New Wine, Old Wineskins — How Movements Change Everything
THE SHOCK ABSORBER
Albert Camus described the Netherlands as a nation of pipe smokers watching the same rainfall on the same canal. It was not, by any account, a hotbed of revolution.
And then, in less than two years, it completely flipped.
A radical student union replaced a conservative one. A window cleaner named Robert Grootveld started staging bizarre street happenings around a statue in Amsterdam, dressed as a shaman, inviting crowds to burn cigarettes. When Princess Beatrix married a German aristocrat who had served in the Wehrmacht, protesters responded with smoke bombs and absurdist stunts — including plans, never executed, to put LSD in the drinking water and smear lion faeces from the zoo around the town. The police responded with force, live on television. The mayor and police chief were ousted. The city changed posture completely.
And out of that same cultural upheaval came Total Football.
What happens when institutions can't keep up with culture, why the answer has always been a movement, and what the church is supposed to do about it.
Total Football as Cultural Movement
Total Football, that begun with Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff at Ajax Amsterdam set in motion a lineage that runs through the entirety of modern football. Constant interchange of position, relentless pressing, the idea that any player can play anywhere on the pitch — didn't emerge from a tactics board in isolation. It emerged from the same Dutch culture that had just discovered that a conservative society could flip in two years when the right movement caught fire. Freedom within a structure. The individual liberated by the collective framework rather than constrained by it.
The Brazilian Jogo Bonito — the beautiful game, individual freedom and flair — was partly an expression of a militaristic authoritarian government wanting to use football to establish a national identity. The 1950 Maracanazo, when Uruguay beat Brazil, was a national trauma echoes throughout Brazilian football to this day. Dutch total football carried the same freedom-within-structure ethos that was reshaping Dutch society. Termed the world game, football and culture don't run in parallel.
And the church, is the same.
The World Before the Industrial Revolution
To understand what the Industrial Revolution did to the church, you have to understand what the world looked like before it.
In 1745, approximately 75% of people in England lived in villages. People didn't travel. Accents varied because nobody moved enough to flatten the differences. The fiddle was played differently in different Irish villages because musicians never left their villages to hear how anyone else played.
Faith was transmitted in that world through the parish system. The local church was at the centre of village life. Generation passed faith to generation across communities. The institution worked because the culture was stable.
The steam engine changed everything. Machines could do the work of a hundred labourers. Jobs in the countryside evaporated. People flooded to the cities, to Manchester, to Sheffield, to London, where those same steam engines were driving the power looms that needed workers. Within a generation, 75% of people lived in cities. The parish infrastructure, spread across an emptying countryside, was suddenly serving nobody. The city churches couldn't cope with the burgeoning slums.
The Luddites and the Machine
The cottage industries that had sustained women across England for generations were wiped out by the power looms. The Luddites, now a byword for technology resistance, were actually a proto-feminist movement: women trying to defend their livelihoods, their craftsmanship and their economic independence against the factories that were replacing them.
The daughters who once sat beside their mothers learning the craft of weaving were now standing for long hours in front of machines, some already stooped at ten years old, their bodies malformed from the labour. The crime rate in the cities skyrocketed. Prisons filled. The old ships from the Battle of Trafalgar became prison hulks on the Thames. And then, when those filled up, a fleet was dispatched to the other side of the world.
The church, which should have been responding to the human crisis unfolding in front of it, was largely paralysed. Tied to the Crown in the case of the Church of England, politically cautious about ministering to the poor in ways that might stoke revolution, opened its doors and hoping people would come.
Robert Raikes and the Accidental Movement
Robert Raikes was not a clergyman. He was a layman who noticed the Olivers running around the streets of Gloucester and did something about it by inviting them into his home. He taught them to read, using the Bible. He found friends who were excited about what he was doing, and they started a Sunday School newspaper.
That newspaper spread across England, crossed to America, arrived in Australia. Within eight years of Raikes starting his home gatherings, Thomas Hassall in Parramatta was running the first Sunday School in Australia, teaching Anglo and Aboriginal children in the same room. A glimpse of a different kind of Australia, gathered around the gospel.
The institution couldn't solve the problem. But the movement could.
This is the pattern that Max Weber, the founding sociologist, identified as the archetype of all movements: a charismatic leader gathers people, teaches them, the teaching gets systematised and spread by what Weber called priests or bureaucrats, and the idea propagates without requiring the physical presence of the originator. Jesus doesn't need to be everywhere because the Bible can be everywhere. And for Christians, there's the further dimension Weber doesn't account for: the Holy Spirit, who dwells within the community so that Christ is genuinely present wherever his people gather.
Jesus' wineskins metaphor is movement theory: you can't pour new wine into old wineskins. The new covenant couldn't be contained in the old institutional forms of the old covenant. It needed new wineskins, new structures that could hold the movement rather than constraining it.
Mark Senter's 50-Year Cycles
Mark Senter's framework gives historical structure to what Raikes started. He identifies 50-year cycles of youth ministry innovation, each one beginning as a movement in response to a cultural crisis the existing institutions couldn't address:
The Sunday School and YMCA addressed the crisis of industrialisation and urban poverty.
Christian Endeavour came fifty years later with a different emphasis.
Young Life and Youth for Christ in the 1940s inspired by Jim Rayburn's relational youth ministry, addressed the crisis of the generation gap and the emergence of a distinct youth culture.
Each cycle started as an organic movement and institutionalised over time.
Senter predicted in his 1992 book that the 90s would begin a new cycle. But unlike previous cycles, he didn't expect it to produce one dominant model that would be exported globally. The postmodern fragmentation of youth culture into subcultures meant the new cycle would be characterised by a plurality of models, many movements rather than one.
The Youth Ministry Wars
In Sydney in the 90s, this played out in the Youth Ministry Wars. Two super models were fighting for dominance. The funnel model, inherited from earlier decades, associated with Tim Hawkins and Cameron Hyslop, said: run a big, culturally connected youth group, get as many kids as possible through the door, then funnel the interested ones into Bible study and church.
The discipleship model, associated with Ken Moser and No Guts No Glory, said: close the big Friday night groups, run a small Bible study before church on Sunday night, rely on peer-to-peer evangelism.
Both were responses to the same crisis: the retention problem. By the 1980s, it was becoming undeniable that the youth group model was producing a lot of kids who enjoyed youth group and then left the church the moment they aged out. The question was what to do about it.
Soul Revival, fell into a third way without quite knowing the war was happening. They weren't consciously positioning against either super model. What followed wasn't a strategy, it was a community. That community, it turned out, was expressing something that the Youth Ministry Wars were debating in the abstract.
When YouthWorks College was established in 2000, the Sydney Diocese largely consolidated around a discipleship-focused model, which was good in many ways, but risks prematurely closing a conversation that Senter's framework suggests should stay open. The freedom to keep innovating, to keep developing new approaches for new subcultures and new contexts, is exactly what the current 50-year cycle was supposed to produce.
New Wine Needs New Wineskins
The parallel with Total Football is sharp. Football, too, was consolidating around dominant models in the postmodern era, and then globalisation changed the conversation again. You can watch almost any game from anywhere in the world now. The tactical innovations that used to surprise at the World Cup are now shared and adapted and countered in real time across every league on the planet.
The church faces the same globalisation pressure. Models developed in one context get exported and adopted globally before anyone has worked out whether they fit the new soil. All of them developed in particular cultural contexts, all of them helpful in their contexts, all of them potentially constraining when applied as universal solutions.
Jesus said it two thousand years ago: new wine needs new wineskins. The movement of the gospel always finds new forms when the old ones can no longer hold it. The institution is necessary, it preserves what matters, holds the theological core, provides the stability that allows the community to form. But when culture shifts faster than the institution can adapt, the movement springs up outside the institution, solves the problem the institution couldn't, and eventually becomes an institution itself.
Robert Raikes didn't plan to start a global movement. He just noticed some kids who needed help and did something about it.
That's always how it starts.
Discussed on this episode
Mark Senter - The Coming Revolution in Youth Ministry
Mark Senter - Four Views of Youth Ministry
Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast.
The Shock Absorber is a podcast for church leaders doing church a little differently. Next episode: the tangibles of church project management. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Email Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au, and join the Shock Absorber Network at shockabsorber.com.au.
Soul Revival Church is an Anglican church in the Sutherland Shire and Ryde.