That is what I appreciated most about the book. Glahn is not merely making an argument for greater inclusion by locating a few forgotten women and adding them back into the conversation. She is asking a hermeneutical question: are we actually reading these stories according to the way they were written? That takes the conversation beyond the usual arguments over office, authority, ordination, or a handful of disputed Pauline texts. Before we decide what women may or may not do in the church, we probably ought to take a more careful look at what women are already doing in the biblical narrative and, just as importantly, how the narrators themselves evaluate them. In that respect, Glahn’s work feels at home alongside Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg, whose studies of Hebrew narrative have reminded us that characterization, repetition, dialogue, narrative gaps, irony, and literary placement are not decorative features surrounding theology; they are often the very means through which the theology of the story is communicated.²

Tamar in Genesis 38 is a particularly good example. I have heard that chapter treated for years as though it were something of an awkward interruption in the Joseph story, almost as if Genesis wandered off topic for a moment before returning to Egypt in chapter 39. But once we begin paying attention to literary placement, the chapter becomes considerably more interesting. Judah has just participated in the betrayal and sale of his brother, and then the narrative turns immediately toward Judah’s own moral failure with Tamar. He withholds from her what he owes, and she eventually forces the truth into the open. The turning point is Judah’s own acknowledgment that she is more righteous than he is. When Judah appears again later in Genesis, something has changed. The brother who participated in selling Joseph is eventually willing to offer himself in place of Benjamin. Genesis 38 therefore looks less like an interruption and more like one of the places where Judah is being transformed. Tamar is not incidental to that transformation; in a meaningful sense she becomes one of its catalysts.

The ancient Near Eastern texture adds another important layer. Tamar is not operating within a modern world of autonomous relationships and individualized economics. Her life is embedded in kinship, household continuity, inheritance, offspring, widowhood, and the responsibilities of the patriarchal household. John Walton has repeatedly cautioned modern interpreters against treating the ancient world as though its social institutions functioned like our own, and that warning is particularly important here.³ Tamar’s actions remain provocative, but the social world of Genesis makes it increasingly difficult to portray her merely as a sexually questionable woman. She is a widow whose future has become precarious because Judah has failed to carry out an obligation that bears directly upon her place in the household and upon the continuation of the family line. The narrator ultimately allows Judah himself to pronounce the moral judgment. In cases like this, historical context does not explain the text away; it often strips away assumptions that later readers have unconsciously added to it.

I found myself thinking similarly when Glahn turned to Exodus 1–2. We naturally remember Moses as the great human figure in the confrontation with Pharaoh, but the resistance to Pharaoh begins before Moses ever walks into the royal court. Shiphrah and Puah refuse the king’s genocidal command. Moses’ mother preserves her son. His sister watches over him. Pharaoh’s own daughter ultimately participates in undermining her father’s decree. The literary irony is hard to miss once someone points it out: Pharaoh decides that the Hebrew boys are the threat and allows the girls to live, yet women repeatedly become the agents through whom his attempt to destroy Israel is frustrated.

There is another subtle narrative texture here that I think Glahn rightly invites us to notice. Exodus begins with shemot, “names,” and yet Pharaoh remains unnamed while Shiphrah and Puah are explicitly remembered. In the ideological world of the ancient Near East, kings are normally the people whose names endure. Royal inscriptions, monuments, dynasties, military accomplishments, and building projects all worked toward the preservation of royal memory. Yet Exodus turns that world upside down. The most powerful man in Egypt becomes simply “Pharaoh,” while two apparently insignificant Hebrew midwives are preserved by name within Israel’s sacred memory. This is exactly where literary reading and ancient cultural background belong together. Walton’s work on the conceptual world of the Old Testament and the broader cultural-background approach associated with scholars such as Craig Keener remind us that biblical texts constantly converse with the assumptions of the worlds in which they were written.⁴ In Exodus, that conversation becomes wonderfully subversive: empire decides who matters, but Israel’s God remembers differently.

The daughters of Zelophehad brought me back to the same observation. Mahlah, Noa, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah are five names that many readers of Scripture could probably not retrieve without looking them up, and yet Numbers goes out of its way to preserve them. Their request in Numbers 27 can sound to modern ears like an early dispute over property rights, but that description is probably too thin. Land in Israel is tied to household, tribe, inheritance, ancestral continuity, and participation in the future of the covenant community. Their concern that their father’s name might disappear because he has no son is therefore not merely economic. They are asking whether their household will continue to have a place in Israel’s inheritance. Moses brings the matter before YHWH, and the divine response vindicates their claim and contributes to the development of Israel’s inheritance law. In other words, the narrative does not portray these women as troublesome exceptions to the system but as people whose discernment helps Israel more faithfully understand covenantal justice.

This also places Glahn in an interesting conversation with several recent books on women and Scripture. Nijay Gupta’s Tell Her Story operates primarily in the world of the New Testament and early Christianity, recovering women such as Phoebe, Prisca, Junia, and others whose leadership and ministry can disappear when the early church is reconstructed primarily through male figures.⁵ Cynthia Long Westfall’s Paul and Gender approaches the question from Pauline theology, rhetoric, social context, and linguistic analysis, while Philip Payne’s The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood works directly through many of the passages traditionally used to construct gender hierarchy.⁶ Glahn is doing something slightly different from all three. She is not primarily beginning with the disputed “women in ministry” texts and then defending a position. She is stepping farther back and asking whether our entire biblical imagination has been shaped by the way we have selected, characterized, and retold these stories. I think that makes her book especially useful pastorally because it reaches readers before the argument becomes a debate over positions.

That same methodology becomes particularly important when we reach the Samaritan woman in John 4. Christian retellings have often supplied an extraordinary amount of information that John himself never gives us. She is frequently described as promiscuous, socially ostracized, and forced to collect water at noon because the other women of the village reject her. Yet John never says any of those things. Jesus says she has had five husbands and that the man she presently has is not her husband, but the Gospel does not tell us how those marriages ended. In a first-century world in which women generally possessed considerably less social and legal power within marriage, widowhood, divorce, repudiation, infertility, and economic vulnerability all become relevant possibilities. Craig Keener’s cultural-background work is particularly helpful here because it reminds interpreters that the social world surrounding the text must constrain our reconstruction rather than our modern assumptions filling in the gaps.⁷ This does not prove that the woman was morally innocent in every respect; it simply asks us not to convict her of sins the narrator does not identify.

What becomes far more interesting to me is John’s literary placement of the encounter. John 3 gives us Nicodemus: male, Jewish, educated, respected, religiously credentialed, and approaching Jesus in darkness. John 4 then places before us a Samaritan woman who occupies almost every opposite social category. Yet she enters into an extended theological conversation with Jesus, recognizes progressively more about his identity, and becomes instrumental in bringing her village toward him. Read alongside Nicodemus, the effect is difficult to miss. John appears to enjoy overturning the categories by which readers decide in advance who is most likely to understand Jesus. Glahn’s larger argument works particularly well here because the woman’s significance does not need to be imported into the story from a contemporary gender agenda. It is already built into John’s narrative architecture.

This is where I think A Woman’s Place Is in the Story makes its most enduring contribution. It is certainly a book about women, but underneath that it is really a book about how we read Scripture. It asks us to slow down long enough to distinguish the biblical narrator from the interpretive traditions we have inherited. That does not mean tradition is always wrong, nor does it mean every neglected woman must become the secret hero of her story. Jezebel, after all, really is condemned. But even there the question matters: what does the biblical text actually condemn her for? Her sins in Kings are tied to idolatry, royal abuse, murder, and the seizure of Naboth’s ancestral inheritance. Later Christian imagination has sometimes transformed “Jezebel” into a vaguely sexualized accusation directed toward manipulative, assertive, or powerful women. The distance between those two things is a reminder that interpretation can accumulate traditions that eventually feel biblical simply because we have repeated them long enough.

Conclusion: Telling the Story More Faithfully

The longer I sat with Glahn’s work, the more I found myself thinking beyond questions of interpretation and toward the actual life of the church. Hermeneutics never really stays in the classroom. The way we read Scripture eventually becomes the way we preach, the way we lead, the way we recognize gifting, the way we form young people, and even the way we imagine who God is likely to use. If we repeatedly tell the biblical story in a way that highlights male courage while overlooking female courage, celebrates male leadership while treating women as peripheral, or assigns motives to women that the text itself never gives them, those patterns eventually become part of the spiritual imagination of a congregation.

That is why I think A Woman’s Place Is in the Story is worth reading beyond the academic conversation. Pastors should read it. Teachers should read it. Men who have spent years teaching Scripture should read it. Women who have sometimes wondered whether there is really room for their voice in the story should read it. Not because every reader will agree with every interpretive conclusion, but because Glahn forces us to ask a more fundamental question: have we been telling the whole story?

For me, that connects deeply with what we have tried to pursue through Expedition 44. Discipleship is not simply collecting correct propositions. It is learning to see the world through the story of God and then allowing that story to reshape the way we live. Jesus was constantly restoring people whom religious systems had learned not to see. He noticed the woman touching the edge of his garment when everyone else saw only the crowd. He allowed Mary to sit in the posture of a disciple. He received theological confession from Martha. He entrusted resurrection witness to women whose testimony carried little public weight in their surrounding culture. Again and again, the kingdom seems to arrive through people whom others have pushed toward the margins.

That should make us careful about whom we overlook in our own churches.

There may be a woman sitting quietly in the congregation who sees something in the text the rest of us have missed. There may be a young girl growing up in the church who needs to hear not merely that she is valuable, but that women have always been woven into the redemptive story as prophets, patrons, witnesses, teachers, disciples, leaders, mothers, theologians, and courageous agents of God’s purposes. There may also be men whose own discipleship becomes richer when they learn to receive wisdom and leadership from sisters in Christ rather than instinctively assuming that spiritual authority always arrives through a male voice.

That is where Glahn’s book becomes more than a corrective. It becomes an invitation. Return to the text. Read more slowly. Notice who is named. Notice who speaks. Notice who sees what others miss. Notice who acts faithfully when the expected heroes fail. Notice where the narrator places moral weight. And then ask whether our churches are making room for the same kinds of people God consistently makes room for in Scripture.

I would recommend A Woman’s Place Is in the Story especially to pastors, ministry leaders, Bible teachers, and anyone involved in spiritual formation. Read it with an open Bible. Read it in conversation with the ancient world. Read it alongside the larger body of scholarship on women and Scripture. But perhaps most importantly, read it with your own church in mind. The goal is not to manufacture a different biblical story. The goal is to recover the one that is already there and then have the courage to let that story form our communities more faithfully.

Notes

1. Sandra L. Glahn, A Woman’s Place Is in the Story (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2026).
2. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011), esp. his discussions of repetition, characterization, dialogue, and narrative reticence; & Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
3. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
4. Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014).
5. Nijay K. Gupta, Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023).
6. Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016)
7. Keener, IVP Bible Background Commentary

There are places in Caputo’s theological language where I would want to make distinctions or add qualifications, particularly when words such as faith and miracle are extended into the language of organizational development. Yet his central instincts about leadership intersect with several important biblical themes. Scripture does not prescribe modern democratic governance as the singular biblical model, but it repeatedly challenges forms of authority that accumulate power for their own sake. Jesus’ teaching on leadership is particularly important here. In Mark 10:42–45, after James and John seek privileged positions in the kingdom, Jesus points to the political structures familiar to the disciples: “those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.” The verbs are significant. Katakyrieuō carries the sense of exercising mastery or domination, while katexousiazō emphasizes the forceful exercise of authority. Jesus’ response is emphatic: ouch houtōs de estin en hymin, “but it is not so among you.”¹

Jesus does not abolish leadership in this passage; he radically alters its direction. Greatness is measured by service, and authority is directed toward the flourishing of the people under its care. Luke preserves the same teaching in the context of the Last Supper. While the disciples argue about which of them should be considered greatest, Jesus contrasts the rulers of the nations with his own kingdom and says, “I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:24–27). This is one of the clearest examples of what we often describe as the upside-down kingdom of Jesus. The kingdom does not simply replace one hierarchy with another hierarchy occupied by better people. Jesus questions the assumptions beneath hierarchy itself: greatness descends, authority serves, and the one who leads takes the posture normally assigned to the least important person in the room.

John 13 makes the same point narratively. Jesus knows that the Father has given “all things” into his hands, yet his response to that authority is to rise from the table, wrap himself in a towel, and wash his disciples’ feet. The action is striking precisely because Jesus is not relinquishing authority. He is showing what divine authority looks like when it becomes visible. The one who possesses genuine authority uses it to serve, cleanse, prepare, and dignify others. Caputo’s leadership model is not identical to Johannine Christology, of course, but his insistence that leaders can use authority to release the capacities of others belongs within the same broad moral world.

This becomes especially evident when Caputo describes the movement of decision-making closer to teachers and classrooms. He repeatedly emphasizes that leaders did not simply remove structure and walk away. Teachers were trained, supported, given resources, and then trusted to exercise responsibility. Freedom without formation can become chaos, but control without freedom can prevent maturity. The New Testament often holds the two together. Paul’s description of leadership in Ephesians 4 is a useful example. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry” (Eph 4:11–12). The noun katartismos carries the idea of preparing, furnishing, or bringing something into proper working condition.² Leaders therefore do not exist primarily to perform the work while everyone else watches. Their work includes preparing the larger body to participate.

Paul’s argument reaches its climax in Ephesians 4:16, where the body grows as “each part does its work.” That is remarkably close to one of the best features of Caputo’s story. His teachers became more creative because leadership created space for them to exercise gifts already present among them. Parents discovered ways to contribute. Students encountered classrooms shaped by experimentation, art, nature, mathematics, technology, theater, and community participation. Caputo describes the school less as a machine executing a centralized program and more as an environment in which many people learned to contribute to a shared life.

First Corinthians 12 provides another important biblical parallel. Paul describes the church as one body composed of many differentiated members. The Spirit distributes charismata, gifts of grace, among the whole community. No single member possesses everything necessary for the body’s life. The eye needs the hand, the head needs the feet, and even the members that appear weaker are described as indispensable.³ The point is not democracy in the modern political sense, but interdependence. Healthy communities are structured in ways that recognize that meaningful contribution is distributed broadly rather than concentrated narrowly.

Caputo eventually uses the metaphor of a jazz ensemble to describe what happened at Key Largo. The school was not an orchestra controlled at every moment by one conductor. It had a common theme, but participants were given room to improvise within it. That metaphor is perhaps closer to Paul’s body language than Caputo himself intended. Biblical unity does not require sameness. In Paul’s communities, unity exists because people with different gifts remain coordinated around a common Lord, a common Spirit, and a common good.

The story of Moses and Jethro in Exodus 18 offers an older biblical example of the same leadership problem. Moses has become the single point through which the disputes of Israel must pass, and Jethro immediately sees that the arrangement is unsustainable: “What you are doing is not good” (Exod 18:17). The problem is not that Moses lacks authority but that authority has become unnecessarily concentrated. Jethro’s solution is to identify ʾanšê-ḥayil, capable and trustworthy people, and entrust genuine responsibility to them.⁴ Moses continues to lead, but leadership becomes distributed. The result is not the abandonment of authority but the multiplication of responsible leadership.

Caputo’s experience with school discipline reveals a similar movement. The faculty eventually concluded that student behavior could not simply be treated as a problem for the principal to solve. Discipline had to become part of the shared life of the community. Caputo writes that they began to understand discipline less as controlling children and more as creating a community in which teachers, parents, and students shared responsibility for how they lived and learned together. The biblical word paideia is useful here. Often translated “discipline,” it can refer more broadly to education, training, and the formation of character. Hebrews 12 and Ephesians 6:4 both use the term in a formative rather than merely punitive sense. Biblical discipline is ultimately concerned with what kind of person is being formed.

That concern with formation may be one of the strongest points of contact between Caputo’s educational philosophy and a Christian vision of leadership. Good leadership does not merely produce compliance. It develops people who can increasingly carry responsibility themselves. Paul can tell the Roman believers that they are “competent to instruct one another” (Rom 15:14), and in 1 Corinthians 14 he imagines a gathered community in which multiple people arrive prepared to contribute, while everything is ordered toward oikodomē, the building up of the whole body. The New Testament picture is neither authoritarian nor anarchic. It is ordered participation.

Caputo repeatedly argues that trust became a catalyst for this kind of maturity. Teachers who were entrusted with meaningful authority became more willing to assume responsibility, solve problems, and contribute creatively. This should not be confused with the idea that people are inherently trustworthy in every circumstance or that accountability is unnecessary. Scripture is far too realistic about human nature for that. Yet Christian leadership also cannot remain permanently suspicious of the people it claims to be forming. Eventually disciples must be permitted to act, decide, fail, learn, and mature.

Jesus himself demonstrates this pattern. He teaches the Twelve, corrects them repeatedly, gives them authority, sends them out, receives them back, and continues their formation. Luke 9–10 is particularly instructive because Jesus’ ministry begins to reproduce itself through others. They are entrusted with real participation in the mission before they fully understand everything they are doing. The kingdom advances through people whom Jesus is still forming.

This makes Caputo’s story more interesting than a simple argument for educational democracy. At its strongest, The Once and Future School is asking what authority is actually supposed to accomplish. If leadership exists primarily to preserve the leader’s control, Caputo’s experiment will always appear dangerous. If leadership exists to cultivate mature people capable of contributing to a shared mission, then distributed responsibility becomes not a threat to authority but one of its proper outcomes.

There is also something distinctly kingdom-shaped in Caputo’s insistence that the people closest to the work should be heard. The movement of Jesus consistently dignifies people whose voices were easily overlooked by conventional structures: children, women, the poor, the sick, Samaritans, tax collectors, and others located outside the centers of social prestige. This does not mean that every voice possesses equal wisdom in every matter. It does mean that proximity to status is not the same thing as proximity to truth. The kingdom repeatedly overturns assumptions about where wisdom, faithfulness, and significance will be found.

Perhaps that is one reason Caputo’s experience remains worth considering. The most important transformation at Key Largo was not architectural. It was relational and cultural. Teachers discovered greater confidence. Parents became participants. Students experienced a school that increasingly belonged to a community rather than simply being administered over one. Caputo remembers that trust began moving through the system: state leadership trusted districts, districts trusted schools, schools trusted teachers, and teachers increasingly trusted students and the communities they served.

That pattern is not a complete theology of leadership, but it is close enough to several kingdom instincts that Christian leaders should pay attention to it. Jesus consistently turns power outward. Paul understands leadership as equipping. The body of Christ depends upon the contribution of many members. Moses learns that responsible authority can be shared. Biblical freedom repeatedly becomes service rather than independence. Taken together, these themes provide a strong theological framework for appreciating what Caputo witnessed in one unusual school in the Florida Keys.

Conclusion

For the church, this may be the book’s most useful challenge. We can become very good at gathering people, teaching people, and organizing people while never actually forming them to carry responsibility in the kingdom. Jesus did something different. He called disciples close, formed them in community, entrusted them with real ministry, corrected them when they failed, and then sent them again. Discipleship was never simply the transfer of information. It was the formation of people who could increasingly participate in the life and mission of God.

That is why Caputo’s story has significance beyond Key Largo. Healthy leadership should eventually produce people who can lead, healthy teaching should produce people who can teach, and mature discipleship should produce disciples who can make disciples. A church that requires the constant presence of a few gifted leaders may be active and successful while still remaining spiritually immature. The New Testament imagines something much fuller: saints equipped for ministry, gifts released throughout the body, and ordinary people learning to carry extraordinary responsibility for the sake of others.

Perhaps the lasting gift of The Once and Future School is therefore not a particular educational model but a question every leader should be willing to ask: Are the people entrusted to us becoming more dependent upon our leadership, or are they becoming more capable of participating in the work God has given them?

The kingdom of God grows through formed people. The work of discipleship is to help form them.

ORDER YOUR COPY HERE: https://www.amazon.com/ONCE-FUTURE-SCHOOL-Democratic-Satisfaction/dp/1966448821

Endnotes

1. Walter Bauer, Frederick William Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.vv. “κατακυριεύω” and “κατεξουσιάζω”; R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 415
2. BDAG, s.v. “καταρτισμός”; Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (Dallas: Word, 1990), 252
3. Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 918
4. Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 128 & a slight reference to William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1–18, AB 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 628
5. David A. deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle “to the Hebrews” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 436
6. Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 185
7. Edward Caputo, The Once and Future School: A Model for Democratic Leadership, Teacher Satisfaction and Student Success (Stuart, FL: Panthera Publishing, 2026).

Surrender, Formation, and the Presence of the Bridegroom

“New Wine,” – soil must receive seed. Grapes must pass through the press. Vessels must be prepared before they can be filled. What God produces within a person is eventually poured out as an offering for others.[1] This draws on central language from Jesus’s teaching about new wine and wineskins in Matthew 9:14–17, Mark 2:18–22, and Luke 5:33–39. These sayings have often been detached from their Gospel setting and used to support almost any kind of religious change. New wine becomes a new ministry, worship style, spiritual movement, or church structure. Old wineskins become those who prefer established traditions.

Jesus’s meaning is richer than a general endorsement of change. His teaching concerns the arrival of the bridegroom, the formation of his disciples, and their capacity to participate in what God is doing through him. The issue is not whether new things are always better. Luke even records Jesus saying that the person accustomed to old wine will usually prefer it. The issue is whether those encountering Jesus can recognize the moment and become capable of carrying what his presence is producing.

Wine in Ancient Israel

Wine was woven into the agricultural, economic, and religious life of ancient Israel. A vineyard required cleared land, walls or hedges, pruning, protection, harvesting, and years of patient cultivation. Planting a vineyard expressed confidence that a family would remain in the land long enough to enjoy its fruit.

This explains why grain, wine, and oil frequently appear together as signs of covenant blessing (Deut 7:13; 11:14; Hos 2:8; Joel 2:19). To sit beneath one’s own vine and fig tree represented peace and freedom from oppression (1 Kgs 4:25; Mic 4:4). To plant a vineyard and have an enemy consume its fruit represented covenant judgment (Deut 28:30, 39). Wine was more than a beverage. It represented settled life, fruitful labor, communal joy, and the faithfulness of God.

At harvest, grapes were brought to a winepress. Pressing installations discovered throughout Israel commonly include an upper treading floor connected to a lower collection vat. Workers crushed the grapes underfoot, and the juice flowed through channels into the basin. Further pressure could be applied to the remaining pulp and skins. Naturally occurring yeast began transforming the juice soon after pressing.[2] The pressure of fermentation required careful attention. Ancient wine was fermented, stored, and transported in several kinds of containers. Large ceramic jars were common, while skin containers were useful for smaller amounts and transportation. These wineskins were generally made from sheep or goat hides whose openings had been sewn or tied and whose seams were treated to reduce leakage.[3]

A new skin retained enough flexibility to accommodate the movement of young wine. An older skin could become dry, weakened, or rigid. If active wine were sealed inside it, the expanding contents could rupture the container. The result would be the loss of both the wine and the skin. Jesus’s audience did not need the image explained. It belonged to the ordinary agricultural world around them.

The Hebrew Language of Wine

The most common Hebrew word for wine is יַיִן, yayin. The term appears approximately 140 times in the Hebrew Bible and has cognates in several ancient Semitic languages. It generally describes fermented wine, although its quality and strength could vary considerably.[4] The Hebrew Bible presents yayin as both gift and danger (a contranym word). Wine gladdens the human heart in Psalm 104:15 and accompanies offerings in Exodus 29:40. Melchizedek brings bread and wine to Abraham in Genesis 14:18. Yet Noah’s drunkenness exposes his household to shame, while Proverbs warns that wine can master and deceive those who consume it without wisdom (Gen 9:20–27; Prov 20:1; 23:29–35). Wine intensifies the condition of its recipient. Within a feast it can express fellowship and joy. Without restraint it exposes disorder.

A second word, תִּירוֹשׁ, tirosh, is frequently translated “new wine.” It appears primarily in descriptions of agricultural produce and covenant abundance. The word may emphasize wine as the fresh yield of the vineyard, but it should not be equated automatically with modern, unfermented grape juice. Hosea 4:11 places yayin and tirosh together among substances capable of taking away understanding.[5] The word עָסִיס, asis, describes sweet or freshly pressed wine. Joel 3:18 declares that in the day of restoration the mountains will drip with it. Amos 9:13 uses similar language when the prophet envisions Israel’s renewed land producing such abundance that the one plowing will overtake the one harvesting.

This is the larger biblical background behind Jesus’s words. New wine carried associations of harvest, restoration, celebration, and the promised renewal of Israel. When the prophets imagined the age of salvation, they often pictured wine flowing freely. Isaiah 25:6 describes YHWH preparing a feast of rich food and aged wine for all peoples. Amos imagines mountains dripping with sweet wine. Joel connects flowing wine with the day when God restores his people. Jesus did not invent a new spiritual symbol unrelated to Israel’s Scriptures. He announced that Israel’s long-awaited hope was beginning to appear in his ministry.

New Wine and Fresh Skins

The Greek wording of the Synoptic sayings contains an important distinction. The wine is οἶνος νέος, oinos neos, while the skins are ἀσκοὶ καινοί, askoi kainoi. The adjective neos commonly describes something young or recent. The wine is new because it has been newly produced and is still developing. The adjective kainos often emphasizes freshness in character or condition. The distinction should not be treated as absolute, since the meanings overlap, but Jesus’s wording is fitting. Young wine requires fresh skins capable of moving with it.[6] The container does not create the wine. It receives, protects, and carries it. Its value is determined by its ability to serve what has been placed within it. In Matthew’s version, appropriate skins allow “both” the wine and the wineskins to be preserved. Preservation is the goal.

Luke describes what happens when the vessel cannot accommodate the wine. The wine bursts the skins, spills out, and is lost. The tragedy involves more than damage to the container. What the vessel was intended to preserve is also wasted. This gives the saying a more serious meaning than a call for innovation. Churches, traditions, leadership structures, worship practices, and ministries are all vessels. They can preserve and distribute the life of the kingdom, but none of them is the kingdom itself. A new structure that fails to preserve the wine is no better than an old structure that ruptures under its pressure.

The Bridegroom and the Question of Fasting

The discussion begins when people ask why John’s disciples and the Pharisees fast while Jesus’s disciples eat and drink. Fasting was an established Jewish practice associated with repentance, mourning, crisis, and longing for God’s intervention. The question was reasonable. Why did the disciples of Jesus appear less disciplined than other serious religious communities? Jesus responded with the image of a wedding. Wedding guests do not fast while the bridegroom is with them. A time of separation will come, and then they will fast. For the present, the bridegroom has arrived and the appropriate response is celebration. The bridegroom language carries considerable theological weight. Israel’s prophets described YHWH as the husband of his covenant people (Isa 54:5–8; 62:4–5; Hos 2:14–23). By placing himself in the role of the bridegroom, Jesus identifies his ministry with the promised restoration of God’s relationship with Israel.[7] This is why the new wine belongs to a wedding. Jesus is healing the sick, forgiving sins, welcoming social outsiders, and eating with tax collectors. The kingdom is entering places where religious respectability did not expect to find it. The presence of Jesus has changed the meaning of the moment.

Fasting remains appropriate, but its meaning must now be determined in relation to him. The disciples will fast when the bridegroom is taken away. Their fasting will no longer be an undefined religious exercise. It will express longing for the bridegroom and the completion of his kingdom. The new wine therefore represents the messianic reality arriving through Jesus. Forgiveness is being announced. Outcasts are being restored. A renewed covenant community is forming around the Messiah. These developments create pressure against social and religious boundaries that cannot contain them.

Old Wineskins and the Danger of Supersessionism

Christian interpreters have sometimes identified the old wineskins with Judaism and the new wine with Christianity. According to this reading, Jesus came to replace the obsolete religion of Israel with a new religion called Christianity. This interpretation forgets that everyone participating in the discussion is Jewish. Jesus, his disciples, John’s disciples, and the Pharisees are engaged in an internal Jewish conversation about faithful practice. Jesus is not rejecting Israel’s Scriptures. He is interpreting Israel’s story around his own messianic vocation. The language of a new covenant also comes from Israel’s prophets. Jeremiah promises that YHWH will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, writing his instruction upon their hearts (Jer 31:31–34). Ezekiel describes God cleansing his people, giving them a new heart, and placing his Spirit within them (Ezek 36:25–27). Newness means that Israel’s God is acting faithfully to restore his people.

Luke adds a saying that prevents readers from treating everything old as evil: “No one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good’” (Luke 5:39). This may describe the natural human preference for what is familiar. It may also acknowledge that old wine possesses genuine value. Either way, Jesus is not promoting novelty as a spiritual virtue.[8] A similar image appears in Pirkei Avot 4:20, where teachers and students are compared to old and new wine contained in old and new vessels. The Mishnah was compiled after the New Testament period, so the saying cannot be assumed to provide the direct background to Jesus’s teaching. It does demonstrate that Jewish teachers could use wine and vessels to discuss formation, receptivity, age, and wisdom without assigning a fixed moral value to everything old or new.[9]

An old wineskin is therefore not simply an old church, an inherited liturgy, or an older generation. Young people can become rigid. New ministries can become possessive and controlling. A contemporary church can protect its methods as fiercely as the institution it once criticized. Freshness is measured by receptivity to Jesus. A suitable wineskin remains capable of being corrected, stretched, and formed by the life of the kingdom.

Crushing, Formation, and Surrender

Crushing and pressing emerges naturally from the winepress, but it must be handled carefully. Scripture sometimes uses the winepress as an image of judgment. Joel 3:13 summons the nations to the press because their wickedness is great. Isaiah 63 portrays the divine warrior with garments stained from treading the nations. Revelation later draws upon the same prophetic imagery (Rev 14:19–20; 19:15). Pain should not be romanticized as though every wound were directly inflicted by God. Abuse, injustice, illness, betrayal, and grief are not good simply because something may eventually be learned through them. The Psalms of lament give wounded people permission to protest, grieve, and ask why God seems absent.

The gospel reveals a God who enters suffering. Jesus does not stand at a safe distance from the crushing. He is betrayed, rejected, beaten, crucified, and buried. Resurrection does not declare death good. It reveals that death cannot prevent God from bringing life. Surrender, then, is not passive submission to every demand made by a religious leader. Christian surrender is yieldedness to Jesus. The hands shaping the vessel bear the wounds of the crucified Messiah. He forms people for life, communion, and service. The crushing is never the final purpose. Grapes are pressed so that wine can be produced and shared. The vessel is filled so that it can eventually pour out what it has received.

Make Us Vessels

The vessel language of the song also recalls Jeremiah’s vision of the potter reshaping clay in his hands (Jer 18:1–6). Isaiah calls God the potter and Israel the clay (Isa 64:8). Paul describes believers as fragile earthen vessels carrying extraordinary treasure so that the power will be recognized as belonging to God rather than to them (2 Cor 4:7). A vessel does not exist to admire its own fullness. Paul describes his life as being poured out like a drink offering for the faith of others (Phil 2:17; 2 Tim 4:6). What he receives from Christ becomes something he gives for the church.

This movement from receiving to giving provides an important framework for discipleship. A renewal weekend may become a concentrated space of confession, healing, communion, and renewed calling. The talks, music, testimonies, palanca, silence, and table conversations can prepare people to recognize that the bridegroom is near. They cannot manufacture the presence of Christ. They serve that presence. The weekend is also not the completion of discipleship. Participants return to their homes, churches, relationships, responsibilities, and unresolved circumstances. The lasting evidence of new wine will not be the intensity of a weekend response. It will appear in the fruit that follows: a softened heart, a courageous apology, a restored relationship, a growing hunger for Scripture, greater generosity, patient faithfulness, and an increasing resemblance to Jesus.

The deepest prayer of Weekend 53 may not be, “God, give us something new.” God has already given himself to us in Jesus and poured out his Spirit upon his people. The more searching prayer is, “Make us capable of carrying what you give.” Make us receptive to your presence. Make us flexible under the pressure of grace. Teach us to honor what came before without demanding that you act only as you have acted before. Free us from protecting religious structures after they have ceased to serve your kingdom. Form us into a community that welcomes those whom Jesus welcomes.

A wineskin never creates the wine. It receives it, stretches around it, and preserves it until the appointed time. Then it opens, and what it has carried is poured out for others. This is where the image finally leads. Jesus takes the cup and shares it with his disciples. Wine becomes a sign of covenant, communion, sacrifice, and the kingdom that will one day be fully revealed. The life received from Christ becomes a life shared around his table. The bridegroom is among us. The feast has begun. The wine is meant to be shared.

Conclusion: When the New Wine Leaves the Weekend

The prayer for new wine is a courageous prayer because it gives Jesus permission to change more than our circumstances. It invites him to search the places within us that have become rigid, guarded, wounded, or resistant. Most of us want the fruit of transformation, but we are less certain about the surrender that makes transformation possible. We want peace without releasing control, reconciliation without having the difficult conversation, freedom without naming what has bound us, and resurrection without entering the places where something old must finally die.

Jesus meets us there with patience. He does not shame the brittle places within us. He knows how they formed. Some of our defenses were built in seasons when we were trying to survive. Some of our habits grew from disappointment. Some of our hardness began as an attempt to protect a heart that had been wounded too many times. The Shepherd does not approach those places with condemnation. He comes with truth, tenderness, and healing. He shows us that what once protected us may now be preventing us from receiving the life he wants to give.

Becoming a fresh wineskin does not mean erasing your story. Jesus does not discard your history, personality, questions, or scars. He redeems them. The resurrected Christ still carried his wounds, but those wounds no longer represented the victory of death. They had become witnesses to the faithfulness of God. In the same way, surrender allows Jesus to take the places that once testified only to pain and make them testimonies of grace.

For some, the invitation of this weekend will be to forgive. Forgiveness does not pretend that the wound was insignificant. It does not eliminate healthy boundaries, excuse abuse, or instantly restore trust. Forgiveness releases the right to remain the judge and places justice into the hands of God. It loosens the grip that another person’s actions have maintained over your inner life. Sometimes forgiveness is spoken through tears. Sometimes it must be chosen many times before the heart catches up with the decision. Even then, every act of forgiveness creates space where new wine can begin to breathe.

For others, the invitation will be to receive forgiveness. Many people believe that Jesus forgives sinners in general while quietly wondering whether he has forgiven them in particular. They carry old shame into every new season. They assume that their worst moment is the truest thing about them. But the gospel does not announce that Jesus will tolerate you once you have punished yourself sufficiently. It announces that Christ has come near, entered your darkness, carried your sin, defeated the powers that held you, and opened the way home. Repentance is not crawling back to an angry God. It is turning toward the Father who has already come looking for you.

Some will need to release control. Control often disguises itself as responsibility. We tell ourselves that everything depends upon us because trusting God feels too uncertain. We manage people, anticipate every possible failure, and carry burdens that were never given to us. Eventually the soul becomes exhausted from trying to occupy a position that belongs only to God. Surrender does not mean that we stop caring or acting responsibly. It means that we obey faithfully while allowing God to remain God. We tend the vineyard, but we cannot command the rain. We prepare the vessel, but we cannot manufacture the wine.

Others may need to recover their voice. Perhaps someone taught you that humility meant silence or that submission meant disappearing. Perhaps your gifts were ignored because you did not fit someone else’s expectations. The Spirit does not fill people so they can remain hidden forever. He gives gifts for the strengthening of the body. Your voice does not need to sound like anyone else’s voice. Your testimony does not need to resemble anyone else’s story. The question is whether you will offer what God has placed within you. A quiet word spoken in obedience can carry more life than a loud word spoken for attention.

There may also be relationships that require attention when the weekend ends. New wine will eventually press against old patterns of avoidance. If the Spirit brings someone to mind, do not dismiss it as an interruption. Pray about the next faithful step. Make the call. Write the letter. Ask the question. Listen without preparing your defense. Confess your part without explaining it away. Reconciliation requires the participation of more than one person, so not every relationship can be immediately restored. You can still choose honesty, humility, forgiveness, and peace on your side of the relationship.

Do not despise small beginnings. Spiritual transformation is often quieter than we expect. We look for a dramatic moment while God begins with one honest confession, one surrendered habit, one act of generosity, or one conversation we have avoided for years. Fruit grows slowly because it is alive. A manufactured appearance can be produced quickly, but genuine formation takes time. The Father is not impatient with the pace of healthy growth.

This is why you will need community after the weekend. A wineskin is a communal image before it becomes an individual one. Jesus did not call isolated believers to manage private spiritual experiences. He gathered disciples around a table and taught them to carry one another. We need people who will remind us what God has done when our emotions change. We need friends who can celebrate our growth without flattering us, correct us without controlling us, and sit with us when there are no simple answers. Do not leave this weekend with only a memory. Leave with names, relationships, and a willingness to be known.

You should also expect resistance. A meaningful encounter with God does not remove every temptation, heal every wound overnight, or answer every question. The days following a spiritual high can feel surprisingly ordinary. That does not mean the weekend was false or that God has withdrawn. New wine develops in hidden places. What began in a moment must be carried through prayer, Scripture, communion, repentance, service, and life with the church. The work of grace continues when the music has stopped and no one is watching.

Guard what God has entrusted to you, but do not clutch it. The wine was never meant to remain sealed forever. Whatever Jesus heals in you can become a place from which you help another person heal. The comfort you have received can become comfort for someone who is grieving. The freedom you have found can become hope for someone still hiding. Your story does not make you the Savior. It allows you to point more honestly toward the one who saved you.

When you return home, ask yourself a few simple questions. What is Jesus asking me to release? Whom is he asking me to forgive? Where is he calling me to tell the truth? What gift have I kept hidden? What relationship needs a faithful next step? Where have I confused control with responsibility? How can what God has given me become life for someone else?

Do not try to answer every question at once. Begin where the Spirit has placed his finger. Obedience is often one clear step before it becomes a visible journey.

The bridegroom has not invited us to a weekend of temporary inspiration. He has invited us into his life. He is forming a people who know how to feast in his presence, fast in their longing, remain faithful through suffering, welcome the outsider, forgive as they have been forgiven, and pour themselves out in love.

So bring Jesus your whole life. Bring him the fruitful places and the barren ones. Bring him your confidence and your fear, your joy and your disappointment, your obedience and your resistance. Bring him what is still tender and what has become hard. You do not have to arrive already transformed. You only need to stop hiding from the one who transforms.

May Jesus soften what has become rigid, heal what has been wounded, and strengthen what has grown weak. May he free us from religious performance and form within us the quiet faithfulness of genuine disciples. May our homes become places of peace, our churches become tables of belonging, and our lives become vessels of his presence.

And when he pours new wine into us, may we have the courage to receive it, the patience to carry it, and the love to pour it out for others.

Notes

1. Hillsong Worship, “New Wine”, There Is More (Hillsong Music, 2018).
2. Carey Ellen Walsh, The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel (Harvard Semitic Monographs 60; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 35 & Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 167
3. David Van Limbergen et al., “Making Wine in Earthenware Vessels: A Comparative Approach to Roman Vinification,” Antiquity 98 (2024): 361
4. Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. and ed. M. E. J. Richardson, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000), 2:406
5. Hans-Jürgen Fabry, “תִּירוֹשׁ,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. David E. Green, 16 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974–2018)
6. Frederick William Danker, ed., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 497
7. A. Kee, “The Old Coat and the New Wine: A Parable of Repentance,” Novum Testamentum 12 (1970): 13
8. m. Avot 4:20. The comparison is valuable as a later Jewish parallel, but its dating requires caution when reconstructing the immediate historical background of Jesus’s saying.

These questions are not new. Frank Viola began pressing many of them decades ago, first through his early work on house churches and later through Pagan Christianity?, written with George Barna, and Reimagining Church. Viola’s critique was directed toward the institutional habits Christians often assume are prescribed in the New Testament: professional clergy, passive congregations, sermon-centered gatherings, religious buildings, and highly programmed services. His constructive proposal was an organic expression of church in which every member participates and Christ, rather than a professional minister, functions as the community’s center.¹ Whatever one makes of every historical argument advanced by Viola and Barna, they helped a generation of Christians distinguish the church described in the New Testament from the ecclesiastical customs that developed around it.

Brave Cities belongs to this same broad conversation, although McCall and Halter move beyond the living room. Their vision is neighborhood-sized and eventually city-shaped. The subtitle identifies their concern as “the archaeology, artistry, and architecture of kingdom ecosystems.” Archaeology involves digging beneath inherited church forms to recover the kingdom beneath them. Artistry refers to the imagination needed to embody the gospel within a particular community. Architecture concerns the patient construction of relationships, spaces, businesses, homes, and economic practices through which communal life can develop.

That language matters because Brave Cities is not another manual promising reproducible church growth. Its opening image, “Music Not Math,” challenges the belief that ministry can be reduced to transferable formulas. The church is closer to a song than an equation. Its life cannot be produced simply by importing someone else’s methods, terminology, service order, or leadership structure. McCall and Halter encourage communities to listen carefully—to God, to one another, and to their particular place—and then to create faithfully within that setting. A coffeehouse may become important in one city, while a farm, home, school, trade, recovery ministry, athletic program, or shared business may become central somewhere else.

Alan Hirsch’s influence can be felt throughout this approach. His work has consistently called the Western church to recover its missional identity, apostolic imagination, and capacity to operate as a movement. In The Forgotten Ways, Hirsch described the church’s “apostolic genius” as something already present within its spiritual DNA, waiting to be reactivated.² Both The Starfish and the Spirit and Brave Cities draw from this movement-oriented stream. They distrust centralized control, emphasize the gifts and agency of ordinary believers, and view multiplication as something living systems do when they are healthy. Brave Cities, however, places more attention on the physical and economic ecology in which such a movement takes root.

The Soil Beneath the Church

One of the book’s controlling metaphors is soil. Modern agriculture can sometimes force crops from depleted land through chemicals, engineered seeds, and industrial techniques. Something may grow, but the ecosystem beneath it remains unhealthy. McCall and Halter use this as an image of churches that continue producing services, programs, attendance, and religious activity while the communal soil underneath them deteriorates.

Their point is not that Sunday gatherings are inherently harmful. They explicitly acknowledge that traditional, contemporary, house, digital, large, and small churches can all serve people faithfully. Their concern is what happens when the gathering becomes the controlling definition of church. Attendance then becomes the primary evidence of faithfulness, teaching becomes concentrated in a few professionals, and most members learn to receive ministry rather than participate in it. A church can maintain excellent weekly services while remaining relationally thin and largely disconnected from the suffering of its surrounding community.

The alternative proposed in Brave Cities is a “kingdom ecosystem.” Healthy soil contains thousands of organisms interacting in ways that sustain the whole environment. In the same way, a kingdom ecosystem includes disciples, homes, businesses, gathering spaces, friendships, mentoring relationships, acts of justice, shared resources, and places of hospitality. No single element is the church by itself. Together they form a web of life through which the reign of God becomes visible within a particular place.

This ecological language is helpful because it moves the conversation away from deciding which church model is universally correct. Models tend to be copied. Ecosystems must be cultivated. A model can be transported from one city to another with little regard for context; an ecosystem grows from the history, needs, gifts, wounds, and possibilities already present in a community. Lesslie Newbigin made a related argument when he described the congregation as the hermeneutic of the gospel—a community whose shared life interprets the good news before the watching world.³ The credibility of the church’s message is inseparable from the social life created by that message.

Disciples Before Churches

McCall and Halter repeatedly return to Jesus’ investment in people. Jesus did not begin with a building campaign, weekly attractional event, or fully formed institution. He formed disciples who learned his way of life while traveling, eating, serving, confronting evil, caring for the sick, and announcing the kingdom. The book compares disciples to a cover crop planted in depleted soil. Their presence gradually restores what has been damaged.

This is one of the strongest parts of Brave Cities. Discipleship is treated as a life shared rather than a curriculum completed. Teaching still matters, but it occurs within the movement of life. Parents do not ordinarily raise their children through one weekly lecture. They teach through conversation, correction, work, meals, conflict, questions, failures, celebrations, and ordinary experiences. McCall and Halter ask why spiritual formation should be imagined so differently.

Their concern resembles Robert Banks’s study of Paul’s churches as participatory communities in which spiritual formation occurred through mutual contribution rather than dependence upon a single religious professional.⁴ It also echoes the argument of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch that the church is missionary by its very nature and must therefore form disciples capable of embodying the gospel outside ecclesiastical spaces.⁵

The book’s practical picture is compelling. Evangelism happens while coaching, working, drinking coffee, sharing a meal, operating a business, or listening to someone’s story. Teaching happens in homes, conversations, email exchanges, mentoring relationships, and gatherings where more than one person may contribute. Discipleship occurs while people work together and experience enough of one another’s real lives to see character revealed. The gospel becomes credible through proximity.

The book is especially perceptive in recognizing that transformation often occurs in moments of tension. People become open to change when the inadequacy of their present way of living can no longer be ignored. A struggling marriage, addiction, financial crisis, relational rupture, failure, or experience of grief may create an openness that a prearranged lesson does not. This does not make suffering good, nor should crisis be manipulated. It means that wise discipleship is attentive. It listens for the questions people are actually asking instead of forcing everyone through the same material at the same pace.

The Hammer, the Table, and the Grandmother

One of the more memorable sections of the book describes discipleship through three images: the hammer, the table, and the grandmother. The hammer represents work—the activity of building, creating, repairing, serving, and producing something useful. The table represents rest, remembrance, conversation, food, celebration, and belonging. The grandmother represents the steady wisdom of elders who have endured enough of life to remain calm when everyone else is frightened.

These images carry more substance than another ministry acronym. The hammer locates discipleship within meaningful work. People learn generosity, patience, integrity, endurance, reconciliation, and mutual submission when they build something together. The table gives that work a relational center. It creates space to tell stories, process failures, share Scripture, remember Jesus, and receive one another again. The grandmother keeps an energetic movement from becoming captive to the impulses of its most charismatic pioneer.

The book’s preference for grandmothers over formal elder boards is intentionally provocative. Its critique arises from observing leadership teams that protect institutions, preserve existing programs, and manage risk while remaining distant from the daily life of the community. There is truth in that criticism. Biblical eldership, however, should not be dismissed simply because many churches have embodied it poorly. The New Testament vision of eldership is relational, mature, hospitable, and exemplary. In fact, much of what McCall and Halter call “grandmothering” resembles the pastoral wisdom the New Testament expects from its elders. Their argument is strongest when heard as a recovery of lived spiritual maturity rather than a rejection of all recognizable leadership structures.

The same qualification applies to their treatment of teaching and sacraments. Brave Cities rightly opposes the monopolization of teaching by professionals and recognizes that God’s grace is encountered throughout ordinary life. Availability, neighboring, generosity, hospitality, shared meals, care for the poor, and communal rest can all become sacramental in a broad sense. Yet baptism and the Lord’s Supper retain a particular place within the church’s life because they are practices given to the community by Jesus and rooted in the gospel’s central story. Expanding our sacramental imagination need not require flattening every distinction between the sacraments and other faithful practices.

These are places where the book’s rhetoric occasionally moves faster than its historical or exegetical argument. Its account of the Reformation’s understanding of preaching, sacraments, and discipline is too compressed, and its dismissal of inherited church structures sometimes treats their abuses as though they were their essence. Even so, the criticism should not be brushed aside. Many congregations have reduced church life to listening to a sermon, receiving religious goods, and remaining accountable to an organization. Brave Cities is asking whether that can bear the full weight of the New Testament’s vision of a Spirit-filled people sharing life in Christ.

A Free-Market Church?

The most distinctive contribution of Brave Cities may be its treatment of economics. The authors question a financial model in which Christians give primarily to maintain buildings, salaries, programs, and centralized church infrastructure. They ask what might happen if more kingdom resources were invested in small businesses, intentional homes, community spaces, employment, sustainable ministries, and ventures addressing local suffering.

The phrase “free-market church” could easily be misunderstood. McCall and Halter are not simply baptizing capitalism or suggesting that churches operate as profit-seeking corporations. They envision a shared economy in which work, money, property, skills, businesses, and homes are stewarded for the good of the community. Their scriptural center is the economic imagination of Acts and Paul’s collection for Jerusalem: abundance meeting need so that the body experiences a form of equality.

Their distinction between charity and sustainability is valuable, although it should not be pressed too far. Emergency charity remains necessary. Hungry people need food before they need a business plan. Families in crisis sometimes need assistance without an immediate expectation of productivity. Yet the authors are correct that long-term care must take dignity, agency, employment, ownership, and sustainability seriously. Relief that never develops into relationship can preserve the distance between giver and recipient.

The economic vision of Brave Cities resembles John Howard Yoder’s description of the church as a visible social body whose shared practices offer the world an alternative politics. It also recalls Ched Myers’s work on Sabbath economics, particularly the biblical relationship between manna, Jubilee, debt, redistribution, and communal sufficiency.⁶ The church does not announce another way of life only through its preaching. Its handling of possessions, power, property, debt, work, and vulnerability reveals what it actually believes about the kingdom.

“Business is the mission” is one of the book’s more provocative claims. At its best, the statement means that honest work, excellent products, fair employment, beautiful spaces, and genuine care for customers are not secular activities that occasionally finance spiritual ministry. They can become part of the church’s public witness. A coffee shop does not become missional by placing Christian slogans on its cups. It becomes a kingdom expression when it offers good coffee, treats workers justly, knows its neighbors, creates belonging, and allows relationships to develop without turning people into evangelistic projects.

This vision has meaningful precedent in Christian history. Monastic communities joined prayer, hospitality, labor, agriculture, learning, and care for the poor. The Moravians developed businesses and trades that helped sustain a remarkable missionary movement. The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., organized small, disciplined communities around particular callings and concrete forms of service. Mark Lau Branson and Dwight Friesen’s Churches, Cultures and Leadership similarly describes Christian leadership as participation in a network of relationships rather than control from the organizational center.⁷ Brave Cities gathers these instincts and applies them to the economic and communal realities of contemporary cities.

Apostolic Leadership and Its Costs

The final movement of the book focuses on “apostolicing,” the life of the pioneer servant. McCall and Halter describe apostolic people as starters, builders, cultural architects, and stewards who see possibilities before others do. They connect ideas, people, funding, work, and place. They often begin before permission is granted and continue through criticism, uncertainty, and personal sacrifice.

The book offers an important correction to church cultures that have concentrated almost entirely on shepherding and teaching gifts. Pastors and teachers are indispensable, but communities also need evangelists, prophets, and apostles. Paul’s language in Ephesians 4 describes these gifts as serving the maturity and ministry of the whole body. Apostolic leadership is therefore not a higher ecclesiastical rank. It is a pioneering function that helps the church cross boundaries, begin new work, and lay foundations upon which others can build.

McCall and Halter are candid about the costs. Pioneer leaders frequently carry financial uncertainty, criticism, spiritual opposition, and the pressure of holding a vision others do not yet understand. They may invest years of labor without owning what they have created or receiving adequate compensation. The book’s discussion of funding rightly asks donors to support character and calling rather than using money to control outcomes.

Some caution is still needed here. Suffering does not authenticate every vision, and criticism is not necessarily proof that a leader is pioneering faithfully. Apostolic language can become dangerous when it shields strong personalities from accountability or interprets every disagreement as religious resistance or spiritual warfare. The New Testament’s apostles were accountable to the gospel, to one another, and to the communities they served. Genuine pioneering leadership carries authority, but it also receives correction and makes room for communal discernment.

That caution does not diminish the book’s central insight. New work carries a cost, and many of the people who benefit from it will never see what was required to begin it. Churches should become better at identifying, supporting, protecting, and resourcing faithful pioneers—women and men capable of imagining forms of kingdom life that do not yet exist.

A Book for Builders

Brave Cities will resonate most deeply with people who already sense that the inherited forms of Western church life are too narrow for the kingdom they find in the New Testament. It is written for builders, hosts, entrepreneurs, artists, missionaries, neighborhood pastors, community developers, and spiritually restless people who cannot separate discipleship from the life of a city.

Readers looking for a complete ecclesiology will find places where the book needs more historical development and exegetical restraint. Its rhetoric sometimes paints institutional churches too uniformly, and a few of its biblical connections function more as evocative analogies than sustained interpretations. Yet the book does not claim to provide a complete theology of the church. It is trying to restore imagination. It asks Christians to stop measuring faithfulness primarily through attendance, budgets, buildings, and centralized programs and to look for fruit in transformed people, reconciled relationships, shared resources, meaningful work, hospitality, justice, and enduring love.

For those of us working within organic expressions of church, the book offers language for instincts we have carried for years. Church is cultivated in the soil of shared life. It grows through people who know one another well enough to carry burdens, speak truth, share meals, forgive offenses, recognize gifts, and remain together through difficulty. Its witness becomes tangible when the lonely receive family, workers recover dignity, homes become places of hospitality, resources circulate toward genuine need, and ordinary Christians discover that ministry has never belonged exclusively to religious professionals.

A Personal Word for TOV

This book reaches me personally because so much of what McCall and Halter describe is what we have been trying, however imperfectly, to cultivate at TOV. We gather around tables. We bring food. We share communion as part of an actual meal. Children remain close to the life of the community. Different people teach, lead worship, pray, serve, and open their homes. We carry one another through illness, loss, financial pressure, relational difficulty, and the ordinary weight of life. We have never wanted TOV to become another religious event that people attend while remaining strangers to one another. Our hope has been to become a spiritual family learning to follow Jesus together.

This is not a novel recipe invented by the organic-church movement. It is the pattern that repeatedly emerges from the New Testament. In Matthew 28:19, the controlling verb in Jesus’ commission is μαθητεύσατε (mathēteusate), “make disciples.” “Going,” “baptizing,” and “teaching” describe how that command is carried out. Jesus did not command his followers merely to gather audiences, deliver weekly lectures, construct religious buildings, or produce better worship services. He commanded them to form people who would learn his way and order their lives around everything he taught.

The noun μαθητής (mathētēs) means more than a student who acquires information. A disciple is an apprentice whose life is being reshaped through attachment to a teacher. That is why Jesus’ recurring invitation is ἀκολούθει μοι (akolouthei moi), “follow me.” Following involved physical proximity, observation, imitation, correction, participation, and eventually being sent to continue the work of the teacher. Jesus formed disciples on roads and shorelines, inside homes, around tables, among the sick, in conflict with religious authorities, and in the presence of the poor. His teaching was inseparable from the life through which it was demonstrated.

Acts 2:42–47 gives us a glimpse of what happened when that way of discipleship became communal. The believers “devoted themselves”—ἦσαν προσκαρτεροῦντες (ēsan proskarterountes)—to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer. The verb προσκαρτερέω (proskartereō) conveys persistent attachment and continuing devotion. Luke is not describing four items placed into a weekly service order. He is describing a sustained way of life. Their devotion produced shared meals, prayer, generosity, gladness, public credibility, and material care so tangible that needs were addressed among them. Teaching remained essential, but it lived within fellowship. Communion took place around tables. Prayer accompanied shared life. Generosity moved possessions toward actual need.

The modern church has wandered a considerable distance from this pattern. Its evolution may have produced forms that are useful, sincere, and sometimes beautiful. I am not interested in declaring that everything developed after the first century is therefore illegitimate. Yet much of what we now call church does not seem to move with the relational flow of Jesus or the earliest Christian communities. We have become very good at gathering people who barely know one another, teaching people we may never share life with, and measuring participation without knowing whether anyone is becoming more like Christ. A person can attend faithfully for years while remaining lonely, unknown, materially burdened, and largely uninvolved in the lives of others.

The shepherding challenge is not simply to criticize that system. It is to recover the life we were given. If we are going to call one another disciples, we must become close enough to observe how each other follows Jesus. We must share enough life to recognize suffering before it becomes a crisis. We must create tables where confession is safe, correction is loving, forgiveness is practiced, and no one needs to pretend. We must know one another’s children, notice one another’s absence, carry one another’s burdens, and place our time, gifts, homes, and resources at the disposal of the kingdom. That is far more demanding than attending a service. It is also far closer to the life Jesus gave his disciples.

This is my prayer for TOV. I do not want us merely to grow larger; I want us to grow closer, deeper, and more faithful. I want our gatherings to remain an expression of the life we share rather than a substitute for it. I want our tables to remain open, our homes available, our children known, our resources shared, and our hearts tender toward those who arrive carrying wounds from religion, family, or life. I want us to become the kind of community in which people can encounter Jesus through Scripture, communion, friendship, work, hospitality, laughter, patience, and costly love.

I am deeply grateful to Taylor McCall and Hugh Halter for giving language to this hope. Brave Cities reminded me why this work matters and why it is worth the inconvenience, misunderstanding, sacrifice, and patience that genuine community requires. I finished the book grateful for those who have already helped build this life with us at TOV, hopeful about what God is still forming among us, and freshly committed to following Jesus together—not as consumers of a religious gathering, but as disciples, friends, servants, and family.

Notes

1. Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity? Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices, rev. ed. (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2008) & Frank Viola, Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2008).
2. Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016).
3. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 222–33.
4. Robert Banks, Paul’s Idea of Community: The Early House Churches in Their Cultural Setting, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).
5. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2013).
6. Ched Myers, The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics (Washington, DC: Tell the Word Press, 2001).
7. Mark Lau Branson and Dwight J. Friesen, Churches, Cultures and Leadership: A Practical Theology of Congregations and Ethnicities, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023).

Most people encounter the Hebrew alphabet simply as the twenty-two letters used to write biblical Hebrew. At the most basic level, that is exactly what they are. Hebrew is a language, and its letters function linguistically. Within Jewish interpretive tradition, however, the letters were also contemplated for their shapes, numerical values, placement, and relationship to the sacred text. Rabbinic and later mystical writers often found theological significance in details that modern readers would easily pass over.

When I started studying Hebrew at Moody Bible Institute and later at the UW Madison Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, it was engrained in my head that care is needed. The meaning of a biblical word does not come from assigning a spiritual definition to each of its letters. Biblical Hebrew still has to be read grammatically, syntactically, historically, and literarily. Later Jewish reflection on individual letters belongs more properly to the worlds of midrash and mysticism. Those traditions can be fascinating and sometimes theologically rich, but they should not be confused with the lexical meaning intended by a biblical author.

The opening word of Genesis provides a good example.

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים
berēʾšît bārāʾ ʾĕlōhîm

Genesis begins with the letter ב — bet. Grammatically, the bet attached to rēʾšît functions as a preposition. The phrase berēʾšît means something like “in the beginning” or, depending on how one understands the syntax of Genesis 1:1–3, “when God began to create.” Nothing in the grammar requires a symbolic meaning for the letter itself.

Rabbinic interpreters nevertheless noticed that the Torah begins with bet rather than aleph, the first letter of the alphabet. Bereshit Rabbah preserves several reflections on this. One observes that the shape of ב is closed on three sides and open toward the direction of reading. The image becomes a meditation on the limits of human inquiry: creation opens before us, while what lies beyond it remains hidden. Another interpretation connects bet with berakhah, “blessing,” since both words begin with the same letter.¹ This is not an alternative translation of Genesis 1:1. It is midrash. The reader begins with the written form of the biblical text and allows that form to generate further theological reflection.

The same instinct becomes much more developed in early Jewish mystical literature. Sefer Yetzirah connects the twenty-two Hebrew letters with the ordering of creation and describes the cosmos through the interplay of letters, numbers, and the ten sefirot.² In that setting language itself becomes part of the theological imagination of creation. Scholars have long noted how strongly linguistic the worldview of Sefer Yetzirah is.³

There is at least a biblical starting point for this fascination with language. Genesis 1 repeatedly describes God creating through speech: “And God said…” Psalm 33:6 similarly declares, “By the word of YHWH the heavens were made.” The Hebrew Bible emphasizes divine speech rather than hidden magical properties in the alphabet, but later Jewish thinkers naturally wondered about the relationship between divine speech, written language, and the letters through which sacred words were preserved.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook takes this kind of reflection in a particularly creative direction in Reish Millin. Written in the early twentieth century, the work meditates on Hebrew letters, vowel points, and cantillation marks as openings into spiritual and theological contemplation.⁴ Kook is working far beyond ordinary grammatical exegesis, yet his approach belongs to a long Jewish tradition of reading Scripture slowly enough to notice even the smallest features of the written text.

That may be the most useful lesson for Christian readers. Hebrew letters should not become a fortune-telling system, and they should not be treated as a secret code behind Scripture. An aleph does not possess one fixed spiritual meaning everywhere it appears, nor does a bet unlock a hidden layer of Genesis inaccessible to ordinary exegesis. Those claims go beyond what the biblical texts themselves support.

Still, Jewish reflection on the letters reminds us how patiently Scripture has been read across the centuries. The biblical world takes words seriously. Creation comes through speech. Prophets consume scrolls. Names carry meaning. Torah is written, memorized, recited, and taught from generation to generation. The first bet of Genesis does not secretly decode creation. It does remind us that readers before us often lingered over the text far longer than we do. There may be something worth recovering in that posture: reading Scripture slowly enough to notice its grammar, its literary shape, its cultural setting, and occasionally even the letter sitting at the beginning of the line.

For those of us who teach, pastor, or simply want to follow Jesus faithfully, there is a pastoral invitation here as well. We live in a culture that rewards speed, certainty, and immediate application, and those habits easily follow us into Scripture. Sometimes we need to recover the discipline of staying with the text before rushing to explain it. Read it slowly. Ask better questions. Notice the words, the repetitions, the structure, the cultural world behind them, and the places that resist easy answers. Not every detail needs to become a doctrine or a sermon point. Some things are worth sitting with for a while. Good shepherding does not always mean giving people quicker answers; sometimes it means teaching them how to become patient readers who love Scripture enough to linger over it.

Notes

1. Bereshit Rabbah 1:10. The passage preserves several interpretations of the opening bet, including reflections on its shape and its association with berakhah (“blessing”).
2. Sefer Yetzirah 1:1–2:6. The work describes creation in relation to the ten sefirot and the twenty-two Hebrew letters.
3. See Tzahi Weiss, “Sefer Yeṣirah” and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), especially his treatment of the linguistic and cosmological world behind the text.
4. Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook, Reish Millin (London, 1917), especially its meditations on Hebrew letters, vowel points, and cantillation.

A Review of Lance Ford, Rob Wegner, and Alan Hirsch, The Starfish and the Spirit: Unleashing the Leadership Potential of Churches and Organizations

The Starfish and the Spirit, by Lance Ford, Rob Wegner, and Alan Hirsch, belongs within this larger conversation, but I think it presses the question further. The problem is not merely that churches need better discipleship programs. The deeper issue may be that much of what we have constructed as “church” is organizationally predisposed toward producing spectators, consumers, and dependents rather than mature disciples capable of making other disciples.

That distinction is one of the reasons I enjoyed this book so much.

Rather than attempting a chapter-by-chapter summary, I want to highlight several ideas that particularly stood out to me. There is considerably more here than can be addressed in a short review. The book moves through leadership, organizational structure, multiplication, self-management, disciple-making environments, ecclesial ecosystems, collective intelligence, mutual submission, and conflict resolution. What follows, therefore, is less a synopsis than a theological engagement with several themes that I believe deserve serious consideration.

Jesus Made Disciples

One of the convictions that has increasingly shaped my own ecclesiology is surprisingly simple: Jesus appears to have been considerably more interested in making disciples than in producing converts.

That statement requires some qualification. Jesus certainly announces good news. The Synoptic tradition introduces his public ministry with proclamation: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The verb kēryssō and the noun euangelion are unquestionably important to the New Testament witness. Evangelistic proclamation is not an unfortunate later addition to Christianity.

Yet proclamation in the ministry of Jesus is consistently ordered toward allegiance, apprenticeship, and participation.

Immediately following Mark 1:15, Jesus does not establish an evangelistic institution. He calls people: “Follow me” (deute opisō mou; Mark 1:17). The announcement of the kingdom produces a community of apprentices who learn the way of the kingdom by accompanying its king.

This distinction becomes even clearer in Matthew’s conclusion. The so-called Great Commission does not grammatically center upon “go.” The controlling imperative of Matthew 28:19 is mathēteusate—“make disciples.” The participles surrounding it—going, baptizing, and teaching—describe dimensions of that disciple-making vocation. And what Jesus commands them to teach is not simply information about himself but obedience to “everything I have commanded you” (Matt 28:20).³

The mission is therefore not exhausted by getting someone to assent to a message about Jesus. The mission is the formation of a people who learn to live the life Jesus taught and embodied.

Luke offers essentially the same pattern in narrative form. Jesus gathers the Twelve “that they might be with him and that he might send them out” (Mark 3:14). They observe, participate, misunderstand, fail, receive correction, are sent, return, reflect, and are sent again. The process is intensely relational. Discipleship happens along roads, around tables, in homes, on boats, in conflict, in failure, and in mission. Long before Christianity possessed seminaries, sanctuaries, denominational headquarters, publishing houses, or carefully constructed church programs, it possessed people learning the way of Jesus together.

That observation provides an important theological doorway into The Starfish and the Spirit.

From Spider to Starfish

The controlling metaphor of the book comes from Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider. Ford, Wegner, and Hirsch appropriate the distinction for ecclesiology. A spider represents a highly centralized organization. Its essential functions converge in a central head; remove the head and the organism dies. A starfish functions differently. Its life is distributed throughout the organism, giving it a remarkable capacity for regeneration.

The authors use this distinction to expose something many church leaders intuitively recognize: Western churches frequently concentrate extraordinary amounts of ecclesial responsibility in extraordinarily few people.

The pastor becomes preacher, theologian, visionary, counselor, organizational strategist, spiritual authority, conflict manager, fundraiser, teacher, evangelist, and institutional representative. The congregation gradually learns that ministry is something performed primarily by professionals, while the professionals gradually become exhausted from performing ministry on behalf of everybody else.

The authors’ alternative is not organizational anarchy. That point matters. Their argument is more nuanced than simply “hierarchy bad; decentralization good.” They explicitly allow for hybrid organizational forms and acknowledge the necessity of accountability and appropriate structure. Their concern is the location and distribution of power. Exponential’s description of the book captures this well: leaders become curators of a community on mission rather than the source of certainty and initiative for every ministry activity.

This seems to me remarkably consonant with Ephesians 4:11–16.

The apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers are given not primarily to perform the ministry, but pros ton katartismon tōn hagiōn eis ergon diakonias—for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry (Eph 4:12). Whatever conclusions one reaches concerning the contemporary function of the fivefold ministries, Paul’s underlying ecclesiology is difficult to miss. Leadership exists to cultivate the capacity of the body. The body ministers. The leaders equip the body to minister. When leadership performs everything important while the congregation observes, the church has not merely developed an inefficient organizational structure. It may have inverted Paul’s ecclesiology.

Organic Does Not Mean Disorganized

This is another aspect of the book that I particularly appreciated. “Organic church” can become a romantic phrase. It can imply that structure itself is the problem, as though the earliest Christian communities possessed no recognizable leadership, boundaries, discipline, authority, or organization. The New Testament does not support such an interpretation. Paul appoints elders (Acts 14:23). Titus is instructed to establish elders in the communities of Crete (Titus 1:5). Material resources are collected and administered (1 Cor 16:1–4). Conflict is adjudicated (Acts 15). False teaching is confronted. Communities maintain recognizable practices of baptism, Eucharist, hospitality, discipline, teaching, and mutual care. The alternative to institutionalism is therefore not institutional incompetence.

The authors instead envision what Alan Hirsch calls a “chaordic” organization—a deliberate balance of sufficient order to maintain stability and sufficient openness to allow creativity, adaptation, and multiplication. The language is organizational, but the theological instinct behind it is important. Structure should serve life rather than requiring life to serve the structure. That distinction may be among the most useful contributions of the book. The question is not whether a church has organization. Every enduring human community develops organization. The more significant question is whether the organization exists to facilitate the mission of the people or whether the people gradually come to exist to maintain the organization. Those are not the same thing.

Multiplication Changes the Measurement

The starfish metaphor becomes especially powerful when Ford, Wegner, and Hirsch turn toward multiplication. A starfish does not merely survive decentralization; it possesses the capacity to reproduce. Accordingly, the book moves from multiplying disciples to multiplying leaders, microchurches, hubs, and ultimately networks. This is where the book intersects significantly with Hirsch’s larger body of work.

Hirsch has spent decades arguing that movemental Christianity is not something imported into the church from contemporary organizational theory but a latent capacity already embedded within the people of God. His influential The Forgotten Ways described six elements of what he called missional DNA (mDNA): Jesus is Lord, disciple making, missional-incarnational impulse, apostolic environment, organic systems, and communitas.⁴ The Starfish and the Spirit brings much of that earlier movemental theology into direct conversation with organizational structure.

Hirsch’s connection with 100Movements is also worth noting here. He is a founder of 100Movements, and the organization describes its publishing work as intentionally oriented toward paradigm change, multiplication, mission, and “movemental Christianity.” In other words, The Starfish and the Spirit should not be read as an isolated experiment. It represents a larger stream of missional ecclesiology that Hirsch has been developing across works such as The Forgotten Ways, The Permanent Revolution, 5Q, and related movemental projects. I find this particularly compelling because multiplication forces us to reconsider what we measure.

Churches naturally count attendance. Attendance is visible, comparatively easy to quantify, and not entirely meaningless. The book of Acts occasionally gives numbers precisely because numerical growth can indicate something significant (Acts 2:41; 4:4). But attendance alone tells us remarkably little about discipleship. Five thousand people attending a gathering may represent extraordinary kingdom fruit. It may also represent five thousand religious consumers gathered around the gifts of a handful of professionals. The number itself cannot tell us which.

A more revealing set of measurements concerns reproduction: Are disciples making disciples? Are leaders producing leaders who do not remain dependent upon them? Are communities capable of functioning without the constant presence of the charismatic personality who began them? Are people becoming sufficiently mature that ministry naturally expands beyond the centralized institution? The Pauline letters repeatedly assume precisely this reproductive logic. Paul entrusts the gospel to Timothy, who is to entrust it “to faithful people who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim 2:2). There are multiple generations of transmission contained in that single sentence.

Paul → Timothy → faithful people → others. That is movement.

A Helpful Place within the Contemporary Discipleship Conversation

One reason I would recommend The Starfish and the Spirit is that it complements several important streams of contemporary evangelical ecclesiology without merely reproducing them. Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, published by Zondervan, correctly emphasizes that churches can maintain impressive ministries while producing spiritually and emotionally immature people. Zondervan itself summarizes Scazzero’s concern as a culture of “shallow discipleship” incapable of producing deeply transformed disciples. Harrington and Patrick’s The Disciple Maker’s Handbook, also from Zondervan, approaches the problem more explicitly through intentional disciple-making relationships and multiplication.

Perhaps the closest conversation partner, however, is Woodward and White’s IVP volume The Church as Movement. Its structure—distributing, discipling, designing, and doing—likewise insists that genuine ecclesial movement depends upon discipleship, community formation, polycentric leadership, and incarnational mission rather than simply successful public gatherings. Hirsch appropriately wrote the foreword to that volume. The Starfish and the Spirit adds something valuable to this conversation because it focuses attention not only on what discipleship should accomplish but upon the organizational systems that either permit or inhibit it. A church can preach discipleship while structurally producing dependence. It can preach the priesthood of all believers while functionally constructing a clerical caste. It can tell people that everyone has gifts while designing virtually every important gathering around the gifts of three people on a platform. It can preach multiplication while rewarding accumulation. That tension deserves considerably more attention than it normally receives.

The Church as an Ecosystem

Perhaps this is ultimately what I appreciated most about the book. The church envisioned here is less like a religious corporation dispensing spiritual goods and services and more like an ecosystem in which disciples, gifts, relationships, ministries, and communities can emerge and reproduce. That is not a rejection of preaching, gathered worship, theological education, pastoral leadership, or institutional structure. Nor should the starfish metaphor be absolutized. Every organizational metaphor eventually breaks down, and ecclesiology must ultimately emerge from Scripture rather than biology or management theory. Nevertheless, metaphors can expose realities we have ceased to notice. The spider exposes the fragility of churches constructed around centralized personalities. The starfish exposes the possibility of communities whose spiritual life is distributed throughout the body. And that brings us back to Jesus.

Jesus could have constructed his ministry around the permanent expansion of his own platform. Instead, he repeatedly gave ministry away. He sent the Twelve (Mark 6:7–13). He sent the seventy-two (Luke 10:1–20). He allowed disciples to preach, heal, baptize, announce the kingdom, and eventually carry the mission beyond his immediate geographical presence. The astonishing movement of Acts is possible precisely because Jesus did not create disciples who could function only while standing beside him. He formed people who could be sent. That may be one of the simplest tests of our ecclesiology.

A mature church does not merely gather people well. It forms people who can be sent well. It does not merely attract disciples to gifted leaders; it equips disciples to become mature participants in the mission of God. And it does not measure success solely by how many people remain gathered around its center, but also by how much kingdom life is capable of flourishing beyond it.

Ford, Wegner, and Hirsch have given the church a helpful vocabulary for thinking about that transition. The Starfish and the Spirit will not answer every ecclesiological question, nor should an organizational metaphor be asked to do so. But it succeeds at something perhaps more valuable: it exposes assumptions about leadership, power, discipleship, and structure that many of us have inherited without realizing we inherited them.

For pastors and leaders already questioning highly centralized models of church, much of this book will feel familiar—but it gives language and structure to those instincts. For those working within traditional congregational structures, the book need not be received as an argument for dismantling everything. In fact, the authors explicitly resist such a simplistic conclusion. It can instead become an invitation to ask where ministry can be released, where leadership can be multiplied, where control can give way to trust, and where structures can be redesigned around the formation of disciples rather than the maintenance of programs.

There is far more in The Starfish and the Spirit than I have touched upon here. Its discussions of light-load leadership, organic hierarchy, self-management, trust, accountability, disciple-making environments, mutual submission, and collective intelligence deserve their own treatment. But the larger contribution is clear enough. The church does not need fewer leaders. It needs more people equipped to lead. It does not need less theology. It needs theology embodied in communities capable of reproducing the life and way of Jesus. And it does not need to abandon structure. It needs structures that serve the mission Jesus actually gave us: make disciples. That is why I found The Starfish and the Spirit worth reading.

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Notes

1. Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021) & Bobby Harrington and Josh Robert Patrick, The Disciple Maker’s Handbook: Seven Elements of a Discipleship Lifestyle (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017).
2. J. R. Woodward and Dan White Jr., The Church as Movement: Starting and Sustaining Missional-Incarnational Communities (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2016).
3. On the syntax of Matt 28:19–20, mathēteusate is the finite imperative, while poreuthentes, baptizontes, and didaskontes function participially in relation to the command to make disciples. The grammatical observation should not be overstated—as though “going” were unimportant—but the construction nevertheless places disciple making at the grammatical center of the commission.
4. Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016). Hirsch’s six elements of mDNA provide much of the conceptual background for the movemental ecclesiology developed with Ford and Wegner.
5. Lance Ford, Rob Wegner, and Alan Hirsch, The Starfish and the Spirit: Unleashing the Leadership Potential of Churches and Organizations (Exponential Resources, 2021), esp. 1–19, 43–73, 91–153, 267–93.

As we look toward Tres Dias Weekend 53, I find myself thinking less about what might happen during three extraordinary days and more about what will remain when those three days are over. A renewal weekend can become a meaningful marker in someone’s spiritual journey, but Scripture consistently draws our attention beyond moments and toward formation. The question is not simply whether we encounter God profoundly for a weekend, but whether our lives become increasingly rooted in Him afterward. This is precisely where 2 Peter 1:3–11 offers an important framework. Before Peter tells his readers what they must cultivate, he reminds them of what God has already provided: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Pet 1:3). The order is important. Divine provision precedes human participation. Grace is not the reward at the end of Christian formation; grace is the ground from which Christian formation begins.¹

Peter deepens this claim in the following verse by saying that through God’s promises believers become κοινωνοὶ θείας φύσεως (koinōnoi theias physeōs), “participants in the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). The noun koinōnos communicates participation, association, or the sharing of something held in common and belongs to the same linguistic family from which we receive koinōnia. Peter is certainly not suggesting that human beings become divine beings in an ontological sense. Rather, participation in the life of God produces a people increasingly shaped by God’s character.² This makes the virtues that follow exceedingly important: goodness, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and ultimately agapē. They are not entrance requirements by which we earn participation with God; they describe what begins to emerge from a life already participating in what God has graciously supplied. Richard Bauckham appropriately describes agapē at the conclusion of Peter’s list as the crowning virtue that encompasses what precedes it.³

This is why Deeply Rooted provides such a compelling image for Weekend 53, even though we should recognize that Peter himself does not employ the metaphor of a tree in this passage. Rather, the imagery emerges when Peter’s vision of spiritual formation is read within the larger canonical world of Scripture. Psalm 1 describes the faithful person as כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַל־פַּלְגֵי מָיִם (keʿēṣ šātûl ʿal-palgê māyim), “like a tree planted by channels of water” (Ps 1:3). The verbal form šātûl, from שׁתל (šāṯal), describes something planted or transplanted.⁴ This is more than decorative agricultural imagery. In the climate presupposed by the biblical writers, access to water determined whether vegetation merely appeared for a season or endured long enough to bear fruit. John Goldingay observes that the long dry season of the Middle East made proximity to a dependable water source particularly important precisely during the period in which fruit matured.⁵ The psalmist therefore portrays the flourishing life not primarily as the result of extraordinary strength within the tree, but as the consequence of where that tree has been planted.

Jeremiah 17:7–8 develops the same biblical imagination. The person who trusts in YHWH is compared with a tree planted beside water that “sends out its roots by the stream.” Here the Hebrew שֹׁרֶשׁ (šōreš), “root,” draws our attention beneath the visible surface of the tree. The foliage and fruit may be what others eventually see, but they depend upon a hidden system of attachment and nourishment. This tree imagery participates in a much broader biblical and ancient Near Eastern symbolic world in which trees, gardens, flowing waters, and flourishing vegetation regularly communicate life, fertility, divine blessing, and ordered creation. Yet the biblical writers repeatedly redirect the imagery toward covenantal dependence upon YHWH. Psalm 1 connects flourishing with sustained meditation upon Torah, while Jeremiah connects it explicitly with trust in YHWH. The fundamental question is therefore not simply whether a person appears fruitful, but where his roots have gone for life.

Read against that background, Peter’s language becomes even more significant. In 2 Peter 1:5 he calls believers to “make every effort” and employs ἐπιχορηγήσατε (epichorēgēsate), from epichorēgeō, a verb carrying the sense of supplying, furnishing, or providing what is needed.⁶ Peter’s language requires genuine human participation; grace is not passivity. Yet that participation occurs only after verses 3–4 have established God’s prior provision. The virtues of verses 5–7 are therefore neither a spiritual ladder by which we ascend toward God nor independent achievements accumulated through religious determination. Peter describes a life in which God’s provision and human response belong together. Faith matures into embodied character, and that character touches knowledge, desires, endurance, worship, relationships, and finally love. These qualities are interconnected expressions of a life being formed in Christ rather than separate accomplishments to be checked off one after another.

Peter makes that continuing dimension explicit in verse 8 when he speaks of these qualities as ὑπάρχοντα καὶ πλεονάζοντα (hyparchonta kai pleonazonta)—being present and increasing. Christian formation is not static, and this may be one of the most important truths for us to remember as we enter a renewal weekend. The goal is not simply to experience something powerful enough that we can remember it years later. The goal is that what God begins, reveals, restores, or reminds us of becomes increasingly visible in the ordinary life that follows. Jesus expresses the same reality through the vine imagery of John 15 when he repeatedly uses μένω (menō), “remain,” “stay,” or “abide.” The branch bears fruit not because it experienced a remarkable moment with the vine but because it continues in the vine (John 15:4–5). Paul similarly speaks of Christian character as καρπὸς τοῦ πνεύματος (karpos tou pneumatos), the “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal 5:22). Biblical fruitfulness is consequently less about religious achievement and more about sustained participation in the life of God.

This changes how we might think about Tres Dias Weekend 53. We certainly pray for powerful encounters with God, meaningful worship, reconciliation, healing, friendship, laughter, confession, communion, and moments in which the presence of Christ becomes unmistakably real. But none of those moments are ends in themselves. They are invitations into something longer. In the language of Tres Dias, the weekend exists for the Fourth Day. The rector’s vision rightly emphasizes this point: the weekend may help plant and nourish, but the cultivation of a life takes place over months, years, marriages, friendships, churches, disappointments, victories, ordinary Mondays, and countless opportunities to choose the way of Jesus. Success therefore cannot finally be measured at Closing on Sunday evening. It becomes visible as men remain rooted in Christ, their churches, their families, their reunion groups, and one another long after the weekend has ended.

Perhaps, then, our prayer as we approach Weekend 53 should be both expectant and humble. We should expect the Holy Spirit to work among us, while remembering that none of us can manufacture the transformation we desire to see. We can prepare carefully, teach faithfully, serve sacrificially, extend agapē, create space for genuine koinōnia, and make ourselves available to one another, but God remains the giver of life and growth. The deepest work of the weekend may not even be recognizable while the weekend is happening. A seed planted in conversation, a wound exposed to grace, a friendship begun, a truth finally believed, or a calling quietly awakened may not display its fruit until much later.

As we look toward Weekend 53, that is what I am praying for: not merely men who have experienced an unforgettable three days, but men who are becoming deeply rooted—rooted in the grace of God, rooted in Christ, rooted in Scripture, rooted in genuine brotherhood, and rooted deeply enough that the life of Jesus increasingly becomes visible through their own. Peter’s language leaves us with a vision larger than a weekend. God has already supplied what pertains to life and godliness; our invitation is to participate in that gift and continue cultivating what He is producing within us. The weekend eventually ends, but the life into which it points us is only beginning.

De Colores.

Notes

1. Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 50 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1983), 181–87. Peter’s exhortation in 1:5–7 follows and depends upon the divine provision described in 1:3–4; the literary relationship between these sections is significant for avoiding a purely moralistic reading of the virtue list.
2. Walter Bauer, Frederick William Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. “κοινωνός.” See also 2 Pet 1:4 for Peter’s distinctive expression koinōnoi theias physeōs.
3. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, 187. Bauckham observes that agapē functions as the climactic virtue and embraces the virtues that precede it.
4. Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. and ed. M. E. J. Richardson, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000), s.v. “שתל.”
5. John Goldingay, Psalms, Volume 1: Psalms 1–41, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 58. Goldingay notes the importance of dependable water to fruit-bearing trees during the long Middle Eastern dry season and understands the “channels” of Ps 1:3 as potentially natural streams or irrigation channels.
6. Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Roderick McKenzie, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), s.v. “ἐπιχορηγέω.” The verb carries the basic sense of supplying or furnishing and is used elsewhere in the New Testament for God’s provision (cf. 2 Cor 9:10; Gal 3:5).

Why Gideon Was Threshing Wheat in a Winepress

“The angel of the LORD came and sat under the oak that was in Ophrah… His son Gideon was threshing wheat in the winepress in order to hide it from the Midianites.” (Judg. 6:11)

One of the easiest mistakes modern readers make when approaching the Scriptures is assuming that every detail serves merely as background scenery. Ancient Hebrew narrative, however, rarely wastes words. Places, geography, architecture, and even agricultural practices frequently communicate theology as powerfully as the dialogue itself. What initially appears to be an incidental observation often proves to be one of the author’s most significant literary devices.¹ Such is the case with Gideon’s winepress.

For many readers, Gideon hiding in a winepress simply illustrates his fear. While that observation is certainly true, it does not go nearly far enough. An Israelite audience would have recognized immediately that something was profoundly disordered long before the Angel of YHWH ever spoke. The problem was not merely that Gideon was afraid. The problem was that he was attempting to perform one agricultural task in a place never intended for it. Before we are introduced to Gideon’s doubts, his questions, or even his calling, the narrator has already shown us that Israel’s world has become inverted.

To appreciate the force of the scene, one must first understand the geography of ancient agriculture. Throughout the hill country of Iron Age Israel, threshing floors and winepresses occupied entirely different environments because they served entirely different purposes. The Hebrew word for a threshing floor, גֹּרֶן (gōren), referred to an exposed, elevated circular area, often constructed on a ridge or hilltop where prevailing winds could be harnessed during the winnowing process.² After harvested grain had been crushed beneath sledges or the hooves of oxen, workers would toss the mixture into the air with wooden forks or shovels. The heavier kernels of grain would fall back to the earth while the lighter chaff was carried away by the wind. Without wind, there could be no proper separation. Elevation was therefore not merely convenient; it was essential.

Winepresses, by contrast, were designed according to entirely different principles. The Hebrew term גַּת (gat) describes a basin carved directly into limestone bedrock, normally consisting of a shallow treading floor connected by a narrow channel to a deeper collecting vat below.³ Rather than seeking exposure, winepresses intentionally utilized gravity. Grapes were crushed underfoot, their juice flowing downward into the lower basin where fermentation could begin. Unlike threshing floors, winepresses were enclosed, recessed, and often situated along hillsides where bedrock could easily be quarried.

In other words, everything about a winepress opposed the very conditions necessary for threshing wheat. That simple observation transforms our reading of Judges 6. Gideon was not merely hiding. He was threshing wheat in a place where wheat could never be properly processed.

The narrator has quietly revealed the devastating effects of Midianite oppression before saying a single word about Israel’s spiritual condition. Fear had altered the landscape of ordinary faithfulness. Agricultural practices that had remained largely unchanged for centuries were now being abandoned because survival demanded adaptation. What had once taken place publicly upon the windswept heights was now carried out secretly beneath the earth.

This is precisely how oppression functions throughout the biblical narrative. Its first objective is rarely outright destruction. Instead, it slowly reshapes ordinary patterns of life. The Midianites did not initially seek permanent occupation of Israel’s cities. Rather, as the text itself explains, they arrived seasonally “like locusts,” allowing Israel to cultivate the land before stripping it bare at harvest (Judg. 6:3–6). Such patterns closely resemble the seasonal raiding economies attested among semi-nomadic peoples throughout the ancient Near East, whose wealth depended less upon territorial expansion than upon controlling the productivity of settled agricultural communities.⁴ Israel continued sowing, cultivating, and harvesting, but never experienced the fruit of her labor.

Eventually, even faithful work begins to migrate into hiding.

When Fear Rewrites the Landscape

One of the remarkable features of biblical narrative is that it often reveals Israel’s spiritual condition through geography long before it explains it in words. Mountains, valleys, wildernesses, gardens, rivers, and cities are rarely passive settings. They become theological landscapes upon which covenant faithfulness—or covenant failure—is visibly displayed. Gideon’s winepress belongs to this literary pattern.

The Book of Judges repeatedly portrays Israel descending into covenant disorder. What begins as isolated acts of compromise gradually develops into a national pattern of spiritual fragmentation. The author intentionally describes a generation that “did not know the LORD or the works He had done for Israel” (Judg. 2:10). This forgetfulness was not simply intellectual. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, remembrance (zākar) carries covenantal significance. To remember is to live faithfully in light of God’s redemptive acts, while forgetting inevitably leads to disordered worship and misplaced allegiance.⁵

Against that backdrop, Gideon’s winepress becomes more than a hiding place. It becomes visual theology. The tragedy is not simply that Midian has invaded Israel’s land. The tragedy is that Midian has begun reshaping Israel’s imagination. For seven consecutive years, according to Judges 6, the Midianites waited patiently until Israel’s crops reached maturity before descending upon the land “like locusts” (Judg. 6:5). Their strategy was economically devastating. Rather than occupying Israel’s territory year-round, they allowed the Israelites to bear the exhausting labor of plowing, sowing, cultivating, and tending their fields. Only when the harvest promised life would the raiders arrive, carrying away grain, livestock, and provisions.⁶

Such tactics were well known throughout the ancient Near East. Nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples often depended upon seasonal raids rather than territorial conquest. Their objective was not necessarily to possess the land but to control its productivity. The result was psychological as much as economic. Entire populations gradually abandoned ordinary rhythms of life because those rhythms no longer seemed safe.⁷

This explains Gideon’s behavior far better than cowardice alone. He is not acting irrationally. He is adapting. Fear has become ordinary. What once belonged on an exposed hilltop must now be attempted beneath the earth. The image is haunting because it reveals something oppression always seeks to accomplish. Tyranny rarely begins by changing convictions. It begins by changing habits. Little by little, ordinary faithfulness becomes extraordinary risk. Communities withdraw. Celebrations diminish. Harvests become secretive. Open spaces become dangerous. Eventually people no longer ask whether something is right or wrong; they simply ask whether it is safe. The narrator never explicitly tells us any of this. He simply tells us where Gideon is standing.

That single geographical detail communicates volumes. Even more striking is the irony that would not have been lost upon an ancient audience. Grain was one of the covenant blessings repeatedly promised to Israel if they remained faithful to YHWH (Deut. 7:13; 11:13–15; 28:1–12). Wine likewise represented abundance, joy, and divine provision. Both grain and wine were signs of covenant flourishing.⁸ Yet here those blessings have become confused. The place intended for wine has become the place for grain. The geography of blessing has collapsed into the geography of survival. Israel is still farming. But she is no longer living as the covenant people she was created to be. Perhaps this explains why the Angel of YHWH never begins by discussing military strategy. There is no conversation about swords. No tactical plan. No immediate promise of victory. Instead, God enters the very place where fear has relocated His servant. Before Gideon is ever called to deliver Israel, he first encounters the God who refuses to remain absent from Israel’s hidden places. The winepress, therefore, is not merely the backdrop for Gideon’s calling. It is the first sermon of the narrative.

God Walks into the Winepress

One of the most remarkable features of Gideon’s calling is not found in what God says, but in where He chooses to say it. Modern readers often move quickly to the Angel’s declaration, “The LORD is with you, mighty warrior” (Judg. 6:12), yet the narrative intentionally lingers over the setting before recording a single word of dialogue. The divine encounter does not begin upon a battlefield, at an altar, or even upon one of Israel’s sacred mountains. It begins in a winepress—a place of concealment, economic desperation, and quiet survival. The narrator’s sequence is intentional. Before God commissions Gideon to confront Midian, He first enters the very place to which fear has driven him. The movement of the text is therefore not from courage to encounter, but from encounter to courage. Divine presence always precedes divine vocation.⁹

This pattern appears repeatedly throughout the biblical narrative and reflects one of Scripture’s most enduring theological themes. Humanity’s instinct after the fall is consistently to withdraw, conceal, and protect itself, while God’s response is to move toward those very places of hiding. The emphasis is not that hidden places are inherently sacred, but that God’s presence is not limited by them. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the Lord continually reveals Himself in wildernesses, deserts, foreign lands, caves, prisons, and other seemingly insignificant locations that would never have been considered centers of religious importance. Sacred space is created not because a location possesses inherent holiness, but because the presence of God transforms ordinary ground into holy ground. Gideon’s winepress joins that remarkable pattern. What had become a symbol of Israel’s oppression suddenly becomes the place where heaven interrupts history.¹⁰

Equally striking is the fact that God does not initially address Gideon’s circumstances. There is no immediate explanation for Midian’s oppression, no military strategy, and no promise that the suffering will soon end. Instead, the first declaration concerns God’s own presence: “The LORD is with you.” That order is profoundly significant. Modern readers often seek God’s activity before His presence, asking first how He intends to solve the crisis. Judges presents the opposite movement. Before Israel receives deliverance, Gideon receives communion. Before there is victory, there is relationship. Before there is a battle to fight, there is a God who has willingly entered the place where His servant believed he had been forgotten. The narrative quietly reminds its readers that the greatest miracle in Judges 6 is not ultimately military triumph, but divine nearness.¹¹

Seen in this light, the winepress functions as far more than an agricultural detail. It becomes a theological contrast between human perception and divine initiative. Gideon believes he is hiding from Midian; the reader discovers that he is being found by God. What appears to be the least likely place for revelation becomes the very stage upon which God’s covenant faithfulness is once again displayed. The irony is unmistakable: the place chosen for concealment becomes the place of calling, and the place associated with fear becomes the place where YHWH first speaks shalom into Israel’s darkness.

The Winepress Was Never the Destination

One final observation deserves consideration. While the winepress functions as the setting of Gideon’s encounter with YHWH, the narrative never presents it as the goal of Gideon’s journey. There is a subtle but important distinction between the place where God meets His servant and the place where God intends His servant to remain. Throughout Judges 6, the movement of the story is deliberate. Gideon is first introduced in a place of concealment, but the remainder of the narrative steadily draws him into increasingly public acts of covenant faithfulness. His first assignment is not military but theological: he is commanded to dismantle his father’s altar to Baal and restore proper worship within his own household (Judg. 6:25–32). Only after the work of covenant restoration begins does the narrative turn toward Israel’s deliverance from Midian. The order is significant. Before God transforms Israel’s circumstances, He begins by restoring Israel’s worship.¹²

This progression also prevents the interpreter from romanticizing Gideon’s hiding place. The winepress was not a sanctuary because concealment possesses spiritual value, nor does the text suggest that fear itself becomes virtuous. Rather, the holiness of the place derives entirely from the presence of the One who entered it. In the Hebrew Scriptures, sacred space is never defined primarily by geography but by divine presence. Whether at the burning bush, the tabernacle, the temple, or an otherwise ordinary parcel of ground, places become holy because YHWH chooses to dwell there. Gideon’s winepress belongs within that larger biblical pattern. Its significance lies not in its architecture or symbolism alone, but in the astonishing reality that the God of Israel willingly entered a place shaped by fear and transformed it into the location of divine revelation.¹³

The literary irony is therefore profound. Gideon entered the winepress seeking concealment, believing it to be the safest place available in a land devastated by oppression. Yet the very location chosen to avoid discovery became the place where he was most fully seen. Before Gideon ever recognized himself as a judge, deliverer, or even a “mighty warrior,” he was first recognized by God. His identity was not established by his present circumstances but by God’s covenant purposes. The narrative repeatedly reminds its readers that divine calling is grounded not in human adequacy but in divine initiative. YHWH’s declaration, “The LORD is with you,” precedes every command that follows, establishing a theological order that echoes throughout Scripture: God’s presence is never the reward for obedience but the foundation from which faithful obedience flows.¹⁴

Seen in this light, the winepress becomes one of the most theologically rich settings in the Book of Judges. It stands as a visible testimony to Israel’s covenant disorder, illustrating how oppression had distorted the ordinary rhythms of life and reduced God’s people to survival. At the same time, it becomes the stage upon which the covenant God demonstrates His unwavering commitment to dwell among His people. The narrative neither minimizes Israel’s suffering nor glorifies Gideon’s fear. Instead, it directs the reader’s attention to the character of YHWH, who enters the very places where human hope appears most diminished. The winepress is therefore remembered not because Gideon hid there, but because God chose to meet him there. That distinction ultimately transforms an otherwise ordinary agricultural installation into one of the most remarkable places of encounter in the Hebrew Bible.

Conclusion

Perhaps the greatest gift of Gideon’s story is not that it reminds us God can use unlikely people. While that is certainly true, it is not where the narrative begins. Before Gideon ever leads an army, tears down an altar, or witnesses God’s miraculous deliverance, he discovers something far more foundational: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not reluctant to enter broken places. Long before Gideon found the courage to step into the open, God had already stepped into his hiding place.

That truth continues to echo throughout the whole story of Scripture. From the garden where God walked with Adam and Eve, to the wilderness tabernacle, the temple in Jerusalem, the incarnation of Christ, and finally the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, the biblical narrative is remarkably consistent. God’s redemptive work has always moved toward humanity rather than away from it. He is not merely the God who waits to be found; He is the God who comes searching, calling, pursuing, and dwelling among His people.

Perhaps that is why the opening chapters of Judges remain so relevant. We may not thresh wheat in winepresses or fear Midianite raiding parties, but we all know what it feels like when disappointment, grief, failure, uncertainty, or fear begin to reshape the ordinary rhythms of our lives. We quietly adjust. We settle. We begin living beneath the abundance God desires, convincing ourselves that survival is enough. Yet Judges reminds us that God has never been content to leave His people there.

The same Lord who entered Gideon’s winepress continues to enter the hidden places of our lives today—not to affirm our fears, but to reveal His presence. He meets us before our circumstances change, before our questions are fully answered, and before we feel prepared for whatever lies ahead. His presence has always preceded His calling.

Perhaps that is the enduring message of Gideon’s winepress. The most sacred moments in our lives are often not found after every battle has been won, but in those unexpected places where heaven quietly meets earth and the God who delights to dwell with His people reminds us once again that we have never been as hidden as we imagined. The God who met Gideon in the shadows is still meeting His people there today, gently calling them out of survival and back into the life of faithful communion for which they were created.

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Source List

1. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative
2. Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges; HALOT, s.v. גֹּרֶן.
3. Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel; HALOT, s.v. גַּת.
4. Victor H. Matthews, Manners and Customs in the Bible
5. John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Torah
6. Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth; Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges
7. Victor H. Matthews, Manners and Customs in the Bible
8. Gordon J. Wenham, Deuteronomy
9. Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges.
10. Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm
11. Christopher J. H. Wright, Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament.
12. Daniel I. Block, Judges
13. John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians
14. John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology