A couple of years before John Wimber the great leader of The Vineyard Movement, died I met with him in his California office. John was supposed to speak in Norway and my friends there asked me to discuss the Norwegian culture and church life with him so he better understood how to minister more effectively. Unfortunately, John's cancer flared up again and he had to cancel.
Wimber had a big impact on the spiritual climate in the world, especially the USA. The size and vigor of the Vineyard Movement of churches are a not due to him alone but he was a key to a lot of it. John had been a Consultant and Teacher at Fuller Seminary and one of its attendant organizations so he knew very well how to build healthy organizations and multiply a ministry. He was a big proponent of following the commands of Jesus and Paul to "Equip members to minister".
I had met John only once before this but we had a fairly trusting and open relationship. Perhaps because of his illness John was very reflective about his career. He said that the biggest mistake he ever made was to veer away from the original call he received as a Minister. He was concerned that he got too much involved with the Prophetic Movement. He said that big events with famous and infamous "prophets" taken him away from the teaching, training and multiplication call of the Lord. I agree that an Ephesians 4 Equipping call would have made an even greater impact than what he focused on.
I did not comment but silently agreed with him. It took many Vineyard churches and Vineyard Pastors away from their central role and replaced equipping with traveling miracle shows. Their "prophets" stopped teaching and prophesied over needy people who had gathered to hear them. The Vineyard has grown nicely but nothing like what was possible if they had pursued the original vision.
Was he right in that assessment? Let me know what you think.
To learn about equipping, get our materials from the web store.
2 comments:
Thanks for this post, Gary. A helpful reminder that we need to focus on the main task of equipping rather than the tangential trappings of the show.
The tangent the entire prophetic movement created did take the Vineyard off mission, and I don't believe it ever truly recovered. The momentum was lost, as were many solid leaders.
When I was at Wheaton College in the early '90s, I was part of the Vineyard and was asked by a professor to defend the movement's alliance with the Kansas City Prophets. I was leery of that marriage anyway, so it put me in an odd position of having to support my church and deny some of its actions at the same time.
The saddest part of the prophetic debacle was that the Vineyard did what many churches do when confronted with a problem; it sought distance in the aftermath. After Wimber backed away from the Kansas City Prophets, it led to a serious toning down of everything charismata-related within the denomination, which eventually hurt the Vineyard's identity, a situation worsened by Wimber's death. The people who felt betrayed by this toning down eventually left for IHOP and some other more radical charismatic groups, and the remnant seemed destined to fall in with the Church Growth Movement, which itself collapsed after Bill Hybels confessed all that movement's theories of discipleship had not produced the lasting fruit envisioned.
The Vineyard churches in their heyday made a huge impact. Unfortunately, that dalliance with the prophetic movement quenched the spark, and the Vineyard as a whole seems a shell of its former, vital self. In short, I think John Wimber, if he were still alive, would be saddened by the condition of the Vineyard in 2013, and I believe that he would trace some of that to his fateful decision to ally with the prophetic movement, a movement that I believe left no lasting fruit.
Post a Comment