Apostolic Networks In The Third Wave Of The Spirit

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PNEUMA 38 (2016) 23–32

Apostolic Networks in the Third Wave of the Spirit John Wimber and the Vineyard

Jon Bialecki*

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

Jon.Bialecki@ed.ac.uk

Abstract

This essay discusses the relationship between the Vineyard and the various other apos- tolic networks. By comparing the Vineyard with C. Peter Wagner and the New Apostolic Revival, I contend that the chief difference between these two movements lies in a Vineyard interest in pedagogy over a New Apostolic Revival interest in governance, and in the Vineyard’s use of the figure of John Wimber as an exemplar for practice rather than as a figure of authority.

Keywords

the Vineyard – John Wimber – C. Peter Wagner – New Apostolic Revival – Third Wave – authority – conceptual personae

I begin this essay by recounting a story that I was told during fieldwork with the Association of Vineyard Churches; this story came from a friend of mine, a Korean-American youth pastor who had been attending his first Vineyard con- ference. As he told it (and there is some reason to hold this story at arm’s length, because he was a great raconteur), he was enjoying the talks and discussions, but he was increasingly becoming nervous. Again and again, speakers would say something like “As you know, John says.” Meanwhile, my friend would sit in the audience, trying hard to remember exactly where that was said in the

* In addition to thanking the editors and participants in this special issue, I would like to

express gratitude towards Caleb Maskell, Doug Erickson, Jon Stovell, and the Society for

Vineyard Studies Scholars for conversation and feedback that informed this essay; all errors

are the author’s own.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03801001

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Gospel of John, in the Johannine epistles, or in the book of Revelation. Was his knowledge of the Gospels, he wondered nervously, that much worse than he thought?

The genius of this story, of course, lies in the fact that the speakers were referring not to any of those canonical New Testament texts, but to sayings by John Wimber, the former Fuller School of World Missions church growth specialist (and Righteous Brothers session player) who headed the Vineyard between 1982 and 1997; the frisson that animates the humor stems from the idea that Wimber’s words could be referenced with such a degree of frequency and seriousness that they would be mistaken by an outsider as being references to biblical texts.

I begin with this story not only because, as an anthropologist who has spent his career studying the Vineyard, I happen to share my discipline’s post- Geertzian weakness for starting every paper with an ethnographic vignette, but also because I believe that it speaks directly to the topic of this special edition of Pneuma. Notice that the speech of those who discuss what are often called “apostolic” movements is often marked by the same structure: an individual proper name followed by the proper name of an institution. In other words, an effective “founder” is associated with the larger collectivity that this founder brought into being. The founder thereby appears to serve as a metonym for the larger collectivity. It is no accident that all the groups referred to in this special issue should be structured in this manner; after all, many (though by no means all) of the leading figures are larger-than-life individuals.1 It would be easy to assume that this is because the constituent movement collectively referred to as “Apostolic Networks in the Third Wave of the Spirit” are in some way all are marked by the same organizing logic, be that for reasons having to do with genealogy, with effective structures of church governance in late capitalism, or with whatever other ordering mechanism one might posit, and that therefore they all share the same features.2As we shall see, some of these New Apostolic movements have taken this very metonymic relationship between particular figures and institutions to be not merely a common mark of such movements, but rather as actually defining the contemporary apostolic movements as such. Such, we might assume, would also be the case for the Vineyard.

This essay argues, however, that whatever else might be the case for some of the other movements addressed in this issue of Pneuma, this relation between

1 As was noted by a peer reviewer, this especially tends to be the case with American-centered

movements more than with movements elsewhere.

2 See, for instance, William Kay,ApostolicNetworksofBritain:NewWaysofBeingChurch(Milton

Keynes,uk; Waynesboro,ga: Paternoster Press, 2007).

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founder and institution cannot be posited for the Vineyard. Furthermore, at least in reference to the contemporary shape of the movement, it is the very nature of the relationship that in other cases seems to define the new “apos- tolic” network—that is, the metonymic link between the figure of John Wimber and the Vineyard—that has, in this case, prevented the Vineyard from being completely subsumed under both these networks and some of their associated systems of logic. I will argue that something specific about the way Wimber is used in the contemporary Vineyard short-circuits the particular processes of differentiation that are vital to the workings of apostolic networks, at least as put forward by those practitioners who self-consciously advocate for it as a marked social form.

To understand my claim here, it would be well to flesh out what people in the Vineyard mean when they speak of “apostolic networks.” Historically there are several forms of Christian praxis and governance that could be termed apos- tolic; these include not only groups (recall that Azusa Street itself bore the term apostolic) but also immediate precursors to Pentecostalism, such as the Catholic Apostolic Church and other associated Irvingite groups, and neo-and charismatic sequela movements, such as the Latter Rain. But from the vantage point of the Vineyard, the person who has done the most work in the current moment to distribute and systematize the term apostolic as a concept of both charismata and church governance is C. Peter Wagner. Whether or not this impression is actually the case is a different matter, but many Vineyard believ- ers hold Wagner in high esteem in this context because of the prominent role that he has played in the Vineyard’s history. C. Peter Wagner was, of course, John Wimber’s overseer when Wimber was working as a church growth consultant at the Charles E. Fuller Institute of Evangelism and Church Growth. Wagner was also the instructor of record when Wimber taughtmc510, “Signs, Wonders, and Church Growth,” at Fuller Seminary; this course was famous (and in some eyes, infamous) not merely for linking church growth to what was understood as supernatural exercises of the Holy Spirit’s power, but also for setting aside an hour of in-seminary “clinic” in which these gifts would be exercised in a non- structured but still pedagogically intended manner.3 Wagner even claims that he had a hand in the founding of Anaheim Vineyard, the flagship church for much of the Vineyard’s history; he states that he encouraged John Wimber to

3 This course, and the associated controversy that resulted when Fuller cancelled it, did a

great deal to circulate both Wimber’s and the Vineyard’s names in various charismatic and

evangelical media circuits. See Jon Bialecki, “The Third Wave and the Third World: C. Peter

Wagner, John Wimber, and the Pedagogy of Global Renewal in the Late Twentieth Century,”

Pneuma37, no. 2 (2015).

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take his wife’s charismatically orientated Quaker home Bible study and make a church of it, so that Wimber could return to direct evangelizing (instead of church-growth consulting), and also so that Wimber “would have something to do on weekends.”

By reason of these associations alone, Wagner’s role in what he calls “The New Apostolic Reformation” would appear to be exaggerated from a Vineyard perspective. But Wagner is renowned in some Vineyard circles not only for his association with both the Vineyard and the New Apostolic Reformation; he is also remembered, particularly in his early writings on apostolic governance, for the way he has occasionally associated John Wimber and the Vineyard with the new Apostolic Reformation. Further, he has sometimes done so in a rather complicated and, in the view of some Vineyard members, not entirely compli- mentary way. In his early writings, Wagner views post-denominational charis- matically affiliated but theologically evangelical churches—what he refers to as the Third Wave of the Spirit—as by nature apostolic, and his list of examples includes the Vineyard. This list also includes a host of other unlikely exam- ples: Willow Creek and Calvary Chapel also appear as representative of the contemporary apostolic, and Wagner’s ideas of what are particular to apostolic churches were initially broad enough that a great many other churches that wouldnotrecognizethemselvesasapostolicwouldfallintothenet.4Thisseem- ing embrace of the Vineyard is also mitigated (or perhaps made more biting) by the fact that Wagner interprets Wimber’s 1993 admission that the Vineyard is, in effect, a denomination as a betrayal of the anti-institutional bent of Apostoli- cism, even as he acknowledges that Wimber’s approach preserved a great deal of autonomy and avoided the Weberian routinization of charisma that Wagner dreads.

Indeed, Wagner sometimes presents Wimber as an apostle in denial, or even as an apostle manqué; in spite of this, however, Wagner also presents himself as Wimber’s heir. For instance, at the time of Wimber’s death Wagner described him as “moving in the direction of agreeing” with the idea of apostolic leader- ship as a move of the Spirit, thus suggesting that had Wimber carried on for just a little longer, he may have endorsed Wagner’s vision.5However, it is in the area of prophecy where Wagner has done the most to signal some kind of con-

4 Other “apostolic” traits in Wagner’s early discussion included things such as contemporary

forms of musical worship, strong pastor governance, and a prioritization of church planting.

See, for instance, C. Peter Wagner, Church-Quake: How the New Apostolic Reformation Is

Shaking Up the Church as We Know It (Venturaca: Regal Books, 1999).

5 C. Peter Wagner, Apostles and Prophets: The Foundation of the Churches (Ventura ca: Regal

Books, 2000), 127.

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tinuity between himself and Wimber. An important aspect of Wagner’s vision for his own apostolic governance is an interlinked but ultimately hierarchical relation between apostles and prophets; and concerning the relation between apostles and prophets, Wagner has reported himself as having been propheti- cally described as picking up “John Wimber’s mantle.”6

It is important to observe, however, that neither Wagner’s partial bundling of both Wimber and the Vineyard with the apostolic, nor, for that matter, the idea that Wagner has taken up a mantle that Wimber has declined, is merely an act of indefensible hermeneutic violence. For a three-year period between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the Vineyard was associated with a loose coterie of Latter Rain-influenced public figures centered around the International House of Prayer’s Mike Bickle; this collectively went by the title of “The Kansas City Prophets.” During what was perhaps the high point of this association, Wimber asked several Kansas City speakers to address the Vineyard Pastor’s Conference, which was where Wimber did most of his movement-wide leadership training. During that conference it was prophesied that through the Vineyard the two “missing” Ephesian offices of prophet and apostle would be restored, with the 1980s being the period belonging to the prophetic, and the 1990s to the apos- tolic. The marriage between Kansas City and the prophets became a shotgun one when Bickle’s church formally joined the Vineyard and Bickle himself sub- mitted to Wimber’s pastoral authority; all this was done to in an attempt to foreclose the controversy occasioned by a series of allegations made by Ernest Gruen, a rival Kansas City charismatic pastor who claimed that prophets asso- ciated with Bickle were engaging in aberrant, “cultish,” and “occult” behavior.

Later, Wimber was disappointed by a series of prophecies regarding a future revival in Britain that failed to come to pass (especially Paul Cain’s prophecy to John Mumford, a British Vineyard pioneer, that revival would be “released” in Britain in 1990). By 1991 Wimber would attempt to de-emphasize the prophetic at the Vineyard Pastor’s Conference. In 1995 he would publicly state his regrets for the prophetic turn. Finally, in 1996, in the wake of the Vineyard’s disaffili- ation with the Toronto Blessing, Mike Bickle, his Kansas City Fellowship, and all the churches under Mike Bickle withdrew from the Vineyard, claiming that there had not been enough “cross-pollination” of Kansas City and Vineyard val- ues. Given this tumultuous history as well as this potential bad blood, it should come as little surprise that Mike Bickle was one of the prophets who would later prophesy that Wagner was to take up the mantle Wimber put down.7

6 Ibid., 22.

7 See Bill Jackson,The Quest for the Radical Middle: A History of the Vineyard(Cape Town, South

Africa: Vineyard International Publishing, 1999), 166–204.

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One could imagine that this articulation of a continuity with the Vineyard and with Wimber might serve as an enticement to members of the Vineyard, and to a degree this certainly is the case; many former Vineyard believers and churches ended up drifting away from the movement, and several cur- rent churches, while still formally affiliated with the Vineyard, are also to a large degree in conversation with, and influenced by, networks such as the New Apostolic Reformation (much as there are Vineyard pastors and congre- gants still associated with Mike Bickle and the International House of Prayer, or with Toronto and its various sequela). In addition, there are a great many people who attend Vineyard churches and are relatively unaware of alterna- tive renewal or neo-charismatic movements, and hence have no interaction with, or thoughts regarding, the nar or the idea of apostolic networks at all.

But on the whole, there is a broader tendency among Vineyard believers to find the nar unsettling; I have even heard it described on occasion as “creepy.” As they describe it, the movement strikes many as marked by what comes across as a disturbing set of internal hierarchies. Vineyard members trade stories of special empty seats or aisles set aside for “apostles” or prophets. Also, despite the fact that the intra-Vineyard governance operates by way of a somewhat complicated set of overseeing bodies, each one contained within the other, there is a tendency to see the apostolic system, with a series of small groups with a single leader who has a direct hand on the tills of the system, as rather authoritarian. It is also believed (and this is a turn that tends to conflate Wagner, Bickle, and Toronto into one flattened, semi-homogenous field) that there is an excess of the renewal and of the charismatic here, usually expressed with regard to issues of affect and a fixation on the miraculous to the exclusion of evangelizing.

Why is this? It could, in part, be a direct result of the history already de- scribed, though these affairs were mostly mediated through a pastoral stratum and thus had little direct impact on the laity. That does not mean, however, that it did not have results that were disruptive at the level of local churches. I have heard accounts of Vineyard church splits that occurred when they found that they could not contain the multiple loci of authority implicit in the Ephesian fivefold model, models that were implemented after pastoral contact with a prophetic figure.

I would be suspicious of putting too much weight even on these church- split narratives, however, because many churches weathered this period quite well. Further, it would not explain the oddest aspect of this suspicion of the nar. While it is hard to get a sense of the feelings of all Vineyard members, my ethnographic read is that this suspicion is in some ways stronger among

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members who fell into the Vineyard after Toronto; further, this sense seems particularly strong among younger members.

Again, this aspect could be explained by one of the more trope-like analy- ses of the Vineyard, that in the wake of the series of crises that ran from the early to mid-nineties, the Vineyard, which imagined itself as a body suspended between a spirituality and an evangelical theology, has drifted in the evan- gelical direction. A variant of this would be the claim that the Vineyard has succumbed to the Weberian routinization of charisma, the anxiety-provoking possibility that haunts so much of apostolic literature. Under either of these explanations, the Vineyard would simply be an organization that does not see itself as part of an apostolic movement because it has no desire to see itself as essentially still engaged in the business of Holy Spirit.

But to adopt either of these this would be to ignore countervailing evidence. Deliverances, healings, and words of knowledge still occur in a great many Vineyards. Further, to claim that the Vineyard is now entirely an evangelical institution would be to erase the degree to which a younger generation of Vineyard believers, particularly those who have an interest in church planting, have been influenced by critiques of Evangelicalism and in particular by the Emergent Church movement (though there are plenty of other influences on those Vineyard members who see the idea of Evangelicalism as either needing correction or as in essence nonsensical).8

I would argue instead that this rejection of the apostolic hinges on the figure of John Wimber—not Wimber as a historical person, though we have seen that Wimber’s role in the historical decoupling of the Vineyard from a nascent apostolic movement is undeniable—but, rather, the way Wimber is spoken about and imagined, the way his figure is used and circulated, both during his life and after it.

There is a certain irony in this claim, for, as we have seen, it is the idea of a singular, leading figure that is the animating conceit of the apostolic; to say that the conception of Wimber as a singular leading figure inoculates against that very idea as a form of proper governance may come across as being pur- posefully contrarian. This may especially seem to be true when one considers that Wimberian material continues to be produced and circulated: new pack- ages of Wimber-authored talks and writings, a Facebook page that distributes a daily stream of decontextualized Wimber quotes and iconic photographs, and of course the deployment of Wimber sayings, not merely in sermons,

8 See James Bielo, Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity and the Desire for Authenticity(New

York: New York University Press, 2011).

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but in intra-Vineyard discussions regarding the shape and future of the move- ment.

This considered, to say that Wimber is not a singular, leading (albeit posthu- mous) figure in the Vineyard would be grossly incorrect. However, there is something in the nature of focusing on Wimber as a specific and singular figure that, at the same time that it celebrates him, erases his singularity, or rather, makes it a singular portrayal of a Universal. What I mean is that the signa- ture quotes are all of a level to suggest that what is special about Wimber is the degree to which he is depicted as embracing his ordinariness and not any special office. Sayings of the order of “I’m just a fat man trying to get to heaven,” “everybody gets to play,” or “we’re just loose change in God’s pocket” are deployed to suggest that Wimber has nothing unique to him; suggestions of any kind of spiritual athleticism or mystical exercise on Wimber’s part are generally put to rest by narratives such as his purported response to how he prepares for prayers for healing: “I drink a diet coke.”

How does this function to preclude an apostolic logic? The concept behind current primitivist attempts to recapture the five Ephesian offices seems to be centered around an attempt to think through an anti-institutional mode of governance and practice based upon a logic of differentiation in which participants specialize into particular modes, each of which have different spheres of action and responsibilities to one another. In fact, this logic of specialization does not stop at this threshold, but has even finer gradations; for instance, some of these offices have even more nuanced typologies, such as “vertical” versus “horizontal” apostles. Each one of these is an authorization to engage in an arena of activity that is an empowerment as well, since the presumption is that they will be given the tools necessary to accomplish their position. But at the same time, as with any kind of coding, this is also a foreclosure, a denial of other at least theoretical potentialities for individuals who are given particular offices.

This is a kind of specificity that runs against what Wimber, as a figure emblematic of what is, at least in theory, potentially available to any believer, represents. This resonates with other important differences between the nar and the Vineyard; the latter tend to imagine the gifts as situational, while the former tend to think of them as a particular endowment.9 This is not an absolute distinction. In the Vineyard it is common to claim that particular individuals have a greater gifting in particular charismata, such as healing or deliverance; however, this refers to a greater than average capacity in the

9 I am in debt to Doug Erickson for this point.

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particular gifting and not a specialization that precludes accessing other gifts in appropriate circumstances.

This is of course not the only force working against the idea of apostolic networks in the Vineyard. At an even more abstract level, the Vineyard tends to function at a lesser degree of resolution when it comes to the charismatic. While the Vineyard unquestionably backs the idea of divine intervention in the contemporaryworld,Vineyardbelieversalwaysleaveadooropentomorenatu- ralistic accounts, tending never to state that any particular moment is, without any doubt, a moment of divine intervention; ethnographers of the Vineyard have described this as an “as if” edge or a “flutter” in Vineyard attitudes toward the gifts.10 This slight undertone of skepticism is corrosive to claims of divine office; if any particular nonbiblical miraculous is in effect only provisional, then any claim to authority based on a local monopoly on a particular type of super- natural action is questionable. This is another turn that precludes a Vineyard adoption of the kind of structures associated with other apostolic networks.

In the end, these differences may be a function of the work that each of these movements imagines itself doing. Initially the work of the Vineyard was pedagogical; much of its early exposure occurred on the conference circuit, where Wimber’s interactive “show and tell” style of disseminating the praxis associated with the charismatic gifts suggested a near universal availability of these practices, at least to believing Christians. There was an emphasis on what could be replicated.11 By contrast, it appears that much of the work associ- ated with self-conscious apostolic networks is concerned not with pedagogy (though this does occur) but rather with coalition building among indepen- dent churches, leaders, and individuals. Here there appears to be a concern not with an emphasis on replication but with creating a workable vocabulary of interlocking difference, allowing divergent groups to coexist and cooperate without an obligation to model themselves on one another.

In sum, then, what we have with the New Apostolic Revival as Wagner presents it is a mode of supernaturalized governance. With the figure of Wim-

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See Tanya Luhrmann,When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Rela- tionship with God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Tanya Luhrmann, “A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief: Towards an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” Current Anthropology 53 (2012): 371–395; Jon Bialecki. “Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism? On Tanya Lurhmann’s When God Talks Back and Bruno Latour,” Anthropology of Consciousness 25 (2014): 32–52.

This, in turn, suggests that we might do well to ask whether issues of replicability limited Wimber’s capacity ultimately to embrace movements such as Toronto and the Kansas City Prophets.

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ber, as opposed to the historical John Wimber, what we have is something not unlike “conceptual personae,” personifications that works as a map to think through a set of supposedly universal forces (in this case, the human will, the Holy Spirit, and human brokenness).12To the degree that Wimber as a concep- tual persona is set up so as to allow individuals to imagine their own immanent engagement with the world in a way that produces new modes of (supernatu- ralized) being, Wimber could be considered an “icon of immanence” as well.13 This, in the end, seems to be the determinative difference between these two groups. The importance of this, I think, lies in that it turns us toward specific mechanisms to understand the course and nature of the evolution of these groups and not to other mechanisms, such as the routinization of charisma, which is often invoked (at least in discussions by those who are a part of these worlds) as a sort of natural law, and not as a heuristic for tendencies implicit in structuring elements in these groups themselves.

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On the concept of “conceptual personae,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). While religion is generally considered a bar to the production of conceptual personae, what should be noted here is that Wimber is not a cosmological or soteriological figure but, rather, an exemplar of how gifts can be activated and mobilized. Regarding the various ways to express relations between the will, the Holy Spirit, and brokeness in the Vineyard, see Jon Bialecki, “Diagramming the Will: Ethics and Prayer, Text, and Politics.” Forthcoming in Ethnos. Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

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