Routinizing Charisma The Vineyard Christian Fellowship In The Post Wimber Era

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Routinizing Charisma: The Vineyard Christian Fellowship in the

Post-Wimber Era*

Donald E. Miller

In the twenty years of its existence, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship has been an inﬂuential, innovative, and yet oftentimes tumultuous organi- zation. In terms of inﬂuence, it has grown to over ﬁve hundred congrega- tions in the United States, a rather remarkable achievement in two decades. Equally impressive, there are as many Vineyards outside the United States as within, and in countries as diverse as South Africa and Australia. Moreover, there is little question that the Vineyard has contributed to cre- ating a new paradigm of culturally relevant churches. Vineyard music is sung throughout the world, and hundreds of non-Vineyard churches wel- come the Holy Spirit into their worship in ways that did not occur prior to the renewal conferences of John Wimber. In addition, the Vineyard has been at the forefront of a movement to equip laypersons for ministry and, quite literally, to give the ministry back to the people. This innovation has been accompanied, however, by a substantial amount of organizational change and challenge. For example, one of the cofounders of the move- ment, Kenn Gulliksen, left the Vineyard because he believed that it had become too bureaucratic. The other founder, John Wimber—the person with whom people typically identify the Vineyard—died in 1997 after a prolonged struggle with cancer, leaving a leadership vacuum. Wimber’s successor as National Director, Todd Hunter, resigned the position after two- and-one-half years to pursue a calling to plant churches that will

* This essay was originally part of a Hartford Seminary Foundation study. We are grateful to David A. Roozen for his approval and assistance in obtaining it for publication. We are also grateful to the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company for permission to pub- lish this essay in advance of its appearance next year in a volume that currently has the working title: Denominational Identities in Unsettled Times: Theology, Structure and Change, edited by David A. Roozen and James Nieman (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004).

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minister to Generation-X young adults and those with a postmodern mentality.1

Of the case studies in this article, the Vineyard is the youngest organi- zation. But it has had visibility and impact far in excess of its 80,000 mem- bers in the United States.2 Therefore, several important questions can appropriately be asked. For example, what does the mercurial growth of the Vineyard tell us about how innovation occurs within the Christian tra- dition? What lessons are there to be learned from the Vineyard regarding transitions in organizational leadership? And are there features of the Vineyard’s “genetic code” that have application to its ongoing evolution as a Christian movement? The answers to these questions will be drawn from several years of personal visits to Vineyard Christian Fellowships in Southern California and around the nation.3 In addition, I will draw on two surveys of Vineyard pastors,4 along with extensive conversations with both Wimber and Hunter regarding their vision for the Vineyard.5 In terms of the perspective that I bring to this analysis, it is important to note that, as a member of a large, politically progressive, non-charismatic Episcopal church in Southern California, I am an “outsider” to the Vineyard move- ment. However, I also have been inﬂuenced by my research on dozens of Pentecostal and charismatic churches in the developing world,6 as well as by my research on “new-paradigm” churches in the United States, and

The discussion of the Vineyard movement in this article ends with the resignation of Todd Hunter as National Director in May 2000.2

The statistics cited in this article are drawn from a database compiled in 1998 by the Association of Vineyard Churches. Updated information can be found on their website (http://vineyardusa.org/index2.htm).3

Much of the research for this article was done in the early 1990s for my book Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).4

The ﬁrst survey was conducted in 1992-93 as part of the research for Reinventing American Protestantism. The second survey was conducted in 1999 after John Wimber’s death, with the speciﬁc intention of assessing the views of Vineyard pastors about the status of the Vineyard movement.5

The conversations with John Wimber spanned several years in the mid-1990s and included one two-day interview period that was very relaxed and informal. The interviews with Todd Hunter were done after he became National Director.6

Ted Yamamori and I have conducted more than three hundred interviews in nearly twenty different countries as part of a project documenting growing Pentecostal churches that have active social ministries in their communities. See our forthcoming Pentecostalism and Social Transformation: A Global Analysis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, in press).

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from this research I have learned that divorcing heart and head, mind and body, is often fatal to the Christian mission.7

John Wimber and the Vineyard’s Genetic Code

Founders of movements play an important role in setting the genetic code that deﬁnes what evolves after their death, and Wimber is no excep- tion.8 I clearly remember my ﬁrst impressions of Wimber. The Anaheim Vineyard had purchased a large parcel of land in an industrial park. Work had begun on building a 3,000-seat auditorium within the walls of a ware- house and ofﬁce complex. In the meantime, however, the church was gathering under a huge nylon tent structure that had been erected in the building’s parking lot. On one end of the tent, where an extensive sound system was located, there was a stage/platform that looked over a couple of thousand folding chairs that had been set up on outdoor grass- colored carpet.

For the ﬁrst thirty minutes or so of the service the usual soft rock wor- ship songs were sung and people stood, sat, or knelt as their inclination prompted them, some with their hands held out in expectation and others with hands raised, especially during songs that were praising “the God on high.” When the worship period ended offering baskets were then passed without commentary, after which this somewhat overweight man in his late ﬁfties walked up to a bare podium. Wimber read a passage of Scripture and then started to share his interpretation of its meaning, mixed with per- sonal anecdotes. There was no shouting, no dramatic gestures, just an understated sharing of an Evangelical message that was ﬁlled with a trans- parent expectation that the Holy Spirit was in our midst.9

As the message wound to a close, Wimber invited people to come for- ward for prayer. To my great surprise, they came by the dozens. In a very informal manner lay members warmly approached each person and,

See Reinventing American Protestantism, pp. 6-8, for a discussion of the inﬂuence of new-paradigm churches on my own thinking.8

Vineyard pastors frequently make reference to the DNA of the Vineyard movement, and I ﬁnd this biological metaphor very useful in understanding the evolution of the Vineyard church.9

Many popular understandings of charismatic leadership associate the term with dynamic political expression or even televangelist pulpit pounding and gesticulation. Wimber’s charisma was of a different sort and was much more appropriate to a baby-boomer audience that rejected such coercive personality types.

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putting an arm around them—or placing a hand on their shoulder—asked them a few questions, and then prayed. When the area around the stage became too crowded, Wimber invited people to raise their hands so Christians around them could pray for them where they stood. No one left the tent. Ministry time was as important as the preaching and worship.

Before long, there were little groupings everywhere. Some people were weeping. A few were wailing. Others seemed to be physically touched by the Spirit, and were shaking. What was rather bewildering to me was that all of this was happening without any great emotional hype by Wimber. He had quietly invited the Spirit into our midst. This was nothing like the ﬂame-throwing theatrics of the televangelists. What I was later to under- stand is that this form of worship was a unique blending of Wimber’s her- itage in a Quaker church, mixed with deep Evangelical convictions, and radicalized by a belief that God is still healing the sick and intervening in people’s lives, just as Jesus did in the ﬁrst century.

John Wimber was born in Peoria, Illinois, of hillbilly stock. His route out of this blue-collar beginning was through music, and by age ﬁfteen he was playing his ﬁrst professional gig at the Dixie Castle in Orange County, California, near where his parents had settled.10 Before long, however, he learned that he could make more money managing bands than he could playing in them. During one of my interviews with Wimber before he died, John said that he had owned and operated ﬁfty-two different businesses. This business acumen served him well when he later became a church con- sultant because it was a small stretch for him to apply his understanding of people and American culture to the growth and decline of congregations.

In spite of the gratitude that Wimber felt toward the Friends Church, which had nurtured him in the faith after his conversion as an adult, he thought its days were numbered. Sitting in his ofﬁce one afternoon after his cancer surgery, Wimber recounted:

I remember standing shortly after I was converted in the Quaker church, looking at it as a business, out on the front lawn, and thinking, “This place is going out of business, and I love this place. I met Jesus here. But the building is in the wrong place; it’s the wrong kind of building.”

In an interview for the Vineyard publication John Wimber’s widow, Carol, quotes from a Christianity Today article that described her husband during his Righteous Brothers period as a “beer-guzzling, drug-abusing pop musician, who was converted at the age of 29 while chain-smoking his way through a Quaker-led Bible study.” “The Way It Was: The Roots of Vineyard Worship,” Cutting Edge 6:1 (Winter 2002), http://vineyardusa.org/ publications/newsletters/cutting_edge/2002_winter/carol_wimber.htm.

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Indeed, he was convinced that many mainline churches had been going out of business for a long time, but they just did not realize it. Only their endowments, in his view, would cushion their collapse.

Hence, when the opportunity came to start his own church it had a rad- ically contemporary sound. The music drew on the same idiom that the unconverted were listening to in bars and at rock concerts, but the lyrics were different. The revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s had severely dam- aged propositional theology, but it had also opened the door to pragmatic, experiential veriﬁcation of truth. In short, there was a new openness to transcendent realities that resonated with Wimber’s Quaker mysticism, and the new worship style of the Vineyard made cultural sense so long as one threw out the fundamentalist’s dispensational theology and instead believed that God was in the same business today that he was in two mil- lennia ago.

When teaching at Fuller Seminary, Wimber had encountered the writ- ings of theologian George Ladd, and with this foundation in hand he started telling people that they should do the “stuff” practiced by Jesus and the disciples: praying for the sick, casting out demons, feeding the poor and hungry—all of which is the work of the Kingdom. If there is no response, believed Wimber, then at least one is following in the footsteps of Jesus, doing the things that Jesus counseled his followers to do. The results, in his view, are not up to Jesus’ disciples. God is in charge and does things in his own ways and in his own time. We are but his instruments.

From the beginning, the focus of the Vineyard was not on Wimber and his charismatic powers. Wimber saw his job as one of equipping the saints to do the work of ministry.11 This was to be a people’s movement. And it was to be rooted in a clear theology and ideology, not just ephemeral, ecstatic experience. Wimber repeatedly told me in interviews that he wanted to be a Wesley, not a Whitﬁeld—meaning that he wanted to estab- lish a movement that would endure, not one that would be built around a personality. According to Wimber, “Whitﬁeld came, died, left converts, but we couldn’t ﬁnd any of them anywhere. Wesley came, died, and left a movement. That’s what I wanted to do,” he said. “So when God gave me the opportunity, I said, ‘Okay, Lord.’”

Outsiders to the Vineyard movement oftentimes miss the movement- building component of the Vineyard. They only seize on the spectacular

Not surprisingly, the title of the Vineyard’s magazine for many years was Equipping.

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moments of the Vineyard’s history, and, indeed, there are some. Peter Wagner, when he was professor of world missions at Fuller Seminary, invited Wimber to co-teach a course that turned into a laboratory for heal- ing and deliverance.12 In retrospect, seminary is a place to study theology, not to practice the works of the Kingdom, and so, amidst great discussion and controversy, Wimber’s sojourn as a noncredentialed professor ended. And late in Wimber’s life, the Toronto Vineyard erupted with signs and wonders that resembled worship during the Great Awakenings in American religious history. People laughed uncontrollably, made strange animal sounds, and took the presence of the Spirit to heights that even worried the progressive Wimber—and so he eventually sent them packing.13

Fundamental to Wimber’s vision, however, was the desire to give the ministry back to the people. There is no reason for clergy to wear vest- ments or collars that separate them from their ﬂock. Pastors are not spe- cially endowed superhumans; they sin like everyone else; they have no magical powers. Hence, Wimber used to joke that he prepared for a heal- ing meeting by drinking a diet Pepsi and watching a little TV. After all, he was not the one doing the healing—it was God. In spite of Wimber’s charismatic presence, he was an unusually modest and humble person, always turning the glory to God and taking no credit for himself.

If Wimber had a mission in life, it was to ground people in the biblical narratives and train them to do the works of the Spirit. Consequently, Wimber was unusually candid before audiences about his own shortcom- ings. And he frequently joked during a service, especially when people got too wrapped up in the drama of “sign and wonders,” and thereby grounded them back in the everyday world—because, for Wimber, there was no sacred/secular divide. The Kingdom was here, to be enjoyed in the moment.

In his management style, Wimber was sometimes autocratic. He gen- uinely believed that God spoke to him, and that he should be obedient. Hence, it did not make sense to Wimber that he should submit his vision for discussion and democratic vote. According to one of his close friends, this was both Wimber’s genius and his weakness. If one didn’t like the

C. Peter Wagner subsequently embraced many of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit that were practiced in this class. Indeed, he has been a primary apologist for what he calls the New Apostolic Movement within Christianity.13

See Margaret M. Poloma, “The ‘Toronto Blessing’: Charisma, Institutionalization, and Revival,” Journal for the Scientiﬁc Study of Religion 36 (Month 1997): 257-71.

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direction that the Vineyard was taking, then he or she could bail out. Led by the Spirit, Wimber was a great risk-taker in charting a new course. One of his close associates said that Wimber was willing “to bet the whole farm” on some of the directions that the Vineyard took, and it was this quality that enabled him to be a religious innovator.

In hindsight, some of the swings in the Vineyard, by Wimber’s own admission, were mistakes. But he was willing to explore new ideas and then, if he was wrong, to confess his sins and boldly move ahead once again. Consequently, the Vineyard was never static. Under his leadership it was always pushing the envelope, exploring new models for expressing the compassion of Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit.

The one person who did regularly offer him counsel, however, was his wife, Carol.14 Indeed, some of the core values of the Vineyard are convic- tions that emerged out of her deep prayer life. The daughter of a physician, Carol Wimber has been an inﬂuential and articulate presence in the move- ment. On more than one occasion God spoke to her in dreams, and, indeed, John viewed his wife as a vessel of the Holy Spirit’s instructions to him. For example, in 1988 John was pushing hard at a pastors’ conference to identify the Vineyard as a denomination. In his view, it was the rebellious- ness of baby-boom-generation pastors that caused them to resist structure and authority, even though it was precisely this rejection of the institution- alization of religion that had led them to the Vineyard in the ﬁrst place. Carol Wimber, however, had a vision that caused her husband to re- consider his attempt to denominationalize the Vineyard, and Wimber came away from the conference with a strong feeling that the Vineyard move- ment should die, and for the next two or three years he did much soul- searching about its future.

The Origins of the Vineyard

The organizational founder of the Vineyard is Wimber, but the person who gave the movement its name and started the ﬁrst Vineyard church is Kenn Gulliksen. In the early 1970s, Gulliksen returned from a stint in the United States Air Force and moved to El Paso, Texas, to lead a Calvary Chapel–associated ministry called the Jesus Chapels. This work grew rapidly, in part due to people who were migrating out of an Episcopal

See the interview with Carol Wimber, “The Way It Was.”

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church and were attracted to Gulliksen’s emphasis on the presence of the Holy Spirit. Viewing himself as a church planter, Gulliksen moved back to Southern California after this church was booming and launched the ﬁrst Vineyard church as a Bible study in the home of Chuck Girard in July 1974. Within months this church also exploded with growth. In my inter- view with Gulliksen he said, “This may sound very unhumble and very arrogant, but we fully expected it because the one thing that we learned at Calvary [Chapel] was how to have vision.” According to Gulliksen, the methodology was simple: “I played guitar and sat on a stool and led some worship and taught the Bible.” At the end of each service, Gulliksen said, he invited anyone who wanted to receive Christ, and they came forward in droves. In addition to the several thousand people who worshiped weekly at this church, another half dozen Vineyards were started in the next few years—all associated under the broad umbrella of Calvary Chapel.

Simultaneously another branch of the Vineyard was forming. In 1963 a jazz musician, record producer, and self-professed heathen was introduced to Jesus. By 1970, Wimber was leading eleven Bible studies a week that included many people who were attending the Yorba Linda Friends Church in Southern California. In 1971 he was invited to join the staff of the church, and from 1974 to 1978, Wimber served as a consultant at the Institute of Evangelism and Church Growth associated with Fuller Theological Seminary. While Wimber was still working for Fuller, a group of young adults from the Friends church were packing out the home of one of the members. Wimber began to feel a call to minister to this group, because he had grown rather discouraged by what he was observing in many mainline churches across the country. On May 8, 1977, a group of 150 people ofﬁcially declared themselves Calvary Chapel of Yorba Linda, and within a few years the group had grown to 1,500 people, moving from one rented school auditorium to another. By 1980, the Holy Spirit was moving powerfully in their worship, with people speaking in tongues and claiming healing from physical and psychological ailments.

At a fateful meeting in 1982, Chuck Smith, founder of Calvary Chapel, gathered together some of the pastors of the larger churches in the move- ment, including Kenn Gulliksen, John Wimber, Mike McIntosh, Greg Laurie, Jeff Johnson, and Raul Reis. Several of these young pastors imme- diately put Wimber on the hot seat for the exercise of charismatic gifts in his church. In spite of Chuck Smith’s background in a Pentecostal church, he de-emphasized overt expression of tongues, prophecy, and healing in public worship. In my separate interviews with Smith, Gulliksen, and

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Wimber, they all shared the same essential recollections of this meeting. After interrogation by some of the other pastors, Wimber suggested chang- ing the name of his congregation. Smith concurred and noted that Wimber’s emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit had many parallels to what was occurring at Gulliksen’s Vineyard church. A friendship had already developed between Wimber and Gulliksen, so the match seemed perfect. Thus the Vineyard movement was born in 1982 as an organiza- tional entity separate from Calvary Chapel.

Shortly after this meeting, the oversight of this ﬂedgling Vineyard movement passed from Gulliksen to Wimber. In rehearsing the early his- tory of the Vineyard, Gulliksen said that he felt like he was on the verge of an emotional breakdown at this time, overwhelmed by the demands of pas- toring a large congregation and looking after the new church plants that had sprung up. In contrast, Wimber was highly experienced in organiza- tional issues, having run several businesses and, more importantly, having visited some two thousand churches during his years as a church growth consultant.

According to Gulliksen, “John was like a savior in a fat man’s body for me at the time…. When John came, we had really no organization apart from a deep love for one another and a relationship.” Gulliksen had always been a “pioneer,” not a “homesteader,” and he saw his gift as the ability to plant new churches and then to give them to someone else to tend. In fact, in 1983, the year after Wimber took over the leadership, Gulliksen went to Newport Beach and started another Vineyard, which quickly grew to 1,400 people.

Wimber and Chuck Smith disagree on how many Calvary Chapels defected from the movement to join the Vineyard’s more charismatic emphasis. Wimber estimates thirty; Smith says as many as a hundred. Whichever number is more accurate, Gulliksen maintains that these “adop- tions” into the Vineyard movement “were pastored by people who were hungry for more of the Holy Spirit in their own churches and in their own lives. They were risk-takers, possibly more pioneering, and they were peo- ple who had had previous relationships with John.”

The Current Status of the Vineyard

According to the Vineyard’s database, in 1998 there were 490 churches. These congregations range from new church starts with a few members to congregations with several thousand members. Although the Vineyard

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started in Southern California, it is important to note that there are cur- rently Vineyard churches in forty-eight states. As one might expect, California far outstrips the other states, with over one hundred congrega- tions. But it is notable that the states of Washington, Texas, Ohio, Florida, and Colorado all have twenty or more congregations.15

The largest Vineyard is led by Steve Sjogren in Cincinnati, Ohio, with 3,200 adults and 1,100 children attending weekly. Also in Ohio (Wester- ville), there is a large congregation with 3,000 adults and 710 children. The “mother” church of the Vineyard, in Anaheim, is third in size, with youth and adults totaling slightly over 2,600. Other states with Vineyard churches ranking in the “top twenty” include Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Virginia.

During the decade after the Vineyard was founded, there were approx- imately a dozen new church plants each year. In addition, there were “adoptions” or churches that decided to join the Vineyard movement, typ- ically because their pastor and/or people had experienced some type of “renewal” that led them to be more open to the gifts of the Spirit, includ- ing healing and direct guidance by the Holy Spirit. Beginning in 1993, the number of new church plants increased, with over forty new congregations added to the movement in both 1996 and 1997.

During the history of the Vineyard, the ratio of new church plants to adoptions has been approximately three to one. The number of adoptions may decline, however, now that Wimber-led renewal conferences, many of which drew non-Vineyard pastors and members, are no longer being held.

Vineyards seem to grow in all types of soil. Based on our survey of pas- tors, approximately 30 percent are in cities with a population of over a quarter million people, 21 percent are in cities of between 100,000 and 250,000, and there are also Vineyards in small cities. The Vineyards are distributed fairly broadly across the United States, although the West Coast has a disproportionate number.

The Vineyard is still not a large movement. The total number of indi- viduals in Vineyards who are attending church on any given Sunday is less than a hundred thousand people, which is remarkable in view of the wide-

For several graphic presentations of these and following statistics about the Vineyard, see “Maps and Figures for ‘Routinizing Charisma: The Vineyard Christian Fellowship in the Post-Wimber Era,” listed under “Donald E. Miller” at: http://hirr.hartsem.edu/sociology/ sociology_sociologists_of_religion.html#M.

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spread attention that the Vineyard has received. Nevertheless, it is a grow- ing movement and appears to be well positioned to spread its inﬂuence given the broad distribution of churches throughout the United States.

By all accounts the Vineyard is a very young movement. According to our survey of pastors the median congregation was started in 1990. Fully three-quarters of the respondents to our survey are the founding pastor of the church. The average church has slightly less than one full-time paid professional staff member other than the senior pastor. The median operat- ing budget of a Vineyard is $230,000 annually. The median weekly church attendance is 203 adults and 70 children. Based on data from our survey and comparing it to one that I did several years ago, it appears that the average Vineyard is growing by about ﬁfty adult members every ﬁve years. This is a reasonably strong growth rate, especially if new churches are also being planted each year.

The median age of pastors is forty-ﬁve, which places them squarely within the baby boomer category. However, less than one percent of the pastors are under thirty years of age, and one in ten is under thirty-ﬁve. Hence, the Vineyard is genuinely concerned about its ability to connect with Gen-Xers, even though their clergy population is substantially younger than the average age of Presbyterian pastors, for example, which is ﬁfty-ﬁve. Anecdotal evidence indicates that clergy of all denominations tend to draw members that share many of their same characteristics. This is true not only of age, but also of education and background experiences. Hence, it is important to note that a quarter of the Vineyard pastors do not have a college degree, although it is also signiﬁcant that another quarter have some type of postgraduate degree.

In terms of racial/ethnic background, Vineyard pastors are 95 percent Anglo, and the Vineyard is overwhelmingly a “white” church. It is true, however, that a network of twenty-ﬁve “La Vinas” is emerging in Southern California in response to the substantial increase in the Latino population, and Vineyard-style worship seems to communicate well in this setting. A fairly healthy sprinkling of Asians have also been attracted to the Vineyard, although only two percent of the pastors are Asian.

Vineyard pastors are exclusively male, although half of the pastors indi- cate that they “co-pastor” with their wives (even though only 18 percent of the spouses receive a separate salary from the church). In terms of church backgrounds, approximately one-quarter of the pastors we surveyed indi- cated that they attended church less than once a month as an adolescent, and those who did attend regularly were most likely to have attended a

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non-denominational church, an Assemblies of God, Calvary Chapel, or a Southern Baptist church. Once again, these background characteristics have implications for the type of members that the Vineyard will attract.

A Moment of Crisis

On November 17, 1997, John Wimber died of a massive brain hemor- rhage. For several years he had not been healthy. In 1995 Wimber had a stroke, which was preceded by a diagnosis of cancer in 1993. Before that, in 1986, he had suffered a heart attack. Wimber was always struggling with his weight. But he was also the target of substantial criticism by his Evangelical brethren who couldn’t tolerate the supernatural manifestations that undergirded Wimber’s ministry. For a long time, Wimber did not respond to these criticisms—he believed that Christians should turn the other cheek—but he felt these attacks deeply, and this uncharitable behav- ior took its physical toll on him.

The sociologist Max Weber, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, argued that the death of a founding charismatic leader is always a blow to a movement.16 Sometimes movements simply fold at this point, disappear- ing after a rather inglorious struggle. In other instances, there is an heir apparent—such as a son or someone who is genetically related—and the mantle is passed to this individual. Other times the charismatic founder appoints his successor, or, alternatively, wise persons or magicians are called in to divine the will of the gods. The other option, however, is that the movement begins to institutionalize at this point and a bureaucratic leader emerges, often giving structure and order to a movement that other- wise was ruled by the power of charisma. Indeed, one might argue in the history of Christianity that Paul was the one to routinize the charisma of Jesus, formulating theological explanations of the founder’s teachings and presiding over the evolution of ritual development and hierarchical struc- turing of a fast growing movement.

Within the Vineyard there were pastors with considerable charisma to whom the mantle might have been passed on the occasion of Wimber’s death. The two most likely candidates, however, were no longer around in

For a discussion of the routinization of charisma, see S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Also see my discussion of charisma in Reinventing American Protestantism, pp. 24-26.

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November of 1997. Tom Stipe, who had left the Calvary movement to join the Vineyard, had subsequently returned to the Calvary fold. And Brent Rue, pastor of another large Vineyard church, had died of cancer at a rela- tively young age. Knowing that his health was failing, Wimber indicated at a board meeting that Todd Hunter should be his successor, but at the time of his death Wimber had still not laid hands on Hunter to pass the leadership mantle. Hence, when Wimber died there was a leadership void at the top of the Vineyard movement.

According to Hunter, whom I interviewed extensively about this transi- tional period, Wimber had been waiting for an appropriate moment when he would ofﬁcially pass the torch. In the ﬁnal months before his death, however, Wimber’s mental faculties had dimmed and Hunter says that he did not want hands laid on him while Wimber was in this condition, because people would question the appointment. This led to the inevitable consequence: a bureaucratic resolution of the leadership crisis.

In January of 1998 a special board meeting was called. According to Hunter, “I went to that meeting and poured out my heart and said, ‘I’m not sure that I’m the right guy. My ego is not attached to this. I would be just as happy pastoring a church.’” But the answer came back, “No, you’re the guy… we have no questions. You’re it.” And so Hunter’s appointment as the National Director was formalized at that meeting, concluding what was a logical bureaucratic transition, since he had been the National Coordinator for several years.

Todd Hunter had also been the loyal “son” since early in the movement. He is a relatively young baby boomer who doesn’t identify with the Hippie movement, having missed the 1960s counterculture. For six months in 1979, Hunter and his wife Debbie served as apprentices under Wimber’s ministry and then left for Wheeling, West Virginia, where they planted their ﬁrst church. In America’s heartland, they helped start several addi- tional churches, serving also as a Regional Pastoral Coordinator in the Vineyard. Then in 1987 they returned to the Anaheim Vineyard, and for nearly ﬁve years Todd served as the Senior Associate Pastor under Wimber at the “mother” church. In 1991, they moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he pastored a Vineyard church and also earned his master’s degree in biblical studies at Regent University. In 1994, they returned to Anaheim and Hunter became the National Coordinator for the Association of Vineyard Churches.

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Todd Hunter’s Desire for a Charismatic Moment

According to Max Weber’s theory of the routinization of charisma, one would expect the Vineyard to move quickly into a more formalized and bureaucratized mode under Hunter’s leadership, because by all accounts, including Hunter’s own self-description, he was not a charismatic leader. Hunter had, however, read Weber. Also, immediately upon his appoint- ment, he began to consult various management experts, including a disci- ple of Peter Drucker as well as an experienced denominational head, Paul Sedar, of the Evangelical Free Church. After taking counsel from these experts, Hunter did a radical thing. In a major policy decision, which is now known as the Columbus Accords, he eliminated all of the middle management in the Vineyard movement. Gone were the Regional Over- seers, the District Overseers, and the Area Coordinators. Instead, he cre- ated an extremely ﬂat organizational structure that maintained only the Area Pastoral Coordinators (APCs). There were ﬁfty of them across the nation, and they answered directly to Hunter. There were no middlemen. The motive for this radical move of decentralization was to release what he called the “charismatic moment” in the movement, in which he hoped that a hundred John Wimbers would ﬁnd their voice and thereby radicalize the Vineyard.

Operationally, Hunter communicated with these ﬁfty APCs through e-mail and electronic distribution of policy and educational materials. Obviously, he was available for personal conversations, but he also believed that many issues and problems could be solved at a local level. If there was a problem with a pastor in one’s area, then Hunter expected an APC to call another Area Pastoral Coordinator. If a solution could not be crafted, then they should call on a third APC. Hunter’s view was that “if three of our best guys can’t work something out, what is the chance that I will have the magic answer?” In terms of their job description, APCs were to care, coach, communicate, and coordinate. By caring, the APCs were to nurture the ten pastors or so that they oversaw, developing deep relation- ships between and among them. The coaching aspect referred to the need to resource these pastors, providing them with information but also serving as a role model. Their communication role was one of ensuring that pastors felt connected to the Vineyard and one another. And the coor- dination function came into play if there were disciplinary problems of any sort.

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One of the radical things about Hunter’s reorganization strategy was that he allowed pastors to pick their own APC. He sent out a survey to every pastor in the movement and asked them to name two or three people to whom they would like to relate, stressing that these should be people in whom they had conﬁdence and with whom they enjoyed interacting. The process was not entirely democratic, because Hunter took the infor- mation and made the ﬁnal decisions so that APCs would each have approx- imately the same number of pastors to oversee. But in only four or ﬁve cases out of nearly ﬁve hundred did he veto a pastor’s choice.

Hunter’s strategy—and it was a bold move on his part—was that mid- dle management would get in the way of releasing “spiritual entrepre- neurs” (his term). The inevitable tendency is for this intervening layer of bureaucracy to slow down innovation, said Hunter. What he desperately wanted to protect were pastors who would do the new thinking for the movement. And he took this step of decentralizing the Vineyard knowing that some people would oppose him because structure is comfortable. But Hunter did not believe that these pastors would leave the movement. They are not risk-takers. And precisely for that reason, they would also not advance the movement. Hence, he believed that he should not be per- suaded by their call for building the pyramid of organizational hierarchy.

The ﬁrst response to the Columbus Accords was strong afﬁrmation. In the liminal moment of transfer of authority people typically fear that the new leader will seize control in an authoritarian manner. Hence, the warm reception to the Columbus Accords may have been the result of the move- ment’s breathing a collective sigh of relief when Hunter was appointed, precisely because they had gone through such wrenching challenges under Wimber’s risk-taking leadership, and now it was time to consolidate a bit, building their internal ranks. Initially, Hunter was in a honeymoon period. But the complaints started to come that he had tipped the scale too far in the direction of abolishing structure.

On the survey that was distributed to pastors in 1999, there was a wide range of responses to a question regarding how the Vineyard had changed since Wimber’s death. One view was that many leaders have stepped up a notch, assuming more leadership. On the other end of the spectrum were individuals who said the Vineyard appeared rudderless. A common per- ception was that the leadership was now more decentralized and that this was a good thing. One respondent to the survey said that “there has been a switch from one visible leader to an emphasis on the Vineyard’s genetic code/values.” Another pastor observed that the focus has moved away

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from the West Coast, and this is positive. Another respondent stated, “There is a new release of power; new people have been raised up.” The percep- tion also existed that there was now more emphasis on evangelism and church planting and less on “power” ministries of healing and deliverance.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many pastors responding to the survey felt that the Vineyard was changing well before Wimber died. One pastor indi- cated that during the period of Wimber’s illness there had been a progres- sive shift away from the man (Wimber) to the values and theology that he modeled and taught. On the other hand, one pastor said somewhat cyni- cally that “for several years before John’s death, the Vineyard was in a ‘play it safe’ mode. It is still there.”

Todd Hunter’s Resignation

In May 2000, Hunter announced that he was resigning as National Director in order to plant a church that would attract Gen-Xers and people with a postmodern mentality. In his place, Berten Waggoner, senior pastor of the Vineyard Church of Sugar Land, Texas, was named as Acting National Director. On the Vineyard website Hunter was quoted as saying, “If someone is to be an authentic follower of Jesus and pursue the ‘pearl of great price,’ they may be called upon to risk it all.”

When such resignations occur, more is always happening than meets the eye (or appears on the Vineyard website). My own analysis of the orga- nizational transitions in the post-Wimber era is the following.

Wimber was a charismatic leader, and therefore Hunter had a difﬁcult act to follow. Shortly after Hunter was appointed as National Coordinator, a well-known Christian scholar told me that these transitions are always very difﬁcult, implying that whoever was to follow Wimber would prob- ably not last very long. He appears to have been prophetic. It seems that movements, whether Christian or secular, need to chew up and spit out a few successors to charismatic leaders before the followers/members real- ize that one cannot ﬁll the shoes of the founding leader. Indeed, as Weber argues, many movements fold shortly after the charismatic leader dies. Those that do survive have two options: ﬁrst, they can routinize by creat- ing a bureaucratic and rational structure to manage the movement or, alter- natively, they can imbue a new leader with charisma.

Todd Hunter, however, pursued a sociologically novel approach. He did not seek to consolidate personal power by routinizing the movement. Instead, he attempted to remove the layers of bureaucracy that had crept

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into the movement, and he hoped that, through a radical act of decentral- ization of authority, a “charismatic moment” could be created within the movement in which a new level of spiritual entrepreneurship would be ignited, with many pastors in the Vineyard asserting their prophetic call. It was a noble experiment, even though it has seemingly failed. Hence one is drawn to ask why Hunter pursued this course of action.

First, as previously noted, Hunter had read Weber and consulted vari- ous organizational theorists, and he knew a lot about the deadening effects of routinization. For that reason, Hunter simply refused to go down that route. Furthermore, as Wimber’s protégé it would not have been faithful to his mentor’s vision to be a non-innovative movement overseer. Indeed, the course he is currently pursuing, namely, starting a ministry that targets a new population, is much more aligned with the spirit of Wimber, who believed that Christians must always be adjusting the model to ﬁt the mes- sage, taking into account cultural changes that are occurring.

Second, Hunter is not Wimber. Hunter is a teacher, not a preacher or prophet. He doesn’t like conﬂict and usually tries to achieve consensus. Hence, when board members were not willing to bless his vision to start “a movement within the movement” that would tackle the problem of post- modernity—thereby creating a new model within the Vineyard—he chose to resign rather than ﬁght to the end, which is something that Wimber undoubtedly would not have done. In fact, Hunter was rather reﬂective in his comments to me, saying that it is the “mad professor,” not the university president, who should be thinking radical thoughts about the organization. Clearly, Hunter views himself as an innovator and not an organizational manager.

Third, Hunter had started to spell out his vision of a ministry to post- modern youth and it scared some people within the Vineyard movement, particularly those who lean in a more fundamentalist direction. Hunter insisted to me that his views remain Evangelical to the core, and I have no reason to doubt him. The issues he was confronting in various youth con- ferences, however, present radical challenges to orthodox models of apolo- getics, because the younger generation is much more experiential in their attempts to validate truth. Evangelicalism is a product of modernist thought, not postmodern culture. Hence, things that Hunter said during these conferences were taken out of context by individuals who were oper- ating within the rationalistic, foundationalist, modernist approach to theol- ogy and apologetics.

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Finally, there were individuals within the movement that wanted more structure, not less. They wanted more centralized leadership as well as regional oversight. At one level this is very understandable since there are many small Vineyard churches led by relatively inexperienced pastors who feel lonely in their mission and therefore did not welcome the idea of fur- ther decentralizing the Vineyard organization. Some pastors, even if they had denominational roots and had left their churches for the Vineyard because of the breath of fresh air that it introduced into their lives, never- theless yearned for the good old days when fellow pastors, rather than congregational members, were their peer group.

Hence, without assessing blame as to whether Hunter was right or the board was correct in accepting his resignation, it is clear in retrospect that the ﬁt was not appropriate. For some of the same reasons that Gulliksen left the Vineyard, Hunter decided that his spiritual calling was not to be the CEO of a denomination. Hunter is a church planter and a pioneer, seeking to initiate a new model of ministry for a postmodern generation.

Message, Model, and Market

In many ways, by launching a new ministry Hunter is following in Wimber’s image more closely than if he had chosen the path of being a denominational executive. Perhaps better than anyone in the movement, Hunter understood Wimber’s views on the interplay between the message, model, and market of a religious movement. For Wimber, the message was rooted in the biblical narrative and does not fundamentally change over time, although the questions that it answers will inevitably be different depending on the issues confronting Christians at any particular point in human history. The model, on the other hand, should always be in ﬂux. There is nothing sacred about clergy dressing in a particular way, or churches playing a particular type of music, or the body of Christ meeting in a certain type of physical structure. Furthermore, both ritual and orga- nizational structures should change with the times. Finally, both message and model should always be responding to the market for Christianity, which is constantly changing as the culture changes.

Based on his church consulting days, Wimber believed that too many churches were trying to apply sixteenth- and seventeenth-century models to the twentieth century. In his view, this simply does not work, and con- sequently it is not surprising that many mainline churches are declining. Instead, one should always be trying to adjust the model to the market, and

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the message should always be responding to questions being asked in the current context. In fact, Wimber was ruthless in applying this insight to his own movement, believing that the Vineyard was out of sync with many people in their twenties and thirties. Several years before his death he told me: “In my mind the market is moving [referring to the Gen-X crowd]. Let’s move with the market. If we don’t call it Vineyard, we’ll call it Orchard, or whatever other culture-current term there is. I don’t care which church it is as long as it teaches the truth of the Word.”

During this interview, Wimber’s brother-in-law, Bob Fulton, who is in charge of the Vineyard’s multicultural and international churches, made an astute comment. He said that the pastors in the Vineyard and Calvary movements with large ministries have an ability to exegete culture better than, or at least equal to, their ability to exegete Scripture. “They really know how to look at their culture and understand what makes it tick,” he said. Echoing Wimber’s insight about message, model, and market, Fulton believes that these pastors “have an instinctual understanding of their cul- ture, and their brilliance is in packaging the teachings and the scriptures in a way that is palatable to their culture.” Nevertheless, both Fulton and Wimber acknowledged that the Vineyard’s model and message is geared primarily to Anglo baby boomers, and that either the Vineyard will evolve a new style of church that connects with the children of the boomers, or else it will not survive very long into the twenty-ﬁrst century. Wimber told me somewhat emphatically that the jazz and rock melodies of current Vineyard music sound to Gen-Xers like Bach and Beethoven did to baby boomers. He felt that the current generation of Vineyard leaders had learned a lot about generational change in evolving the movement, and, consequently, he said that “they won’t get caught by change without trying to respond to it.”

When I pressed Wimber on what a Gen-X church might look like, he speculated that it will probably have café tables rather than chairs in rows; there will be dancing as part of praise and worship; and the music will be “plugged” (i.e., heavy metal). In probing Hunter about the same issue, he said that Xers have a deep hunger for spirituality, but they want it articu- lated in a way that isn’t “slick.” Gen-X worship will be “rawer” and more authentic, in his view. It will be very relational, as a compensation for the fractured families from which many of these young adults come. And truth will not be propositional. It will be veriﬁed experientially: tested by the community for its ability to transform the lives of people who feel lonely, isolated, and frightened by their economic prospects. In our postmodern

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world, Hunter feels that truth claims by Gen-Xers will be modest, ex- pressed oftentimes in stories rather than propositions or doctrines.

When I pressed Hunter after his resignation about his vision for the church he will start, he was appropriately open-ended but also said that it will not look like the 1960s Jesus Movement. For example, he suspects that it will be less performance-oriented, with worship being focused not on what is happening on the stage but in the hearts of the worshiping com- munity. There will be fewer loud screaming guitars, he said, because peo- ple will be worshiping God with all of the senses, not just that of hearing. In all likelihood, communion will be served weekly. Worship may become more liturgical. Dance, drama, and art will all be important. Indeed, the visual as well as tactile senses may come much more fully into play, and don’t be surprised, said Hunter, if you smell a little incense in the worship space or ﬁnd this gathering of believers meeting in an abandoned mainline church with stained glass windows, thick granite walls, and tile ﬂoors.

It is too early to know if the Vineyard will be successful in reinventing itself. A non-Vineyard Gen-X church (Mars Hill) that is booming in Seattle is led by a young pastor who teaches through whole books of the Bible in one sermon, because that is the only way to tell the full-bodied narratives of people encountering God as they wrestle with the problems of lust, greed, anger, and self-interest. In this church, it is interesting to note that candles and various ritualistic elements are being reintroduced to worship, even though its music is a radical blend of contemporary sounds mixed with an occasional Gregorian chant. Culture obviously moves in cycles, and we may witness a revival of practices and spaces that embodied the spirits of ancient times. After all, this is a rootless generation that is seek- ing stability and connections with the past, however ﬂeeting and individu- alist these desires may be.

Assessing the Vineyard’s Organizational Success

In some ways, charismatic leaders get a disproportionate amount of attention in the literature on social movements. While they are often important in launching a movement, the routinization of their charisma is equally important if the movement is to have any staying power. Bureaucracy is not just a necessary evil. It is essential as movements grow in size. On the other hand, it is also true that movements can get overly routinized—which often happens as they age—and then something dramatic needs to happen to recapture the original energizing insight and

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passion. Sometimes this occurs with schisms, and other times a new prophet marches onto the scene and recasts the vision in a way that once again excites the imagination, typically of people who are alienated and not proﬁting from the existing social arrangements.

The Vineyard has lost its beloved John, its charismatic leader. That’s inevitable. Charismatic leaders always die, and sometimes in untimely ways. When this occurs, the challenge is obviously to ﬁgure out how to evolve the movement, holding on to the original insight that drew people to it but also realizing that as people age, they often desire structure and comfort. They need more than bread, however, in spite of what Dostoevsky said in the “Grand Inquisitor.” They need to live by faith, if the Christian message is going to mean anything at all.

With this as context, it is not all that complicated to ﬁgure out why the Vineyard has grown in such a mercurial fashion. The mainline denomina- tions didn’t understand the culture and they created a vacuum for move- ments like the Vineyard, Calvary Chapel, and a whole host of other new-paradigm churches. Wimber’s several years as a church consultant taught him what was wrong in the mainline. In fact, he probably didn’t need to visit two thousand churches as a consultant to inform his analysis; a couple of hundred would have been enough. After all, Wimber was a jazz musician. He knew how to improvise and he knew how to read an audi- ence. In this case, the audience was middle-class America. Having been a pagan, he knew how to communicate with non-Christians, and it was in their language—the language of music and understated rhetoric—that he preached the gospel. Charisma for baby boomers did not require shouting and yelling. It meant being honest, vulnerable, and sharing from the gut. It also meant invoking the Spirit, which had all but evaporated in the bottom line of corporate business. And it meant offering a little healing to a gen- eration of people that had really beaten themselves up as they destroyed some of our most treasured institutions, such as the family. In this regard, it is no wonder that the Vineyard practiced deliverance. There were a lot of demons to banish, with some of them residing in hurt, wounded, and abused people.

While some people may criticize Wimber for being too authoritarian, it takes a strong, risk-taking leader to break with the chains of the dominant culture. Undoubtedly some people were alienated in the process, because more than a few folks have left the Vineyard, with some of them returning to the safety of the Calvary Chapel fold. But then there are not too many genuine innovators that don’t leave a few bodies in their wake. The path to

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innovation is seldom a straight one. If it were that easy, more people would ﬁgure it out. So Wimber and his ilk of leaders often make mistakes before they get it right, but on the other hand they are willing to break with con- vention. Cultural innovators march to a different drummer, and Wimber claimed his inspiration to be the Holy Spirit.

The real genius of Wimber, however, may have been fueled by the fact that he was a businessman before the Lord got hold of him. He understood markets and models and only had to add the message to his repertoire. Hunter, on the other hand, faced a different problem. This “son” was wise enough not to try to compete with the father. But he, too, was a risk-taker, attempting to create a “charismatic moment” within the movement, although, as it turned out, this was an even harder task than being a charis- matic leader.

What does it mean for the Spirit to break through into a movement of ﬁve hundred churches? Can there be a hundred mini-Wimbers, all trans- forming the Vineyard simultaneously? The conventional answer is “no.” The candle must go out at some point, and the honorable thing is not to postpone the agony, but simply to get on with the second generation of the movement. In short, bureaucratic commonsense suggests that one should get more comfortable with the values of the dominant culture, polish up the performative elements of the ritual, make a little money on the CDs, and take longer and more expensive vacations. Hunter puts the situation more charitably, however. He says that the Vineyard is at the “end of the beginning.” In his view, the honeymoon is over and now it is time to raise the kids, take out the trash, and pay down the mortgage—or whatever is the organizational equivalent of these acts.

Preserving the Genetic Code

When I asked Hunter if the Vineyard was a denomination, he equivo- cated. He observed that in some ways it lacks the traditional markers of a denomination. For example, he noted, the Association of Vineyard Churches does not ordain (this is done at a local level); it doesn’t own property (the individual churches do); it doesn’t have paid bishops (just Area Pastoral Coordinators, who themselves are pastors); it doesn’t have a centralized pension plan (one had better have a well-employed spouse!); and there is no centralized health insurance (hopefully some future politi- cal administration will solve that one). Nevertheless, Hunter thinks that denominationalism is probably inevitable.

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Given his resignation, perhaps the following comments are no longer relevant because we asked pastors on our survey what advice they had for Hunter. However, the comments may have a prophetic quality to them. One Vineyard pastor said, “Put a few cosmic, spontaneous, visionary, new paradigm brothers at the top.” Another suggested, “Surround yourself with wise, faithful, and dreaming men.” And one pastor advised, “Be willing to get out of the boat and walk on the water with Jesus.” These admonitions were mixed with sage advice about “keeping the heart of a servant” and maintaining a balance between the “best of Evangelicalism” and the “best of Pentecostalism.” One pastor clearly thought Todd had been reading too many management books and said, “Stop trying to ﬁgure out the right structure and build relationships.”

Conclusion

The Vineyard Christian Fellowship represents a genre of religious orga- nization that differs from the Methodists or Episcopalians. The Vineyard is part of a “new paradigm” of independent churches and church movements that are deeply suspicious of religious denominations, even though, like the Vineyard, many of these groups are in the process of evolving into quasi-denominational status. These new-paradigm churches prefer to iden- tify as “movements” or networks of afﬁliated churches.17 Some of these churches even go so far as to proclaim that they are part of a post-denom- inational era in American Christianity that eschews any centralized orga- nizational structure or control.

In addition to their decentralized organizational structures, these new- paradigm churches are pioneering a revolution in worship style and form. Unlike the Reformation led by Martin Luther, the current revolution in American religious practice represented by church movements such as the Vineyard is challenging not doctrine but the medium through which the message of Christianity is articulated. Like upstart religious groups of the past, these churches are progressively stripping market share from the mainline denominations. Appropriating contemporary cultural forms, they are creating a new genre of worship music; they are restructuring the orga- nizational character of institutional religion; and they are democratizing

The ﬁrst attempt to convene religious leaders representing this movement was by C. Peter Wagner in a conference held at Fuller Theological Seminary, “The National Symposium on the Postdenominational Church,” May 21-23, 1996.

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access to the sacred by radicalizing the Protestant principle of the priest- hood of all believers.

The issue facing the Vineyard at the present time is whether it will con- tinue to innovate or settle into a comfortable period of maturation. Hunter is not certain what he will call his new church. He is going to invite the people to name it. And it is not clear to me whether this church pioneer will keep his ﬂock within the corral of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. After all, the Vineyard needed to separate from Calvary Chapel in order to estab- lish a distinct and authentic ministry. Likewise, a ministry to postmodern people may not ﬁt within the fold of a movement built on the foundation of Evangelicalism, which is part of the modern as opposed to postmodern culture.18 Furthermore, it is not clear what the future growth of the Vineyard movement will be, not because it lacks charismatic leadership, but because it has done its job too well, and now there are many Vineyard- type clones, including not a few within mainline churches. Hence, the dis- tinctiveness of the Vineyard product has been diminished. One no longer needs to sneak out on Sunday evenings to a Vineyard worship service to hear contemporary music or experience the healing power of the Holy Spirit. The spiritual marketplace is more crowded with contemporary wor- ship forms than it was two decades ago. What is only beginning to emerge, however, is a church for the children and grandchildren of the baby-boom generation.

See the discussion of postmodern religion in Richard W. Flory and Donald E. Miller, eds., GenX Religion (New York: Routledge, 2000).

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