In the seas of change and cultural confusion, I see a generation of world changers arising.
Are you one?
Do you ache to see something good happen in this world?
Are you longing to give your life to something bigger than yourself?Do you have a genuine love and desire for Jesus?
I see these hungry disciples with their hearts stirring within them, but lacking guidance or a clear path forward... They're waiting for someone who can show them the way into a life of meaning and purpose executed on a completely different landscape than the world we once knew.
A NEW MOVEMENT FOR A NEW MOMENT IN HISTORY
If I may boldly declare, God is birthing a new movement in North America, a new spiritual awakening that is stirring in the hearts and lives of this generation. This is not because our previous generations have failed, or that the traditional church is bad. Every Jesus-believing generation stands on the shoulders of faithful men and women who have gone before.
NOTE: We will offer them our honor, gratitude, and respect, always.
Still, we are reeling from the radical shift in the Western world over the last few decades (much longer than that actually). The same way the printing press acted as a world-changing catalyst that led to the Rennaissance, Enlightenment, and Reformation, the World Wide Web birthed an unprecedented time in global history. With accelerating levels of change, every culture now interfaces at complex and intimate levels of interaction and socio-networking. That kind of global interfacing necessitates a re-evaluation of each individual culture. In many cases, this interfacing has become its own catalyst for a kind of deconstruction and reconstruction process where certain paradigms that cannot co-exist within this multi-cultural community are replaced with ones that can.
As a millennial, and maybe as a Canadian, I cannot avoid or deny the reality of a collapsed cultural construct, that the "modern" culture (as in Age of Reason) has essentially collapsed in the Western world partially due to its incongruence with multi-cultural interfacing. I now think of millennials as a transition generation. We were raised primarily within the "modern" cultural constructs only to step across the chasm of child to adult and discover it in ruins. Instead, we faced an entirely different world for which we were never prepared. Out of this great struggle came the quickly adopted phrase, adulting!
If you resonate with that, then you may also resonate with the feeling that you no longer fit. That a gap exists between you and other aspects of our Western society. You know you can't go back and be what your parents were, what their parents were. You can't exactly think the way they think or experience the way they experience life. And yet, there is no clear path forward! There is no new way to step into. A whole lot of people are looking for it, claiming to have found it, trying to deliver it, and yet... something still lacks.
NEW WINE (waiting for new wineskins)
I believe that God is faithful to each generation. He never abandons His people, but always makes provision. He has prepared the way with new wine for a new age!
Do you have new wine inside of you that is meant for a new wineskin? Jesus mentions a tension that exists when new wineskin is kept within old wineskins:
"Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved." (Matthew 9:17, NIV)
Old wineskins are not bad. They aren't wrong or evil or the cause of all our problems! They are the testimony of God's faithfulness to our spiritual mothers and fathers and the systems within which we were raised. Still, new wine doesn't find its fit within an old wineskin. Rather, a feeling of pressure and discomfort starts to build within those who carry new wine inside of them.
Some of you have been angry at the church, but you need to redirect your passion toward blessing the church and trusting God to provide a new wineskin within which you can release the new wine He has put inside of you.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: New Wine does not refer to a new gospel! There is only one new wineskin and that is the new covenant of salvation found in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. This will never change. Our gospel is not changing. Our Jesus is not changing. The Word of God is not changing. Rather, time is changing. Culture is changing. The system within which the gospel of Jesus Christ pulses with new, living, saving potential is changing.
UNPRECEDENTED PEOPLE (people who change the world)
I believe God is raising up an incredible army of faithful followers of Jesus Christ who carry new wine and will release an unprecedented move of God that is divinely appointed for such a time as this. God has entrusted us with a most profound cultural moment. Will we steward the grace (new wine) He's poured into us for the gospel of Jesus Christ to be made known in this generation and the next?
If this resonates with you, if you are called by God to this end, then I am called to you!
I am called to gather, heal, train, and send Unprecedented People - followers of Jesus Christ who carry this grace (new wine) to unleash an unprecedented move of God for such a time as this. I believe we're about to unleash an outpouring of His presence that will not look like anything we've seen previously. (Again, not a new gospel, but a fresh system within which we can unite, transform, and release the saving power and presence of the living God.)
Together, let's keep in step with His Spirit and pioneer forward into a new global age. We will have front row seats to the miraculous work of God building a new wineskin before our very eyes!
"See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."
Isaiah 43:19, NIV