Lessons from the Daily Office.

Mark 2:21-22 is the New Wine into New Wineskins passage.

In The Open Secret, Lesslie Newbigin advocates for indigenous missions and churches to have almost immediate control over their formation and discipleship. His biggest point is that the culture they have been called to creates new ways of understanding holiness and Christian living. If Western ideas are pressed (remember Newbigin was writing about experiences from the mid-20th century), we will actually stunt the formation and growth of these new people groups discovering Christ.

This isn’t allowing the change of the gospel, but new ways to understand and apply old/classic orthodoxy into specific modern cultures. As we enter into a wildly different world in the 21st century, I think there might be a mindfulness of allowing this sort of adaptation to take place.

Too much of our faith practice today is reacting to new things, things which have only been in our cultural moment for a handful of years. The problem is we have a chain of reactions over the last decade that keep us spiraling into a doom loop of ex-carnation.