a question about fasting, specifically why his disciples did not fast as the Pharisees did. It was a question asked on top of a complex backdrop of religion, culture, and spirituality. As with all parables and metaphors Jesus told, you can run different ways to explore meaning. But one of the points Jesus is making here is that sometimes something new comes along that is so good and different that our preexisting structures and beliefs cannot understand or hold it. They too have to change or be replaced. This is why Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1 that the Gospel is a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. The Gospel was new wine for them as it did not match their experience and beliefs of who God was. As older wineskins, they struggled to hold it.
We find ourselves in a similar moment now, even if I can’t fully articulate what exactly this moment is or where it is going. What I do know is that the way church has been done the past several decades is a dying enterprise. At the same time, we have easier access than ever before to older and newer ways of thinking, other Christian traditions, and forgotten or overlooked ancient practices that can move us back toward faith in community. The future is already emerging, but our churches are woefully unprepared for it.
Let’s put this into the parable’s terms. Younger generations are beginning to produce and try new wines and some of them are very, very good. They are often linked directly to the much richer wines of the Early Church and include newer scientific understandings of what makes us tick as humans. It’s exciting and heartening. The problem is that the structures and beliefs of many local churches (the wineskins) are too old, rigid, and brittle to hold this new wine. The result is hurt people and shrinking congregations (burst and ruined wineskins) and younger followers of Jesus struggling to find a local church (spilled wine). Sadly, some of the good wine is being lost.
All the wine, all the time. Photo by Daniel Vogel on Unsplash.
Ideas and beliefs are great at giving you a sense of certainty and keeping you in a specific place, but faith and spirituality is a journey. They will not keep you in one place intellectually or spiritually, and sometimes even physically. The local church on the street corner is usually only capable of enforcing a rigid set of ideas and beliefs, with a few facades and stunts to try to make a fundamentalist posture more palatable. Meanwhile, more and more younger people are turning to podcasts, the writings of a new generation of Christian thinkers, house churches, and non-Protestant or more mature Protestant traditions to explore new wines of faith and spirituality.
And there is nothing that the old wineskins can do to stop them.
Reformation is harder than we want it to be
This wine and wineskin dynamic is the main reason why I have empathy for the original reformers, even if I have issue with some of the things they believed and ways they behaved. They rightly saw something was very wrong and rightly desired something better. For a time, they tried to put new wine in the old wineskin. Eventually they realized they needed a new wineskin altogether. Regardless of what you think about the results, they found a way to keep the tradition moving forward. I wouldn’t be writing this if they hadn’t.
My friends sometimes ask me why I don’t just leave the local church for good. It’s a fair question, and I’d be lying if I said the thought never crossed my mind. But something keeps pulling me back. I think it’s mostly the sacraments, things like communion, which require community to access because of what they are and represent: what the Church can be. That and the knowledge things have been much worse in Church history before and change still happened. Oh, and the way that we do church here in the United States isn’t the way it has always been done.
The truly frustrating thing about this moment though is the increasing volume of new wines being produced and the severe lack of wineskins capable of holding them. There are just not nearly enough of the latter and likely won’t be for many years. Most churches seem to have no interest in becoming new wineskins. Sure, they’ll add some extra programming, make some new plans, and try to feel as if they are more open-minded; but, when it’s time for the rubber to meet the road, most will fall back on their fundamentalist posture around the very ideas and beliefs that got us here.
This isn’t a jab. It’s just recognizing human behavior for what it is: we tend to fall back on what we know and feel comfortable with when the road ahead is concealed in fog. Reformation is a process journey, not an event. These things take time and not one of us is immortal. My generation will likely not see the fuller fruits of whatever these changes are in our lifetime.
Sigh. That’s a hard pill to swallow. At a glance, I don’t find much appealing about being part of a transitional generation because I’ve already been wounded on the metaphorical battlefields like many of you reading this have. A friend recently described this feeling to me as similar to Frodo in The Fellowship of The Ring. Sitting next to Gandalf while lost in the Mines of Moria, Frodo says despairingly “I wish the ring had never came to me. I wish none of this had happened.” I feel seen.
And I honestly don’t even know if we are in the beginnings of a reformation or if the poisoned and unhealthy parts of American Protestantism are simply dying an agonizing death, with the survivors being absorbed into healthier parts of the Church. It’s probably a good bit of both. But if we are on a longer timeline then we have to figure out not just how to navigate this moment, but also how to move toward something better. Not just for our own sake, but for future generations.
Navigating the moment is not a straightforward task. When is it time to leave a local church? Is it better for folks who are considering leaving a church to stand up to the few people who are most responsible for holding us back instead? Do we run to older traditions in the Christian faith that have always been more flexible? Do we try to build something new entirely? What does new even look like?
The answers to these questions depend on people’s specific circumstances and what they feel they are being called to. Whatever we do as individuals though, sustaining the broken theology and fractured communities that refuse to chase true healing and reconciliation with those they harmed is not an option. As hard as leaving or trying to survive feels, it is still the easy part. What comes next, the unknown and unseen, is much more difficult.
Much like Frodo, we’re in the darkness of the mines. But we live in the real world, not fantasy. There’s no Gandalf sitting next to us that we can turn to. In the longer run, that’s a good thing.
Don’t look for a new Luther. There won’t be one. Lucas Cranach d.Ä. - Martin Luther, 1528 (Veste Coburg)
Closing Thoughts
Renowned Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann once said “Churches should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest place in town.” I think about that a lot. It seems that the church leaders who believe in leading with optimism-at-all-costs tend to be the ones whose churches get into the most trouble, or who end up being closet fundamentalists. Boy, isn’t that the American evangelical story.
Whatever comes from this strange moment we are in, I think a lot of it needs to boil down to what Brueggemann says. Happiness is a feeling; honesty is authentic. Occasionally they may overlap, but more often than not they won’t. Life is hard. God is good. We have many questions in our faith and the life of the church we don’t have answers for. We should be honest about it all.
I’m becoming less engrossed in what exact ideas and beliefs emerge in the coming decades and a lot more interested in if we are able to move closer to true faith: being obedient to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, not to our ideas and beliefs about him. Truly putting our obedience to the story of Jesus first means we’ll get more of the ideas and beliefs right anyways. This is the harder path after decades of evangelical leaders trafficking American consumer culture, corporation-think, and the extreme coddling of male ego into Protestantism. But there are practical things we can do to prepare ourselves for the journey ahead.
We need to start learning how to read Scripture differently with multiple lenses. We need to understand that the means are just as important as the ends. We need to recognize that pursuing a false authenticity for the sake of growth in numbers or to help us feel better about the past harms we’ve inflicted is not Christlike. We need to own our shortcomings and move toward repairing the damage we did to people who are no longer in our midst. Instead of praying that God would grant us the confidence of a twenty-year-old who read a John Piper book, we’d be better off praying and striving toward humility and making friends with people who don’t think, look, or believe exactly as we do. And we need to let those people change us for the better.
There will neither be a Ninety-Five Theses this time around, nor a single towering figure such as Martin Luther. And this is good. There will be leaders who are more diverse and dynamic than Luther was or could be. One of these individuals is historian and author Jemar Tisby. In his excellent essay Calling for a Modern-Day Reformation: Revisiting the doctrine of the image of God, Tisby writes:
A new reformation will have new leaders. A selective hearing of the imago Dei has disempowered and marginalized precisely those who have so much to give. Women will have a more prominent role. The poor will have a voice. Black Christians and other people of colour will feature as significant leaders. Those in historical positions of dominance will experience both the humility and the delight of being a student, a guest, and an ally.
The future of American Protestantism will be more ecumenical, theologically, denominationally, and relationally. More and more it will include non-Western voices and people from the margins. The more prominent voices from those spaces are already speaking to the how in decentralized ways across blogs, email lists, podcasts, and social media. Keep an eye out for them, and pay attention to what they are saying.
You are likely to find such leaders in your own community, too. Some will be in a local church, others won’t be. But do especially keep an eye out for them. Pay attention to what they are saying. Join them. If a true faith community —one rooted in the story of Jesus over and above ideas and beliefs about him— can be built at the local level, that is one more wineskin that can hold the new wine, and quench the spiritual thirsts of the rapidly growing number of people who need it.
At the very least, we can hope to swing the pendulum to something quieter, more mysterious, and deeper. Hopefully we can get more right than wrong so that, when it’s time for another reformation hundreds of years from now, there is less pain for future generations to muddle through.
Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda.
I explore faith and church culture in the American South from Memphis, TN. Never miss an article by signing up for my newsletter and subscribing to the podcast. You can also become a member or leave a tip to help keep this site free and open to all.
