Dear friends of New Wineskins,

We’ve recently had some new developments, and I need your input to help us navigate our future.

First, if you’ve been attending regularly, I just want to say thank you! We’ve had some great conversations these past few months. If you haven’t been here for awhile, I hope you’ll come back soon. We miss you! If you haven’t yet attended one of our gatherings, I hope you’ll check us out soon. We always need new perspectives and new voices.

When I started New Wineskins back in May of this year, my hope was that we’d start to develop a community of people who could come together, share deep questions & doubts about faith, be open to talking about hard issues, and find ways to look past different doctrinal positions and opinions so that we could learn to love better. Certainly, that is happening, and again, I thank those of you who have been involved.

I also hoped that we could develop a forum for various voices to share their hearts and passions through a variety of ways…not just through speaking, but through art, music, poetry, performance, writing, etc. And while we have indeed had a few remarkable guest presenters, this particular part of the vision for New Wineskins has not materialized to the extent I’d hoped. As a result, I’m beginning to struggle to come up with new topics/presentations for each gathering.

So, we now face a bit of a crossroads. Because I’ve recently accepted a part-time job as a youth director at a local church, my time to develop programs for New Wineskins every other week is a bit more constrained. In addition, our attendance has dropped over the past month or so to about half of what it was in May, June & July.

So here’s where I need your help. If we wish to continue meeting every other week, I’ll need some help coming up with topics/presentations. Even if you’re not comfortable speaking in front of the group, please send me your ideas & suggestions. If you would like to share some kind of art, music, poetry or other kind of performance piece, I think those would all be fantastic expressions to bring to our group.

Another option may be to cut our meeting frequency back to once per month instead of every other week. Certainly there are pros & cons to this approach. I need to hear your thoughts.

Finally, we may just decide that New Wineskins has run its course for the time being. That’s a perfectly legitimate conclusion.

New Wineskins belongs to you. I need to hear your opinions. Please comment below, post your thoughts on our Facebook Events Page, message me privately, send me an email to faithrants@gmail.com, or call or text me at 304.481.5683.

Shalom,
Joe