australia has some great new wines. vineyards are developing everywhere or so it seems. last sunday we visited giantsteps winery which was very contemporary and stylish. there’s a story jesus told about wine…

No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better’.

the uniting church, like so many other denominations and churches is wondering how to create newness and change whilst remaining faithful to its traditions and edges. a few thoughts in relation to wine…

the thing that struck me about the story last time i read it was the last line about old or vintage wine. once you have drunk the good stuff why would you bother experimenting with the new… so if you are in or have people who are drinking at the well of good vintage wine in churches, then great – let them keep drinking. but if there is going to be good vintage in the future we need pioneers who will go and find new soil and plant vines to begin the process of developing new wine. i have been told (not that i know a lot about it) that it might take fifteen years to go through the process of getting towards something decent. on the way there will be experiments that fail, wine that’s thrown away. but with hard work, passion, good knowledge of wine making tradions and processes, a bit of good fortune (weather conditions, soil, climate etc), and creativity the new wine will get produced. some wines will fail. that’s just part of the process. and sometimes the most unlikely ones will be amazing. if there are things learned, innovations that work, they might also flow back and renew the traditions of winemaking. but it’s new alongside the old… in the church of england we call this (thanks to rowan williams who coined the term) a mixed economy. where there is good old keep it going. and alongside that let’s develop new. this takes the threat out of it for the old. indeed the old is probably better!

i have written before about the church of england and some of the factors that i think have created the environment in which change is happening so i don’t particularly want to repeat that at any length here. but new things starting round the edges (a new congregation, a new community) has been a great way to go rather than trying to change what already exists. then alongside that have been plenty of people still working more at the centre. and that combination has been key along with a shift in environment towards openness to the new and change.

i have done a couple of training days this week – one at the uniting church synod and one at the centre for theology and ministry. one of the comments that got me really thinking was from a woman who was around 85 who said to me that the problem with church is that she knows lots of old people who don’t like it either. they are fed up with singing the same old hymns and want some more action out there in the world! that fascinated me – i think we have told ourselves a story in many places that traditional church is working for the older people. but i have increasingly noticed that church hasn’t just dried up in places for the younger people and adults – lots of people are struggling with it. so maybe a nuance we could add to the new wine/old wine is there is the danger that the old gets kept too long and where we think it’s going to be great, it turns out it has peaked and may even have become undrinkable which is why we’ll always need the new as well as the old to keep the tradition being renewed and alive…

my last thought on wine is that sometimes the old vineyards just when we think they have resisted change and are about to die get a good year or their wisdom honed over decades pays dividends. i am getting increasingly irritated at the church’s capacity to write other parts or denominations or approaches off. every part has its edge and gift to bring and we all only see in part – i’ve got loads of blind spots. the body is only a body with all the parts. i showed a dvd clip in a worship session that i led that we have used at grace before now from david attenborough’s planet earth deserts programme where the desert blooms with life – the water only comes sometimes once every 30 years. but it still blooms where it seems there is no life at all and it could never come again. just when we write somebody or a denomination or a community off that can happen – i actually think there is something about the christian story that suggests we should expect god to surprise us in those kind of scenarios!

other things i have been up to… i joined with the upper room, a young adults gathering round meal tables to join a discussion on community, caught a coffee with paul arnott who heads up cms in victoria, and met with barb from solace and a few others in a pub conversation to compare notes. i also met with mark sayers who used to work with forge, but now heads up uber and one of the red communities. i’ll say more about him perhaps in another post. it’s also been good to catch up with mark pierson again who is in town for a few days.

there is loads going on in melbourne – at least that’s my observation as an outsider – lots of creativity, wonderful people, good thinking. lots of it is small and fragile (no surprise – it’s not vintage yet). there is plenty of reason to feel hopeful about the future against the statistical odds…