The Power of New Wineskins
Innovation ideas in the words of Jesus
In Matthew 9 we find these verses:
14 Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” 15 And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. 16 No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. 17 Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”
I find it interesting that Jesus was asked about fasting. He responds with a reminder that 1) now is the time to enjoy the presence of Emmanuel (God with us) and 2) old wineskins cannot contain new wine. Fasting? Evidently, something about the Pharisee’s application of fasting is “old wineskin-y.”
Theologians would decry taking verses 16 and 17 into any context other than their first-century context. Applying them to innovation in our day would be critiqued as an example of taking a biblical text and forcing onto it an unintended meaning. But in this case, the idea is that something new is coming and the old system and people cannot contain it.
When God moves into a new arena the old systems, structures, and people are displaced. It took the secular business world about two thousand years to catch up to Jesus on this point, but they have. In that same two-thousand year period, we in the church have also lost our taste for new wine, preferring the refined tastes of the old stuff. I think we easily understand that the old systems and structures are displaced. It is harder to grasp that the people who support the old wineskins are also displaced. In the case of Jesus, it was the systems and structures built around the Law and the people who enforced it, the Pharisees. In our case… it could be our ministry organizations (and I include local churches here) and us.
Kuhn reminds us that the people most likely to reject shifts in our paradigms are the ideological elites. Today, these are the people with thousands of Twitter followers or those who frequent the conference speaking circuit. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (a book all innovators should read), he writes:
“The men [and women] who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. These are the men [and women] who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them (page 90). ...There are always some men [and women] who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work” (page 19).
The great advantage of the younger (or new to the field) innovator is “being little committed by prior practice.” They need the new wineskins. When placed in the current structures, they will eventually burst out. When they do, they displace both the structure and the incumbent elites.
Many of us work in environments of old wineskins. In my case, one of the predecessor organizations that formed Missio Nexus goes all the way back to 1917. The world was different; it would be an alien world if we could time-travel back to that point. Fortunately, my board and the many people we serve expect us to focus on new wineskins. That is awesome for me because I very much prefer the new wine over the old and we try to infuse innovation into all we do (it is hard, and we do know we fail often). This is what having a culture of innovation is all about.
I know that for many leaders in ministry, their boards and those they serve expect their wine served aged and refined. Resist the urge to serve them this old wine and go about the business of inviting new tastebuds to sit around the board table. Yes, it is risky (it has burned me more than once) but well worth the effort. Openly discuss your ideological framework with your team and ask about its relevancy. Reward attempts to ferment new things.
Note: Thanks to Bob Blincoe’s blog for the reminder and quote used above (https://robertblincoe.blog).