Our vision.

More than anything else, we seek God’s presence. That’s our number one priority. If God’s not in something, we’re not interested. We want to pursue God’s agenda. As individuals, we want to be people who are increasingly like Jesus. Not just on Sunday mornings, but at home and at work and at the school gates and at the gym. People who are publicly like Jesus and privately like Jesus. A church full of people who are listening to Jesus and then obeying him. We want to see the power of God - in healing, in deliverance, in transforming people and transforming situations. But we know that the power of God comes from the presence of God. As John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard movement said, “We don’t seek God’s power, we seek His presence. His power and everything else we need is always found in His presence.”

We’re people-centred because God is. From his point of view, it’s all about people. Rescuing people, loving people, helping people, healing people, being kind and compassionate to people. James 2:13 says “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” We think that’s because mercy is God’s priority - it’s the reason Jesus came into the world. That’s why He wants us to be merciful, just as He’s been to us. So, we do the mercy, and leave the judgment side of things to God. Because we’re people-centred, we want to be a welcoming church, not just a church with a welcome team. A church that’s hospitable to newcomers, not just a church that has a newcomers’ lunch. Because we’re people-centred, we want every single person who comes here to feel special, because they’re special to Jesus. We want people to start to experience the way they’ll be loved in Heaven here and now.

We want the leadership in the Church - and the work of the Church - to be characterised by friendship, not just function. All the main metaphors for ‘church’ in the New Testament are to do with closeness, and intimacy, and joining: the family of God, members of one body, bricks in the same building and so on. When Paul, Peter and James wrote to the people in their churches they kept describing them as their ‘dear friends’.

In John 15, Jesus says to the disciples: “I’m no longer calling you servants... Instead, I’m calling you friends.”

We want to be a church of friends that welcomes others in. That’s why, along with worship and ministry, the priority for Central Vineyard is to love people, be friends with them, pray with them, look after them, and take an interest in their lives.

There’s a famous Vineyard phrase that, when it comes to the Bible, we want to focus on ‘the main and the plain’. What does scripture mainly have to say and what does it plainly have to say? Pentecostal theologian Gordon Fee says this:

Anyone with even a surface acquaintance with the New Testament has come to recognise that the Christian faith is decidedly on the side of ‘the poor’ and that ‘the rich’ seem regularly to ‘come in for it.’ Thus Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor” and “Woe to you who are rich.” His messianic credentials are vindicated by the fact that ‘the good news is preached to the poor’, while of the rich He says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

The ‘poor’ in both Old and New Testaments refers not only to those in economic poverty (though it includes that) but also the powerless, the disenfranchised and those whose situation forces them to be dependent on others.

So in Exodus, in the middle of various prohibitions about practicing magic and sacrificing to foreign gods, Israel is told not to take advantage of widows and orphans.

And they’re commanded to lend without charging interest. Compassion towards the poor is woven throughout the Old Testament as well as the New. If God is so for the poor, then we want to be too! John Wimber said: “If you’re not going to be kind to the poor, please don’t put the name ‘Vineyard’ on your door.”

The most important people in the Vineyard are not the people with titles, but the people who serve week by week - who come two hours early to get us ready for the service, clean up afterwards, stand in the rain and snow welcoming people, and so on.

In Matthew 23, Jesus said “The more lowly your service to others, the greater you are. To be the greatest, be a servant.”

We want to teach people to be servants in the Kingdom, not consumers of religious goods and services. We want people to ask themselves, “What am I sowing into the Kingdom here?” not just “What am I getting out of it?” Serving is about laying down your own interests for the sake of others.

People sometimes say “I don’t know what my calling is.” We can answer that - your calling is ... to be a servant! To serve the Lord by serving others. All Christians are called to serve before they’re called to anything else. And they never lose that calling, whatever else they do in Christian ministry.

Serving is the incubator in which calling grows. Serving is the place into which God will speak to you.

We want to do everything we’re doing as if Jesus was coming to Central Vineyard today! We want to aspire to excellence in everything, as best we can, because ‘He’s worth it’. We’re not talking about being inappropriately extravagant - we want to be good stewards of what God gives us. We want to be investing it, not squandering it unnecessarily.

But sometimes religious people have a tendency to default towards being a bit on the stingy side! We don’t want to be like that. We want to do everything we do as well as we can, because we’re investing in the Kingdom of God. We’re investing in something that has eternal value. And we want to do everything with passion and generosity.

We want to be passionate and generous because God is passionate and generous. So because we want to be like him, we refuse to say that something’s ‘good enough’ - especially ‘good enough for Church’ - if passion and gen­erosity says that we could do it better. We want to be giving God our best, not our leftovers or our hand-me-downs.

Many unchurched people think that ‘Church’ is a relic of a bygone-era, like a historic monument, and that it’s only relevant for people who are locked in a bygone era, too. For people who wish it was still the 1950s and are praying that the world goes back to being like that.

We don’t have any religious paraphernalia in the building, because we don’t want anything to get in the way of people feeling comfortable, and experiencing the presence of God. We want to explain God, and Jesus, and Christian faith, in language that makes sense to ordinary people, not language that needs de-coding - where you need to be an insider to understand it.

We want to explain how the good news of Jesus is the an­swer to questions people today actually have, not to questions they don’t have, or they used to have. Although the good news of Jesus never changes, the way we communicate that good news has to change all the time. The language (and ways of thinking) that worked in the sixteenth-century, or the nine­teenth-century, or the 1950s, doesn’t work today.

We don’t want to pitch ‘head’ versus ‘heart’ as if they’re in competition with each other. As if ‘heart knowledge’ is good and ‘head knowledge’ is bad. We want to be ‘both-and’ Christians. Jesus said: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

So because we’re Charismatics, we want to experience the God who is alive and who is at work in this world. We want to love him with all our heart and soul. And because we’re also Evangelicals, we want to be both anchored in the Bible as our central point of reference, and people who don’t believe we need to have our minds in neutral to be good Christians.

We’re going to do what Jesus said and love the Lord our God with all our mind, too.

We want to be a people who have integrity - who are true to ourselves and honest with others. We want to be who we are, not pretending to be someone or something we’re not. We want to be real in our spirituality - when we pray for the sick, if someone’s healed, they’re healed, and if they’re not, they’re not. We’re not going to say they are, because that doesn’t advance the Kingdom or glorify God. It’s not ‘faith’ - it’s simply incorrect! So, we’ll pray again, and if necessary we’ll keep praying, but we won’t pretend.

Now, saying we want to be ‘real’, doesn’t mean we don’t want to be transformed, and become more and more like Jesus. It doesn’t mean we say, “Well, that’s just how I am”, as an excuse for being un-Christ­like. God invites us to ‘Come as you are’, but he loves us too much to leave us that way! Transformation is high on his agenda for all of us. But we’re going to start by being real with each other, and honest about where we’re at. Not pretending. We don’t want any unreality or weirdness in our spirituality! When we do ministry, we want to operate in a relaxed, non-hyped, non-showy kind of way. We don’t do theatricals. We invite the Holy Spirit to come - very simply - without charging up the emotions. We want to be a church that has a relaxed and informal spirituality.

One that takes God seriously but doesn’t take itself too seriously.