vineyard great lakes region priorities, by ken wilson

Dear Vineyard Pastor,

 

Our regional leadership team meets once a year to do extensive discussion, prayer and planning. This time helps to set our priorities for the areas that we feel called to encourage and support within the region more broadly through our area meetings, contact with other pastors, regional conference, etc.

 

This year we took some time to discern six priorities that we feel ought to shape our leadership over the next five years. I thought it would be helpful to share these priorities with you to help stimulate conversation within your various area Vineyard pastor connections.

 

1. Lean into church planting. This has always been a top priority within Vineyard, the planting of healthy, reproducing churches to reach the lost and bear witness to the transforming power of the kingdom in word and deed.

 

Over the past year, we noticed a slowing in the number of church plants within our region. It's normal to have an ebb and flow of church planting, but we felt that it's important to continue to press into our value of church planting. Many churches in our region have matured and are investing in buildings; many have planted and are recovering from the energy output that goes along with larger church plants, especially. So we see a real need to continue to encourage church planting and we spent a good portion of our time together planning for this.

 

To do this, we are seeking to identify those churches in our region, which are in a good position to plant in order to encourage them to do so. Danny Meyer will be organizing a mid-size church roundtable to gather churches with attendance of 200-800 and help these pastors with the unique challenges. We suspect that many of these churches are ripe for planting new churches. We'd like to see healthy and growing churches offering "externships" for VLI grads and other potential planters--more intensive training experiences that could build the kind of connections with a local church that could lead to a successful plant.

 

We would also like to focus attention on areas within the region that are ripe for a Vineyard Church plant. These areas include Cleveland, Detroit, Louisville, South Bend/Mishawaka/Elkhart IN, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis. Rick Evans is exploring how he might help stimulate church planting in Cleveland; Dave Workman is doing the same with Indianapolis in mind, and John Racz for the Pittsburg area. If you have thoughts or input on these or other areas, please share them with the leaders in those areas.

 

We hope to do some vision casting for church planting at or connected with our May 2008 regional leaders conference, to be held in Cincinnati. This will be followed by church planting training led by Dave Workman, Jim Bricker and other regional leaders in Fall '08 and Spring '09. We are committing to having a strong showing of leaders in the region at these events. We may also do a Holy Spirit Summit focused on church planting in 2009.

Finally, within our areas (groupings of Vineyard churches) we'd like to host simple "What is the Vineyard?" events to draw those who might be interested in seeing a Vineyard church come to their locale.

 

2. Lean into fostering outward focused churches. We all know that without strong leadership, churches tend to turn in on themselves. Inertia always leads to inward, and rarely to outward focus. So "stirring each other to love and good works" as fellow pastors includes stirring each other to provide this kind of leadership in our churches. We are blessed with some very effective outward focused churches in our region and we want to encourage those churches to share what they've learned and other churches to seek out the best practices that are being pressed out in Vineyard churches all around us.

 

3. Lean into cross-cultural missions. On a national level, Vineyard is involved in promoting church planting in 60 different nations. Many churches in our region are involved in missions partnerships and church planting overseas. It's an historic time of church expansion in many parts of the world, with exciting opportunities opening up in areas previously closed to the gospel.

 

4. Lean into the expanding ministry of the Holy Spirit. The mission before us absolutely requires dependence on the work and power of the Holy Spirit. The breadth of the Spirits work encompasses more, not less. So we want to press out what it means to practice healing prayer, making the presence of the Spirit available to people more broadly, exploring some of the contemplative prayer practices that tend the fire in the fireplace of our own soul. It's been some time since the early surge of the work of the Spirit fostered in conferences that drew the first generation of Vineyard pastors. Now we must learn to encourage the work of the Spirit in local churches, to sustain this ministry for the long haul and see it grow into a new cultural and generational context. Pressing out new expressions of worship to mediate the Sprit's presence in the increasingly diverse contemporary setting is a key area that many are grappling with. I'd personally love to see all of churches offering classes and ongoing equipping opportunities to teach the basics of healing and prayer ministry as well as pressing out new ways to make room for the Spirit's presence in our churches.

 

5. Lean into developing healthy local churches. The Natural Church Development material has been a good tool, for helping churches assess their overall health. We also see a need for many of our churches to tend to areas of ministry that are essential for health and grow. Areas include developing effective youth and children's ministries that are under-girded by good leadership training and abuse prevention practices. For example, every church in our region should have a comprehensive abuse prevention policy, which is carefully practiced. Anything else just isn't acceptable. If you don't have one, talk to some fellow pastors who do or visit our regional website for valuable information.
Every church needs functional structures to handle finances with integrity overseen by boards empowered by good by-laws. And as a region we want to promote healthy communications and connections between and among pastors and leaders--something we are investing in our regional website and community center to help facilitate.

 

6. Lean into increasing our capacity to reach an increasingly diverse harvest field. Anyone in touch with the American situation knows that unless we become more adept at reaching a more diverse population we will become irrelevant.
Since Vineyard began in the 1980's the country has become much more diverse.
To date, we've been most effective in white suburban communities. To be effective we need to learn how to do church in urban centers and among a more diverse population. We have a number of churches making progress in this area but we have a sharp learning curve ahead of us.

 

Donnell Wyche, our Regional Youth Task Force Coordinator, shared his perspective with our regional leaders. Donnell is also part of the new national Diversity Task Force. Donnell wisely stressed that it all begins with the heart: do we want to be more diverse to reflect the kingdom? Are we willing to be intentional about fostering this witness to the kingdom? This puts us in that familiar territory beyond our comfort zone, where risk and faith are needed.

 

We also had a great conversation about the contemporary cultural divide and it's impact on our presentation of the gospel. As Charles Park shared so powerfully at the recent National Conference, we're facing a steep learning curve in what it takes to reach what he called "Center Cities" and people shaped by that sensibility. This is something we're wrestling with here at the Ann Arbor Vineyard, planted in the midst of a large secular University, a center for science, and with a cultural orientation much different than the bible belt. I suspect that many of the people who haven't been reached by the gospel in our local communities share many of these cultural characteristics. If we're going to reach them, we'll need wisdom, passion and power to do so.

 

When we step back and consider these priorities, it can be breath taking. There's no absence of exciting challenge to keep us trusting in Jesus and maintaining our growing edge. If we can make significant progress in these areas over the next six years, we will have done something deeply satisfying, with real kingdom impact.

These are the kinds of things we are considering as we look over our region and try to sense God's heart and how to direct our service within and beyond our local churches.

 

Like any short list of priorities, it's not exhaustive. But it's our best sense of the place to lean our limited leadership resources. In the coming months, as you gather in area groupings of Vineyard pastors, I encourage you to share your own thoughts as we learn to walk together.

 

With love and regard for you all,

 

Ken Wilson

Senior Pastor, Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor
Regional Overseer, Vineyard Great Lakes