Shrinking Jeans And Broken Bottles

Can you imagine Wheaties trying to market their product with a picture of Bruce Genner on the box? Does anyone in here 20 and under even know who Bruce Genner is?

Unthinkable. If you want to sell Wheaties to a 2006 consumer market, you probably need to get like…Peyton Manning on there or something.

So to address the real issue, Jesus uses a common sense illustration in his day to say this: In order for God to continue his mission to reconnect people to himself, we have to recognize that there is a new way of doing it. It’s called Grace. It isn’t no longer about religion and carrying out systematic acts of worship – it is about relationship and pursuing worship in every aspect of who we are.

Jesus is saying. It is a new day in the kingdom of God. And this day doesn’t call for heavy fasting, it calls for feasting on this new wine that God is sending into the world.

And just like the religious leaders of the day, every church in every generation is faced with the same decision. Are we willing to see that God is a God of freshness and creativity and newness and that he recognizes that in order to communicate his message of reconnection to the ever changing world – it takes freshness and creativity and newness. It takes a church that is willing to say the old was good and it worked – but it Was good and it DID work and that doesn’t mean that it will now. Every church in every generation has the responsibility to ask itself are we willing to make the shift to keep the mission moving?

Homecomings are typically days when people from history come back to a place to recall the part of their spiritual past that this church played. Keep in mind that the reason you had a spiritual experience here is because somebody at some time was willing to say – we’ve got to keep moving forward so that we can keep connecting people to Jesus.

And my prayer for this place, whether I am leading or not, is that every year when people come back for homecoming they will be able to say – this place has really changed…look at all these people. There are new visions, and values and stories because we were willing to say “let’s keep moving forward.”

I can’t allow this moment to go by without saying how humbled I am and grateful I’ll ever be for those who came before and said “we must keep moving forward…it’s that big a deal”

I think often of men I don’t even know. Sid Woodruff and Richard Kiser and Ken Hensley and many others whose names I don’t know. These men and some of you were willing to keep moving forward. Who were open to the idea that just like with fasting in the O.T. – certain leadership structures and styles of worship and dress codes and whatever could never be more important than the central mission of what we now call “connecting people to Jesus Christ and a community of people committed to total life change.”

Thank you for the past and your courage and boldness and guts…..but get ready. Because it is safe to say that the world is moving a bit faster these days and that is going to take creative courage on our part to take this amazing message into the culture.