Dear Friends,

I still remember sitting at the bar of the old Marietta Brewing Company one April afternoon back in 2014, texting a couple friends about how we could start something new for people in the Mid-Ohio Valley area who were—for lack of a better way of putting it—sick of church. One of the Brewery’s owners stopped by to chat and I asked her just out of curiosity how often they rented out their banquet space on Sunday evenings.

“Almost never,” she answered. “If you want it for a church thing it’s yours…no extra charge.”

And New Wineskins was born.

I also still remember showing up at the Brewery a few weeks later on the evening of May 4, 2014, wondering if any of the 40-some people I’d invited by email the week before would join me. I recall telling my wife that I’d be happy if seven or eight people turned out.

When 30+ folks had filled the room within the first half-hour I sensed we might have tapped into a need in our local faith community. And when those people—many of whom knew me in some regard but most of whom didn’t know one another at all—opened up with all their honesty and vulnerability to ask the hard questions and have the difficult conversations their churches often wouldn’t allow, I knew we were on to something important.

For the next six years we met every other Sunday evening for what we came to call “Conversation & Community for Spiritual Exiles.” And over that time, our community grew into one that cared deeply about restorative justice, human rights, environmental stewardship, and liberation for those oppressed and marginalized by our society’s consumeristic and hyper-capitalistic systems.

When the global Coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, I bought a Zoom license and we moved our gatherings to the internet…not knowing how that would help us evolve into our next incarnation as an online community as new folks who didn’t live in our original geographic area found out about us and became part of us. We became the first fully online community to join the Reconciling Ministries Network in 2021 and helped clear a path for other small online faith communities to take shape in their own contexts.

None of this was anything I could have ever contrived on my own, and certainly nothing I could have imagined while sitting on that barstool back in April 2014. It was all truly a work of collaborative community in action. I may have had a hand on the steering wheel, but the engine has always been the people of New Wineskins.

As we gather for the final time in our Virtual Theology Pub Powered by Zoom on May 3, 2026, I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to everyone who in any way has been connected to our community. Whether you attended one gathering or many, joined us as a guest speaker, participated in any of our mutual aid projects, donated to any of our fundraisers, or took part in conversations in our Wineskins Workshops Facebook Group, you were and will always remain a part of the New Wineskins family.

As we mark our final gathering together, please note that Wineskins Workshops will remain online for the foreseeable future so that we can continue to share information and opportunities of interest. We will also continue to operate our New Wineskins Network 501c3 non-profit until October of this year, when we intend to discontinue operations after fulfilling our final sponsorship obligation with the Wild Goose Festival.

Leading the New Wineskins community for the past 12 years has been one of the absolute joys of my life. The people I’ve come to know, the stories I’ve gotten to hear and be part of, and the impact we’ve been able to make in our broader communities have given me much for which to be thankful.

In closing, I’d like to share this quote from Fr. Richard Rohr, whose work has inspired so much of who we’ve become as a faith community:

“Resurrection and renewal are, in fact, the universal and observable pattern of everything. We might just as well use non-religious terms like ‘springtime,’ ‘regeneration,’ ‘healing,’ ‘forgiveness,’ ‘life cycles,’ ‘darkness,’ and ‘light.’ If incarnation is real, and Spirit has inhabited matter from the beginning, then resurrection in multitudinous forms is to be fully expected.”

As our time as a New Wineskins community comes to a close, may we—each of us and all of us—be resurrected into the lives of the various spaces we occupy, continuing to bring life and renewal and hope into the world.

Grace & peace,

Joe