Nigel James

As a Vineyard pastor-theologian who is trying to navigate this Sacramental Charismatic tapestry, I have to say that all of this Bethel stuff has really highlighted just how important our Kingdom Theology is, our value of “everyone gets to play,” and how important embracing “best practices” from healthy safe-guarding wisdom are. In other words, Vineyard churches and Vineyard leaders should completely and entirely reject any of the Global Apostolic & Prophetic Movement or NAR influences. We really don’t need those influences given how they operate on completely different theological frameworks with different understandings of soooo many important topics. Sure, our theology SEEMS similar… but I can assure you that the differences are so major that we would be much better served in the following ways: 1. Go back to our early Vineyard sources like John Wimber, Don Williams, Alexander Venter, Derek Morphew, and our early Anglican influences like David Pytches, David Watson, etc. Those thinkers and practitioners were used by God to significantly influence the global Church with Kingdom Theology, empowering people to “do the stuff,” and a healthy desire for the Spirit’s activity. 2. Live in the tension of the “now and not yet.” This fuels our commitment to pray for the sick and expect miracles as well as helps us serve those who are dying and provide pastoral care through grief and loss. Like… seriously… the brilliance of Inaugurated eschatology is how BIBLICAL it is… and how it threads the needle between so many aspects of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels and the Pauline corpus on life in the Spirit. 3. Our super-power is that there are no superstars. Read that again, repeat it, and burn it into your cultural DNA. That is how the Kingdom comes. 4. When we forgot our biblical theology and our commitment to empowering THE WHOLE CHURCH and got distracted by the Kansas City Prophets disaster and were influenced by Latter Rain theology, guess what? Evangelism and missions took a backseat. Baptisms stopped happening. Church planting wasn’t a priority. Discipleship wasn’t seen as cool as ecstatic worship experiences and having powerful prophetic ministry. And guess what? THAT👏WAS👏A👏MISTAKE👏 And that’s why I really DO NOT think that Bethel, the “Culture of Honor,” and all this Wagner-influenced Apostolic / Prophetic stuff should influence us. It’s shiny and sounds powerful (because they tell us it is), but there’s nothing as beautiful and transformative and has the potential to change the world than a bunch of normal-every-day-disciples “doing the stuff.” At least that’s my opinion. The bankruptcy of the global (A)postolic & (P)rophetic movement has been found wanting. And we really have much better options at our disposal. So I suggest we look back, look deeper, and look below… it will fare much better for us.

It’s all too easy to join in the ‘Britain is broken’ chorus, but the church is called to sing a different song, a prophetic song, a song that brings the hope-filled gospel to this nation

A church in Fort Wayne, Indiana trains to protect their church in the event that someone targets them. All churches could use this type of training. 🎥 Fries Consulting