The On the Journey Vision
I hope you’ve found On the Journey helpful! We’re excited to be able to share quality content that helps each of us on the adventure God has for us. It’s been fun to see how we can use current tools and platforms (Email, Facebook, Website, hopefully more to come soon!) to connect the Church together and learn how to do this thing in a more connected and collaborative way.
An Unexpected Adventure…
On the Journey has come out of an emerging picture that God has gradually been revealing over the last few years. Much of it starts with the (very unexpected) adventure that School of Kingdom Ministry has been. Making a long story short there, in 2011, we at The Vineyard Church of Central Illinois created a training program to equip the people in our church family in Spirit-filled ministry. Over the next few years, churches began to come to us and ask if they could run the program as well. As of the time of this writing (the beginning of 2019-2020 school year), we’ve had over 7,000 people participate, many of them having their lives transformed in profound ways.
Along the way, we began to see something interesting happen. At first our focus was on each individual student and the amazing journey God was bringing them on. This is still something we celebrate to this day, but in time, we began to see something beyond individual transformation emerge— we began to see the culture and experience of the local churches themselves change. Pastors began to share with us the new life and vibrancy they felt in their congregation, and how School of Kingdom Ministry had profoundly changed their church as a whole, including the people who had never attended themselves. This story replicated itself dozens of times over in many different local church contexts.
Seeing Discipleship from a New Angle
All this got me thinking…what was happening here? I hadn’t seen something like this before. As I grappled to describe what I was seeing, I found myself settling on a new term that described the effect most accurately:
Church-Church Discipleship
I had never heard of anything like this before, but what I saw happening right in front of me was our local church discipling other local churches in the area of supernatural ministry. The grace and deposit we carry in Urbana was being replicated into other local churches, sometimes on the other side of the world. Like one believer pours into the life and journey of another; in a parallel way, we were seeing one church pour into another.
My curiosity peaked, I began to dig through the Bible to see if I could see ideas like this in play in the Bible. I was familiar with the idea that the church is an interdependent body:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many.
If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
1 Corinthians 12:12-14,26-27
What I find fascinating with this passage is Paul’s generic introduction: the idea of a composite body is how it is with Christ. The unity of the Spirit we all share stitches us together in a way where we cannot be treated as disconnected from each other. We cannot share the same Spirit and not be part of the same body.
From here, Paul turns and applies this logic to the individual; his concluding verse is that we (collectively) are the body of Christ, but individually, we are members of it. This makes perfect sense in the context; Paul is writing this letter to the local church in Corinth.
The question this raises for me though is this: Doesn’t the general logic apply just as strongly to local churches and their relationship to one another as it does to individuals? Does not every local church also share of the same Spirit as every other? Does not every local church body exist as a portion, but not the entirety of the body of Christ? If that is the case, could it be that local churches each have their own unique role in the body?
As I began to read through the letters to churches in the New Testament, I began to see examples of this kind of thinking in the early church. (See 2 Corinthians 8:1-7, or 1 Thessalonians 1:6-7 for example). Paul seemed keenly aware of the grace God had poured out specifically to each of the churches he was in relationship with, and he was working to spread that grace around.
Doing Church Together
What if this picture is actually true? What if God has deposited a unique grace in each local church body, and that we need to share that grace with one another to do everything God has called us to? If that’s true, then our connection to each other as local churches is an important part of God’s design, and with technology, it’s becoming possible in brand new ways. Paul had to personally send Titus to Corinth; I’m able to present in dozens of churches a week with School of Kingdom Ministry, many of which I’ve never personally been to. It is quite literally possible to function as a more connected Church than anytime since the disciples first scattered from Jerusalem in the book of Acts.
The challenge at hand is that we’re not used to thinking this way, and we haven’t structured ourselves in a way where this will naturally happen. The 20th century saw an increasingly independent perspective of how local churches related to the Church (culminating in the increasingly popular non-denominational church). God sees us as united; Jesus is returning for one Bride, not a bunch of brides, but we see ourselves as more separate than integrated.
Through the adventure of School of Kingdom Ministry, I’ve been given a small degree of notoriety and influence in the Church. (I always laugh if someone calls me a ‘celebrity’ - Robert Downey Jr. is a celebrity, I just have a few friends who don’t live where I do.) As with any influence, it’s important we continually ask ourselves what we will spend the influence we have for. The conclusion I’ve come to is that rather than build a platform for myself, I want to build a platform for local churches. I want to see more and more local churches empowered to uncover the gems of grace within them and share them with other local churches that need them. If I need to build channels to get the grace from our church out, I want to build them in a way that they can be used by far more than just us.
In the Vineyard movement, we have a phrase we love to say, “everybody gets to play” —by which we mean everyone has a part to play in this thing called the church: ministry belongs to everyone. I suppose maybe what I’m saying is that “every church gets to give away.” That’s what On the Journey is for. It’s about doing Church together; about sharing the grace God has given us with each other, about becoming One Body and One Bride, because the Father has beautiful things in mind for his Church.
Putty Putman
The Vineyard Church
Urbana IL