2008 Great Lakes Regional Conference Talk
"The Treasure Buried in the Field of Vineyard"
by Ken Wilson
In my humble estimation, the best business book next to Proverbs is Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book is based on studies of organizations that transition from good to great--ones that are "Built to Last" (the title of a companion book by the same author.) And of course the church that Jesus builds is just such an organization, because the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
Organizations that transition from Good to Great, according to Collins have certain common traits.
First, they have a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) What is ours? To preach gospel to every creature. What is the gospel? Great question!
The Vineyard is a movement impelled by a dramatic theological undercurrent: a deepened understanding of the gospel informed by the theology of the kingdom; beyond the helpful Romans Road presentations, Bridge Diagram, 4 Spiritual Laws…."the gospel of the kingdom."
This undercurrent preceded John Wimber, who popularized the works of theologians like Oscar Cullmann and G.E. Ladd. This Kingdom is the treasure buried in the field of Vineyard.
By sheer good fortune, I stumbled into this treasure as a brand new believer without even knowing it. One of my earliest teachers in the Jesus movement days in the city of Detroit, where I grew up was Haskell Stone. Haskell was a Jewish believer in Jesus who taught sitting down in a backyard filled with young hippies who were swelling the ranks of the Jesus movement in the early 1970's.
Smoking a cigarette in an FDR holder, no less. And he taught straight out of the gospels. And always said, "Never get too far from the gospels!"
It turns out that Haskell studied under George Eldon Ladd at Fuller Theological Seminary, the same person who had a profound influence on John Wimber and through Wimber to the entire Vineyard.
After moving to Ann Arbor, I became involved in the ecumenical catholic charismatic covenant community movement. I know, a mouthful! This was a movement that hadn't been particularly influenced by the writings of Cullman or G.E. Ladd. So the kingdom of God theme didn't emerge with any prominence.
Then I happened upon a Vineyard conference, and heard teaching like I hadn't in a long time. Teaching that came straight out of the gospels and spoke openly about the kingdom of God. It was like coming back home--to Ladd, and his teaching on the kingdom it turns out.
Our church eventually became a Vineyard and connected with this kingdom stream. We began to pray for the sick, serve the poor, focus on intimate worship, all those things and more that are rooted in this understanding of the kingdom.
After a few years as a Vineyard, a seminary professor, Brown Kinnard, began to attend our church. We met for the first time, and Brown handed me an old typewritten paper that he had prepared in his seminary days, many years previously. It was a paper about the kingdom of God, based on the writings of Oscar Cullman, who in turn, had a big influence of George Eldon Ladd.
After reading it in Brown's presence, I looked up at him and there were tears in his eyes as he said, "Ken, I've been looking for years for a church that understood the importance of the kingdom of God. I've found it here in the Vineyard church and I can't tell you how much it means to me!"
The theology and the practice of the kingdom of God, is the treasure buried in the field of the Vineyard. Not exclusively of course--the kingdom is bigger than the entire church, let alone one very small slice of the church called the Vineyard.
But it is what makes the Vineyard, the Vineyard.
This theological fermentation called "the kingdom of God" didn't end with John Wimber, or the people who informed his thinking. We are still having our understanding of the gospel of the kingdom stretched. Mine has been stretched by the "3W's": John Wimber, Dallas Willard, Tom Wright--all of them in search of the treasure buried in the field.
So I've put myself through a little exercise, and I suggest you may want to do the same. I've attempted to state the gospel in terms of the kingdom of God in one hundred words or less. Here's my best shot…
The gospel is the good news that our exile from God, others, and ourselves is ending thanks to a great rescue. God has entered the human condition once and for all through his Beloved Son--to reconcile and redeem us by his incarnation, living, dying, bodily rising, ascending, Spirit-infusing, and promised future coming as judge. Jesus is gathering communities of disciples to bear witness to the future-glorious reign of God breaking into the present, empowering us to work toward the day when heaven and earth are once again fully integrated in a new creation-- which through Jesus, has already begun.
Preaching the gospel of the kingdom, as we form kingdom communities that are the "authenticating structure" of the gospel is our BHAG. (Because without a church seeking to put this good news into practice, it's just words.)
Second, according to Collins, organizations that move from good to great, must learn to "Preserve the core and expand the boundaries." I believe his actual wording is something like, "Preserve the core and stimulate progress." You get the gist. Not one or the other, but both. At the same time.
As a church movement committed to engaging our culture with the gospel of the kingdom, we feel the challenge of this all the time, don't we?
PRESERVE THE CORE: Our core includes drawing people into intimate worship, forming relational networks through small groups and other means, the teaching-practice of healing, doing ministry to the poor through the local church, all informed by a empowered kingdom theology.
The core is something we can't assume. To actually express these in a local church is a major challenge. To continue to tend and update our expression of these values is a major challenge.
In our history, many new emphases have come at expense of core values and it comes back to bite us every time. It's easy to get bored or frustrated with one or the other of our core values and let it languish, but that comes back to bite us every time. For example, when we stop teaching the prayer ministry model--adapting it, improving it, as we go along--then other models fill the vacuum. Or we can stop serving the poor and Jesus stops showing up at church as often. Core values are not truly core unless they are of the sort not to be trifled with.
What drew me to Vineyard was the radical challenge of the core values; each one was a stretch for me, and continues to stretch me.
But the stretching doesn't stop with our core values. The gospel of the kingdom is bigger than our core values, more demanding. The particular way we flesh out these core values doesn't work for all time. Plus the core values have an over-arching value: follow Jesus wherever he leads us. And he's leading us into new mission territory all the time, because the mission field is dynamic, like a harvest field is dynamic, not static.
We're in a time of massive cultural change: we need to preserve the core and expand the boundaries to be effective in these new fields.
To expand the boundaries of mission, we are required to do what Jim Collins says organizations that move from good to great always do as part of the transition: we have to "confront the brutal facts."
Don't look now, but large portions of our harvest field are changing. We are watching the browning of America. We are watching a massive influx of immigration that began with immigration reform in the 1960's and has continued unabated ever since. Despite being one of the most religious nations on earth, one of the largest growing groups is "unaffiliated," now about 16% of the population and growing, especially among the young. And the young are now longer Boomers--they are the Millenials, a generation bigger than the vaunted boomers and shaped by other things than shaped the boomers. And we seem to be more polarized as a nation now--a cultural divide seems to rend us in halves across many issues, fueled by the wild and wooly Internet and the rise of cable television with it's talking heads paid by the insult, it seems sometimes.
BRUTAL FACT #1: THE GOSPEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANTY ISN'T BIG ENOUGH. (Just to be clear: by "the gospel of American Christianity" I simply mean the message people are likely to hear on the radio, or by television or when they walk into the nearby catholic parish, or mainline protestant church, or local evangelical and/or charismatic church.)
Sixty years ago, the big movement in seminaries and major church institutions was called "the social gospel." This focused on the concern for social justice as an integral concern of the gospel, and the reality of evil imbedded in social structures. But the social gospel movement lost sight of the transforming power of faith to awaken individual human hearts, to save people, one soul at time.
So the evangelical wing of the church, named after the gospel, began to insist that the gospel was the power of God for salvation one soul at a time; and often this assertion as made over and against the social gospel movement. Evangelicals set to work spreading that message. We applied our American marketing genius to the task; we distilled the gospel into simple and helpful presentations like the bridge diagram and the four spiritual laws. We insisted, implicitly and explicitly that this and not that, is the gospel.
By our relative silence on the gospel's concern for justice, we implied that it is all about receiving Jesus as Lord & Savior for the forgiveness of personal sins so when we die we can go to heaven.
Brutal fact: that gospel is too small. The word "save" in NT (Gk. sozo) is a big word that applies to whole of life: physical, emotional, spiritual; and at all levels of life: personal, social, national, global.
A "big enough gospel" is for the whole person, not just saving souls; the big enough gospel is focused on nations not just individuals (as Tom Wright has so ably demonstrated, the gospel was in part, Jesus' attempt to save Israel from national destruction; to get them off the path of violent resistance and on the path of loving their enemies, the Roman occupiers); big enough gospel is not just about going to heaven when we die; it is also about bringing heaven down to earth here and now, where all the suffering is and leaning forward into the coming new creation.
First brutal fact: the gospel of American Christianity isn't big enough. And the second brutal fact is like unto it: THE GOSPEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH
Many of those on the outside of faith looking in don't hear our message as good news at all. It's widely viewed as bad news. The president of the SBC thinks baptisms are down in SBC, in part, because Americans now view evangelicals as mean-spirited.
I have a friend, Joel Hunter, through my work with Scientists and Evangelicals United to Protect Creation who was, for six months, head of one of largest Christian political action groups: the Christian Coalition. He was let go because he wanted to expand the agenda beyond opposing abortion & gay marriage to include the fight against poverty and environmental degradation.
This is the strategy of some of the largest Christian organizations in the U.S.--often ones with largest mailing lists and the largest media megaphones. As a result, those on the outside of faith looking in know more about what Christians are against than what they are for.
They see Christians playing political hardball, taking no prisoners, and they think to themselves, "If this is what good news is all about, I'm not interested. You may win the argument, but you've lost my heart."
We may say, "Well, people misunderstand the gospel. They are hearing it through distorted lenses. It really is good news. Too bad for them if they misunderstand. That's on them."
Try that with your spouse! I know what I meant! If she didn't hear that, too bad for her!
People God loves are not hearing! Lost people not being found! Not acceptable! Not good enough!
Jesus kept his instructions pretty simple: "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation." (Mk 16: 15)
In English, there's only one adjective modifying that noun: the noun is "news" the modifying adjective: GOOD.
If there's one thing about the news we are under orders to communicate (by word & deed) it is that the news is good!
It's not good enough to say, "We know it's good." Not good enough to sing songs about how good it is. Not good enough to brighten our teeth so our smiles are unnaturally white when we tell the news. Not good enough to put all the pretty people on the platform singing happy-clappy songs, so it looks good because we do.
We have to take our communication task more seriously that that! How can we communicate--tell & do--the goodness of this news?
We have to wrestle with this message and it's implications for our lives on every level: personal, social, global. If our message is not good news on each of these levels, it's not good enough!
Personal: Are we wrestling with the gospel so it's scent rubs off on us? Are we learning to approach God as Abba-Father, so Abba's love for us and others is affecting us? Are we becoming the people who don't gossip in the office because we're concerned to protect even the reputation of people we don't like? Are we the ones learning to listen to others as we would want to be listened to, because our master's rule is the golden one? Are we passionate about bringing the power of the kingdom to rescue people from their personal distress--through emotional, physical, relational, spiritual healing?
Social: Are we wrestling with the gospel and it's implications for the intractable social problems around us? Are we applying the gospel aiming for results?
Souteast Michigan is the most racially segregated place in United States, according to the latest census data. Churches in Southeast Michigan are MORE racially segregated than the neighborhoods and the workplaces are! Not good enough!
It's not enough to contend for gospel: to defend the gospel against unwarranted attacks. We have to contend with the gospel.
If we're wrestling with the gospel we will become increasingly diverse as a movement and within our local churches, assuming that our local communities are more diverse than we are. Sociologists define a diverse church as at least 20% non-majority culture. The Ann Arbor Vineyard is currently about 13% non-majority culture. That means we have some more wrestling with the gospel to do, so that diversity--which is not just a PC term, but a sign of the coming kingdom--becomes a reality!
Does every Vineyard need to be diverse? No. Not every community is diverse. We will have largely white Vineyards, mostly Latino or African American, or other immigrant population Vineyards. But as a movement we have to be become more diverse. And many of our local churches need to approach the diversity of their local communities. We've formed a national task force to help us think through this challenge. Brent Paulson, from the Wycliffe Vineyard, one of our most diverse churches, and Donnell Wyche, from the Ann Arbor Vineyard serve on that task force. We've empowered them to equip and empower us with their best thinking and the best practices in this important kingdom matter. Lets learn from them and others who lead in this area.
One of the great social needs facing our local community is the severe pressure on the family unit, especially single mom families that are under unique pressure. In many churches, if you are a single mom, you feel marginalized, ignored, perhaps, even, shamed. That's not good enough!
James, the brother of Jesus, said true religion means taking care of the widows & orphans. In our generation: single moms & their kids; families struggling to get by without a dad in the home.
That's why we invest as we do in a single moms ministry. That's why the best food we ever serve, with the best-dressed and most professional wait staff, is to the single moms at our monthly Moms Night Out dinner for Single moms and their kids (who are cared for by other caring adults in the far end of the building while their moms are treated like royalty.)
This isn't feel-good do good-ism. This is real-good good-news-ism.
Global: What are three major GLOBAL concerns of our day? We might all have our own list, but here's mine: 1. Dehumanization through rampant disregard for human life (poverty, slavery, abortion); 2. Growing conflict between the Christian West and radical Islam; 3. Global environmental distress.
If our gospel isn't good news for these problems, not good enough!
Thanks to hundreds of thousands of ordinary people involved in global missions, American church is doing something about abject global poverty, with excellent leadership coming from Rick Warren and Bill Hybels; with excellent leadership from the National Association of Evangelicals and others we are mobilizing to oppose modern day slavery. We have a 30 year history of concern for the sanctity of the life of the unborn. So it's not like we've been sitting idle.
But there are two other global concerns to contend with as well. Consider global terrorism fueled by rising Islamic fundamentalism.
Jesus had a big idea: love your enemies; do unto others as you would have them do unto you; don't return evil with evil. Man, do we have some wrestling to do with the gospel on this one!
I think nations need a Department of Defense and a military. Not a Vineyard, policy, mind you, just a personal opinion, of which, like you, I have many. My father fought in WW2: I'm not a pacifist. But crush your enemies is not the gospel! It's not the biggest idea entrusted to us! I don't have the answers, but I know the gospel does, and we haven't been wrestling with it enough concerning one of the biggest challenges of our time.
Or consider environment degradation at a massive scale, like 1.2 Billion people without access to clean drinking water. This has to be a concern to the Jesus movement because his message is good news for the poor and the poor suffer the most from environmental degradation.
You may know that I've been active in this area, since attending a retreat of the leading environmental scientists and several evangelical leaders. At the retreat I heard Gus Speth, the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and first advisor to a U.S. President on the emerging concern about the warming climate (thirty years ago) say words to this effect: "I thought thirty years of good science would solve these problems. [He referred to several.] I was wrong. We need a spiritual and cultural transformation to solve these problems."
It was, looking back, an historic moment. There has been a cultural divide for many years, with environmental scientists on one side, and many people of faith on the other. Some early voices in the environmental movement had some unkind things to say about Christian faith, and many Christians have returned the favor. But now, a leader in the field of environmental scientist was acknowledging the need for a spiritual awakening to address concerns that have been troubling him for decades. At the same retreat, the top environmental scientists in the nation agreed to refer to natural world as the creation from time to time, including E.O. Wilson who wrote a book by that title, The Creation
In fact, because of the work Tri Robinson has begun, the top environmental scientists see Vineyard as good news! The favor of the Lord is upon us in their eyes. I spoke at conference on creation care at the Boise Vineyard last year. And watched dumbfounded as Tri did an invitation for prayer ministry and had several secular environmentalists respond. I prayed with one of them and it led to a wonderful conversation the next day in which we each acknowledged things in our own spheres of influence that have kept us from working together.
Since then, I've met with groups of scientists and evangelical pastors to tear down the walls that have kept us from working together for the common good, first at the University of Akron and later at The Ohio State University.
I understand from Rich Nathan that 150 people gave their lives to Christ at the recent Justice Revival hosted at the Columbus Vineyard. The focus of the conference, as I understand it, was on how the gospel can truly be the good news it's meant to be for the poor and oppressed.
If, in a very short time, the gospel does not become known as something that empowers people to address the global problems that seem so overwhelming, including care for God's creation, it is going to suffer enormous loss in marketplace of ideas. If it's not good news for all creation, it's not good enough.
Since we launched a creation care ministry at the Ann Arbor Vineyard, we've seen more biology grad students than any time in our history combined. More people coming to the church for the first time who have a heart for the environment and want to understand how that can be part of Christian discipleship.
Since my involvement in Creation Care, I've more heart to heart conversations with secular scientists than any time in the past 30 years as a witnessing Christian combined. One of them wrote a blurb for my new book.
So this is a particular concern of mine, and I'm well aware that you may have others. There are plenty of global concerns to go around. As Tri Robinson said last night, "Let's do something, rather than nothing."
It's important for us to tackle these challenges as a body, a community of churches each with different giftings, different passions, different callings, different communities to serve.
One size does not fit all. What it takes to reach the lost in Ann Arbor is different than what it takes to reach the lost in Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Grand Rapids, or Indianapolis, or Florence, Kentucky, or Wheeling, W. Virginia.
Every church does not need to tackle every area. To reach the lost in Ann Arbor, I've had to tackle issues of science & faith. It may not be an important issue in your local community. Don't do it, unless you have to!
Some churches may be stronger at preserving the core, others at expanding the boundaries missionally. Either way, we're going to need each other.
Which brings me to a final word of encouragement regarding an important concern of our movement: church planting.
In these times of massive cultural change, church planting is more important than ever. New wineskins are always needed for new wine. We're commissioned to go into every nook and cranny of creation with the gospel of the kingdom. Each nook, each cranny, needs a church.
New church plants are in the best position to take core values and shape them for a new missional context and to integrate core values with strategic new emphases that serve the harvest.
I want to especially encourage established Vineyard churches in our region which have not yet experienced the joy (and attendant anguish!) of church planting to be ready to give birth to a new church plant in the Lord's time. The kingdom comes through a mysterious partnership between the human and the divine. God is committed to working through flesh and blood--that's the lesson of the incarnation. Or as Eve said after giving birth to her first-born, "With the help of the Lord I have made me a man!"
So I would encourage established churches awaiting your first church plant: be open to life! If nothing else, stop using "birth control" [Please, this is a metaphor--you realize that, I hope; I have no business talking to any of you about your family planning methods--I realize that!]
I encourage you to send a few people at least to the upcoming conference, "A Cause to Live For" to be held in Royal Oak, Michigan in September [see the regional website for details.] Steve Nicholson and others will be there to stoke the fires--and give participants a vision for lending their hands to the work of the kingdom, whether in missions, or church planting, or launching new ministries or serving with conviction in existing ministries. It's for the young and the young at heart, for those willing and those willing to be made willing.
© (2001 - 2008). Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor, 2275 Platt Road Ann Arbor, MI 48104.