The Vineyard Community

Tonight there was a gathering of people in my house. It was not a ‘church service’, although the people present constitute a church. Simply by the fact that we gather together in the name of Jesus you could say that the church is present, and he is present with us. Our purpose is not to advance the cause of an organization, or plan events to promote our way of doing church, or create a space for a spiritual pick-me-up. As followers of Jesus, we belong to the people of God. We are Israel, from whom salvation has come into the world through Jesus and who are now carrying out God’s charge to be the “light of the world” and “a city on a hill.” This is not something we do in our spare time.

This group of people in my home are my friends, my companions on the kingdom journey. I have waded knee-deep in the shit of life with some of them; I have also rejoiced with them in their greatest victories. For others our relationship is just beginning, but God is quickly binding our minds and hearts together. What we all have in common is a desire to live out this thing called Christianity in our real lives, with real people. We’re generally done with church as an institutional mechanism. We are not expecting any pastor or leader to tell us what to do or give us a spiritual boost so we can make it for another seven days. We’re not looking for the next great 40-day program to finally deal with the problems in our lives. We don’t consider our jobs and businesses to only be what God uses to financially support the “real ministry”. No, we are all in the ministry. We are all missionaries. We are all pastors, teachers, prophets, evangelists, and apostles to those around us.

This is the first reality I believe we can say with assurance after five years of asking questions like “What is church?” and “What does it mean to be an apprentice of Jesus Christ?” The only context for ministry that matters and the place where we can most experience the kingdom of God is in the actual lives we are now living. The phrase, “I’m thinking of going into the ministry” is impossible. The minute we decide to follow Jesus, we enter the ministry. With that reality firmly in view, we now have to determine what that looks like in practice. How do you live as an apprentice of Jesus as a father, husband, and engineer? Or as a DHL driver? Or in network marketing? Or as an attorney? How do you live as a community of faith when the status quo in our culture is to insulate and isolate yourself from everyone else? How does Jesus affect our economics, our plans for the future, the way we treat our extended family? These questions begin to (and should) affect every area of our lives, and will continue to preoccupy us for the rest of our lives.

That being said, what is it that we are to do when we gather together? Of course, there are many answers to that question and they all carry some weight. But if we had to choose only one thing, it would be worship. Praise, worship, and thanksgiving are the bread and butter activity of God’s people. Pretty much everything else we do together – learning and teaching, praying and listening, sharing and eating – only make sense in light of worship. We know that worship doesn’t just happen when we sing or play a guitar, but we acknowledge the value and importance of coming together as Paul said, to “speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.” In a very real way, worship is our language. It’s how we learn our way around the faith, around the community. Through praise, we see who God really is, and who we really are as his children. Through worship, we begin to get that God-vision out into our ordinary lives. Through thanksgiving, the kingdom remains real to us in the worst of circumstances.

Finally, we have discovered as a community the value of true friendship. Friendship is an indispensable part of uncovering what it means to be an authentic church. You cannot pray hard enough, study the scriptures hard enough, think and discuss things hard enough, or minister hard enough to make up for lack of true friendship within the community. Being friends does not mean you necessarily like everything about each other or even have all that much in common. It just means that at the end of the day, you can look at each other and know that you are on the same team. Out of that security comes the freedom for honesty, grace, healing, empowerment, encouragement, and hopefully love.

After almost five years of process, we are still a very young community. Every year I feel that all that we have learned up to this point becomes smaller and smaller compared to all that we need to learn. Thankfully, we have laid down the need to prove anything to anyone regarding our size or growth or influence. That being said, my heart slowly and continually swells with desire to see the whole church experience the beauty of the kingdom life lived simply, in community, in the nooks and crannies of everyday existence.