Vineyard / Missional / Emerging
A Couple of months back we got an email asking us a few questions. I’ve paraphrased the questions. Plus the answers I’ve deleted any names, but here it is….
What does it mean to be in the Vineyard and be part of the emerging / missional movement?
How does this look like in our church?
How does “community” mean to Ranges Community Church that is different to other churches?
Historically the growth model of the Vineyard has been a “church growth” perspective – Wimber himself was well primed on the topic having taught it, and worked with some of the best in the late 70′s 80′s
We try to follow a missional model basically – Christology defines missiology defines Ecclesiology (Alan Hirsch has written some great material on this).
In other words how you define Christ with define how you reach people, and this will help you define the way in which you do Church. (Personally I would rather how you define the Trinity).
Church Growth model works best reaching people where there is some background with Christinity eg went to sunday school, next door neigbours were Christians etc. We can no longer assume that most people have had this kind of background. The missional model does not require for people to have to have background knowledge of Christianity.
For me a good way of trying to picture how this works is thinking if Jesus came to the Chinese instead of the Israel what would it look like, or say the Incas in South America, or a people group that live in Siberia…Or in our own culture Australians that have never been to church except for a funeral?
There are a few things that we do a bit differently to some other Vineyards. To be honest everyone got a bit tired of worship songs so we often do more tactile stuff in worship like painting or working with clay or meditation.
The messages are also more of a conversation in which we try to get people to give feedback. Or split into groups. There is a sense in which we explore the bible and aspects of the Christian life together. We are often more facilitatory rather than the one who has to have all the answers.
2) Neil Cole who wrote Organic church writes that we have to increase the bar in what it means to be disciples and lower the bar of what it means to be a church. This simple thought has been very influential for us, not to mention rather freeing when it comes to Sundays, and very challenging when it comes to every day life. We like to spend time with people – lots of phone contact… seeing how people are going and doing life together is more important than programs to us. To be honest we are to busy to run any programs anyway. We both work part time and now have two small children.
We are pretty convinced the Western Church has to do some radical changes. One of the things that Christina and I have decided is that we don’t want to get paid.
-Paid clergy in 90% of cases end up keeping the status quo.
-The paid clergy end up doing most of the work. (We don’t!)
-Without been paid and others knowing, people pick up the slack and use their gifts more. (This is the case for our community where almost everyone contributes in some way to the life of the church, both on and beyond the Sunday gathering)
We have pretty strong boundaries. We only have one evening out per week for church related activity – and that happens to be a discussion group at the local pub. We have a pastoral meeting fortnightly and that is it. Between us we work one to two days per week, and of course Sunday mornings. I think you have do to this.
Even though we do stuff differently, the Vineyard “Values” are broad and we sit in them pretty well.
The essence of community is that we have a set of basic values in which we hold in “common”. For us it is wanting to follow Jesus. That is where we have our “Unity”.
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