Historical-Theological Perspective and Reflection on John Wimber and the Vineyard

By Don Williams, Ph.D.

When western intellectual history is written, the 21st century will be remembered as the “postmodern age.” Among many definitions, perhaps the best known is by Jean-Francois Lyotard: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” With the collapse of Marxism as a viable world-view and the absence of a rational explanation for the universe, we are in an age where pluralism, multi-culturalism and relativism reign. How will we cope with this postmodern era?

The church’s embrace of the modern age, popularly identified as the period from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the Berlin wall, makes this question critical. Modernism was the age of the Enlightenment, the age of reason, the age of the scientific method’s triumph. It was the age where mysticism, miracles, angels, demons, and supernatural interventions were judged naive, the products of childhood fancy. It was the age of demythologizing the Bible. It was the age of humanizing what was left of the “historical Jesus.” It was the age of the church accommodating itself to the secular mindset. It was the age of the Constantinian “national church,” informally established in all its multi-forms, influencing government policy by lobbying Washington. It was the age of the National Council of Churches, its counterpart, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the World Council of Churches. It was the age of the “Consultation on Church Union” (COCU) where “bigger is better.” It was the age of “The Christ of culture” (H. Richard Niebuhr). But this age is over.

While the postmodern era may be the consequence of the fall of the Soviet Empire, its roots lie in the revolutionary ‘60’s, preceded by the “Beat Generation” of the ‘50’s. The arrival of the civil rights movement, the burning of the ghettos, anti-Vietnam War riots, psychedelic drugs, the pill, and rock and roll, where music became political protest and youth editorialized to youth, ended cultural continuity.

The new youth culture was, among other things, an attack upon the modern era. Timothy Leary, ex-Harvard professor and the high priest of hallucinogenic drugs asserted that “reason is a tissue-thin artifact, easily destroyed by a slight alteration in the body’s bio-chemistry.” In this context, the generations were at loggerheads, and all established institutions, including the churches, were under attack. The mainline denominations accelerated their protracted decline (with the exception of the Southern Baptists and other more conservative groups). Symptomatically, Sunday school enrollment dropped more than half for many church bodies. The next generation absented itself. Churches grayed without replacements.

Longing for spirituality, the ‘60’s generation turned east. It was led by the Beatles and other cultural icons, who found Transcendental Meditation, chanting, and mind altering mysticism more attractive than the formal liturgies of Christendom.

It is no surprise that in the midst of this cultural revolution, a new Christian dynamic emerged. The press dubbed this the “Jesus Movement.” By the late ‘60’s a significant number of the “Woodstock Generation” renounced drugs and rebellion and turned to Jesus himself. They brought their counter-culture life-styles of communal living and folk-rock music into the churches that would welcome them. If turned away, they started their own fellowships. Looking for a spiritual high better than drugs, they celebrated Jesus’ love and the power of his Spirit, many becoming neo-Pentecostals or charismatics. In this context, the Calvary Chapel Churches exploded under the fatherly guidance of a former Foursquare pastor, Chuck Smith. They were known for their informal style, Bible exposition, evangelistic fervor, and culturally current music, born from the “rock generation.” They were also known for a heavy emphasis on the soon return of Christ and the end of the age.

Calvary Chapels were transitional from the modern age. While embracing the fervent spirituality of the new birth, they also held to dispensational theology, a highly rational hermeneutic, and soon backed away from what seemed to be the charismatic excesses of physical and emotional display. A small number of Calvary pastors, however, wanted to continue the Jesus Movement’s assault on the modern age. They gathered around John Wimber, a new charismatic leader, who would build and determine the emerging Vineyard Christian Fellowship.

At his core, Wimber was not a modernist. Rationalism had not indoctrinated him. The modern church did not socialize him. While that church, in its Fundamentalist expression, tried to force him into its theological and cultural mode, he did not fit and burned out. Neither, of course, was Wimber a postmodernist. His influence skyrocketed in the mid ‘80’s. In fact, Wimber was a premodernist, a man at home in the Christian world-view and experience which dominated the church and the West prior to the Enlightenment. As such, Wimber positioned the Vineyard with the potential to minister effectively in the postmodern age.