Thanks so much for posting that — it’s meaningful to me to have captured the spirit of what Wimber may have said. I didn’t realize my diagram lined up with his talks from that time period, but since I have great respect for him, it’s reassuring to know that although my diagrams may imply departing the Vineyard movement to build an emerging church movement, this seems actually to be in keeping with what he had in mind. When the time comes, I hope that in the same spirit, I can depart the emerging church movement for the next wave.

Best,

I would change the expansion of the loops.. here is why..

Time during which a recent movement maintained its vitality..

Pentecostalism… 60 years
Vineyard… 25 years
Emergent.. hmm.. could be 15 years..

Is the cycle getting shorter because cultural change continues to increase in pace?

Or.. because we have are now transitioning from modern to post-modern, post-colonial.. will the kinds of cultural surfers who will be leaders inthe emerging church be more flexible and adaptive and less need to settle down… and therefore the chaordic movement will surf along from wave to wave, ever changing according to the wind of the Spirit.. dream on len..

Again, just thinking out loud, I could be wrong….

In this post I’m trying to consider modern church movements vs. a coming postmodern church movement and how/why they will be different… and what that will mean. You did spark my thinking on the charismatic movement which led to this.

So. The Vineyard is the last major modern church movement, meaning it started most recently. In my analogy of the arcs above, we had the Pentecostal movement, out of which a new arc sprang in the charismatic movement, out of which a new arc sprang in the Vineyard movement. If you took the arc as 0=9:00 and 4=3:00, you could fill in point 2 at 12:00 with points 1 and 3 splitting the difference (you might whip up an actual diagram, I’m just floundering to explain it). While Pentecostalism sprouted from point “0″, the two successive movements sprouted from point “3″ on the arc.

Some (i.e., C.Peter Wagner) identified a “Third Wave” in this mix, but in many ways it was synonymous with the Vineyard movement, timed the same but was basically comprised of Vineyardesque types who didn’t want to leave their present churches. Really, if “third wave” was an identifiable-enough group at all, it is parallel to the Vineyard movement. The fact it probably never had enough people identify with it suggests to me it never hit the mark as a movement of its own… and of course it had no definable start point and no definable leader, so if it doesn’t fit my table above, that makes sense to me.

For different reasons, the Toronto Blessing is not a movement, since although it has a start point and identifiable leaders, it didn’t transfer in a lasting way.

In the Vineyard movement, we see a lot of the things outlined under the “Modern” column above. I think there were seeds of the “Postmodern” column at work though, since the Vineyard had for example more diversity between member churches, began by not defending against criticism, and was less given to the org-chart. As time went on though, it began to “fit” the “Modern” description more and more as the movement did the only things that it knew in order to become scaleable… and that was basically to introduce greater levels of organization. The milieu that exists now around the emerging church movement (let’s call it “an awareness of postmodernism”) did not exist at the time… and who knows how that might have affected things?

For the record (and for the benefit of those following along), I was only barely on the periphery of the Vineyard and but for some bits of circumstance would probably have been right in with both feet. There was no Vineyard church in our area until the mid-90’s and when it started many people simply assumed I would join it… but we were just starting a new congregation in the south of the city at that time. So I was very heavily-influenced by the Vineyard and still count it as being of major significance on my own sojourn, still having my share of friends “inside” the Vineyard.

I’ll stop there, as I’m not sure if I’m hitting the mark, but this kind of encapsulates how the Vineyard got brought into this post. I would like to discuss this post-charismatic topic further, as I think it’s significant to the wider emerging dialogue at the moment (see also this post). We can continue here or via email….

Your vantage point as someone just outside the borders of Vineyard, maybe especially because we were in constant dialogue during my Vineyard days as well, would be really valuable.

You know my email address, if it’d be too wordy to post here!