New Wineskins: Missionaries’ Family Reunion

Prayer is a crucial element of every New Wineskins conference

By Jeff Walton

THE LIVING CHURCH

September 23, 2025

Anglican Missionary Norman Beale believes that God opens unexpected doors to Christian ministry. As he worked among Nepal’s Tamang people in the 1990s, he asked what he could pray for villagers, who directed him to an ailing water buffalo.

“I had no veterinary background,” Beale said, and he unsure where to place his hands on the suffering creature. After settling on its nose, the Anglican priest prayed, and the animal’s healing opened doors to literacy classes, screenings of the Jesus film, and the launch of a local church.

Veteran missionaries Norman and Beth Beale | Anglican Frontier Missions

“The Holy Spirit just showed up in great power. I don’t have power to do any of this stuff, but God does,” Beale said. “Today the church in Nepal is full of people from many ethnic groups and castes, not just the Tamang people.”

“The hope of unreached peoples in the world and in Nepal is found in the Lord,” Beale’s wife, Beth, said before more than 1,500 people at the New Wineskins for Global Mission Conference, which met September 17-20 outside of Asheville, North Carolina. More than half were participating for the first time, ranging from missionaries with young children to retirement-age people still on the mission field.

The Tamang were at the inception of Anglican missionary efforts there, and today the Rev. Prem Tamang serves as the first indigenous dean of the Anglican Church in Nepal, which ministers among the south Asian country’s 227 ethnic groups and 125 languages.

“God in his Spirit is growing and multiplying,” Tamang said. “Let us dare to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ to the unreached. It is our responsibility to extend the kingdom of God wherever in the globe we are in.”

The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Maet Paul, Bishop of Gambella, Ethiopia, echoed Tamang’s words. Established in 1996, the Anglican Church in Gambella has grown to 75 churches, 47 congregations, and 16 church plants in the region.

“Many of these congregations are in a great need for discipleship training with a purpose of being rooted in Jesus. Many of our congregations worship under a tree, as they cannot afford to build proper church buildings for worship,” Paul said of his growing flock.

The triennial conference, which brought participants to the Blue Ridge mountains from dozens of nations, marked its 50th anniversary, first founded as the Episcopal Church Missionary Community in 1975. Among the largest recurring events in the Anglican Communion, New Wineskins serves as a mission conference, family reunion for sending churches and missionaries serving across the globe, and a time of united worship.

Under the theme “Hope for the Nations,” the 2025 event drew 70 different ministries, several of which hosted multiday pre-conference gatherings, including the sending organizations Anglican Frontier Missions and the Society of Anglican Missionaries and Senders. Anglican institutions including Trinity Anglican Seminary and Nashotah House Theological Seminary also sent teams.

Anglican bishops from the provinces of Alexandria (Egypt and North Africa), Uganda, and Southeast Asia participated alongside those from the Anglican Church in Brazil and the Anglican Church in North America. Members of the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans and the Global Anglican Future Conference were present.

“I cannot tell you how proud I am that the largest event our province hosts is a mission conference,” ACNA Archbishop Steve Wood said during the conference’s concluding worship service, in which Archbishop of Southeast Asia Titus Chung and Archbishop of Uganda Stephen Kaziimba concelebrated the Holy Eucharist.

Visa issues prevented some longtime participants from attending the gathering, including many from Myanmar and Sudan. Archbishop Stephen Than Myint Oo of the Church of the Province of Myanmar provided a video message, and Ugandan participants’ visas were only granted the week before the conference, enabling their presence.

Divine Appointments

New Wineskins is regarded by returning participants as consequential for unplanned interactions among those seeking to minister overseas, which conference conveners call “divine appointments.”

“A simple table conversation can be life-changing,” E412 Ministries Executive Director Carol Smith Rogers said of the conference, which she first attended in 2007 with her husband, Clark. The two have since crisscrossed the world at the invitation of Anglican churches in Mozambique, Nepal, and numerous other nations.

Those conversations can lead to ministries spread far beyond Anglican circles, but each group at New Wineskins has a shared belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the necessity of the Great Commission in bringing the gospel message “to the ends of the earth.”

“Missions is not cultural imperialism. It is God’s heart,” said Sharon Steinmiller, emeritus executive director of New Wineskins. “God is on the move in amazing ways in our world today. There are as many as 2 million believers in Iran today. The Islamic Revolution hasn’t delivered on its promises and people are turning to Jesus.”

Dependence on God’s providence and prevenient grace were recurring themes across the event.

“If you think you can’t do it, that’s exactly the point: You can’t, you need God,” Steinmiller said.

Speakers described the role of Christians in society to preserve, using Jesus’ language of salt.

“Salt in the shaker changes nothing. Withdrawal or compromise empties our witness,” said the Rev. Canon Paul Ssembrio, chaplain of Uganda Christian University. He described the Church as a “city on the hill” through a collective public witness and a “lamp on the stand” through its members’ personal domestic witness.

“Jesus isn’t exclusive for us,” said the Rt. Rev. Dr. Yassir Eric, bishop of the GAFCON-initiated EKKIOS Church, an extra-provincial diocese working among those from a Muslim background. “We hear about bad things happening and we have a ‘heart of Jonah’ towards Muslims. But God can change that as we share the message of hope, the message of Christ.”

Anglican Practices for Missions

Among the themes proclaimed at the conference is that Anglicanism offers “helpful, contextualizable practices and rhythms” that can connect people with the gospel, according to Anglican Frontier Missions Director Chris Royer.

Royer was a cross-cultural worker to the Middle East in the 1990s. He recalls being asked by a new convert what festivals and special observances Christians practice. He was incredulous when Royer, not yet an Anglican, could identify only Christmas and Easter, compared to dozens of holy days on the Islamic calendar.

Royer now identifies liturgy, sacrament, the prayer book tradition, and a global, visible Anglican church structure as inherited things that can help reach people with the gospel.

The priority of church planting has also proved helpful in spreading the gospel, said the Rev. Gabriel Uchôa of the Anglican Diocese of Recife, Brazil, which has planted 16 churches, including a new diocesan cathedral.

“The joy of seeing children in a new parish lift their voice to God for the first time—that joy is why we keep planting and why we cannot stop,” Uchôa said. “If planting churches is our method, reaching the next generation is our holy mission. What would it mean to multiply structures if our next generation does not carry the fire?”

Leading with Beauty

New Wineskins was not just about overseas missions, but about how God calls Christians to be missionaries in their fields, including the arts.

“Why do the arts matter? There is a theological anchoring because God is an artist. He created us to co-create with him. We are called to bring beauty to broken places,” said the Rev. Dr. Winfield Bevins, executive director of Creo Arts in Wilmore, Kentucky.

Bevins, who previously served on the faculty of Asbury Theological Seminary, mentioned artists in the temple who were anointed and skilled in craftsmanship and produced works of art for God’s kingdom.

“As Christians we are called to lead with beauty, to prepare hearts and minds for the truth of the gospel,” Bevins said. He quoted Catholic Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire and the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota: “The most effective evangelistic strategy is one that moves from the beautiful to the good and then to the true.”

Beauty matters, Bevins said, because it is a means of grace that reflects God’s glory.

“What the arts can do for every one of us is that it can remind us to make our lives a work of art—a life set apart that is holy unto the lord,” Bevins said.

Conference speakers consistently reiterated that the task of bringing Christ to the ends of the earth is impossible on human abilities alone.

“The mission of God is not sustained by human cleverness but by divine might,” Archbishop Wood preached in the conference’s closing service. “It’s not your story that will change another life. It’s an account of how his story changed your story.”

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