Frequently Asked Questions:

How do I get to Vineyard?

7602 Stewart Road, Newark, Ohio 43055
Get Google directions: Click here >>

What is your mission statement?

Our Mission Statement:

Alive Vineyard will make disciples of Jesus Christ as we:

Proclaim the gospel, seek, welcome and gather persons into the Body of Christ;

Lead persons to commit their lives to God through Jesus Christ;

Nurture person in Christian living through worship, baptism, communion, Bible and other studies, prayer, and other means of grace;

Send person’s into the world to live lovingly and justly as servants of Christ by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for the stranger, freeing the oppressed and;

What activities do you offer for children and nursery?

Our children’s ministry is called “Seekers in Sneakers.” It is coordinated by Carole Osborne, who has an incredible love for children and a strong team supporting all age groups! We offer programs for kids aged 0 to 6th grade at both worship celebrations. Our nursery provides a safe and clean environment for babies. From children’s camp in the summer to musicals, making crafts, and learning the stories of the Bible every week — you’ll find your children LOVE JUNIOR CHURCH! Parents of children aged newborn to two must register their children when they drop their child off so they may be reached if their child needs their attention. Junior Church begins at the end of our singing portion of our worship celebration in order for our children to learn the joy of adult worship as well.

What activities do you offer for youth?

“There’s always something to do!”

What can I expect during a Sunday worship service?

Upon arrival, you will receive a program explaining what you can expect during the celebration. One of the first things you’ll notice is the River of Life Cafe’ located immediately to your right as you enter. There is always free coffee or you can order a cup of cappuccino (also free for 1st guests — be sure to use your coupon found in the visitor’s packet) or purchase a roll, bagel or donut. You are welcome to bring a cup into the auditorium.

You’ll also see that most everyone is dressed casually. We begin our celebrations with about 25 minutes of worship. Rather than an organ or choir we have a live band. Most of our music has a pop/rock feel. One way or another, you should have some catchy tunes to hum all week long. After worship, there will be a few announcements. Following the announcements, our children are dismissed for Junior Church as everyone else prepares for the weekend message. The talk lasts somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes and often includes video clips from movies, stories from people’s lives, or dramas.

Afterwards, you’ll have the opportunity to receive prayer from our prayer team, if you’d like. We do NOT take up offerings, but rather provide offering boxes at the entry doors. We do not expect or request money from our visitors!

We will try not to spotlight or embarrass our visitors in any manner while, at the same time, seek to make you feel comfortable and at home.

Are there meetings besides Sunday mornings that I can attend?

How can I get plugged-in to ministry?

We are always looking for committed people desiring to do ministry. The best way to get “plugged in” is simply to contact the leader or a particular ministry and ask if they have needs. The Vinelife, our newsletter is also a source of ministry information. We have something for everyone no matter how much or little you can serve.

If you want to serve but aren’t quite sure where you fit, we offer a class called “Discovering My Servant Profile” which is perfect for you! Watch the church calendar and sign up for our next class. Everyone is welcome to participate in ministry at Vineyard but to be in leadership, you must first attend the Newcomers class and be a member of our fellowship.

What do you believe?

In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, diversity; in all things, charity. St. Augustine

“It is important to keep three circles in mind: a small one that is vital; a larger one that is negotiable; a vast one that is worth chatting about over a cup of coffee.” Pastor Steve Sjogren

Three Circles of Values: Essentials, Traditions & Opinions.

What’s important & what’s not that important? As we see it, there are three circles of values.

The first circle is absolutely vital. We call this essentials. The essentials form a very small circle since there are just a few key things that we must believe to be authentic Christians. Without agreement on these matters, we actually aren’t even believers aligned with the Church and its’ past two thousand years of history.

Beyond the essentials are traditions. Traditions, or denominational “distinctives”, form a significantly larger circle and are what makes the body of Christ rich and interesting. These traditions make the church a diverse body instead of a single-cell ameba.

Finally, the largest circle by far is formed by our opinions. The longer we spend in the Christian life, the more we accumulate opinions.

OUR FIVE ESSENTIALS:

 

OUR HUNDREDS OF OPINIONS:

Our Purpose:

 

“…If you abide in My Word then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the TRUTH and the TRUTH shall make you free.”
-John 8:31b-32

 

Relating to others and Christ;

Understanding God’s Word;

Thirsting for the living waters of God’s presence;

Helping others experience God’s love through tangible ministry.

Our Detailed Beliefs:

Alive Vineyard stands firmly in the center of orthodox Christian teaching. Out of loyalty to Christ and the gospel we have come to a number of convictions concerning the clear teaching of the Bible.

In order to distinguish the truth from error, to proclaim our faith to the world and to build up God’s people in faith, the members of Alive Vineyard affirm the following statements of faith:

A. CREEDS

We affirm the Nicene and Apostle’s creeds. These are historic creeds which help preserve the integrity of the church’s witness and which proclaim the basic elements of the enduring Christian message.

B. GOD

We believe in the one living and true God revealed in the Bible, the creator, redeemer, and sovereign ruler of all creation. In the unity of this Godhead, these are three persons, of one substance, equal in power, glory, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

C. JESUS CHRIST

We believe that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man who was sent into the world to fulfill the prophetic promises of salvation. Jesus Christ is one Messiah, the only mediator between God and man. There is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved. We believe that Jesus came down from heaven, was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was born of the Virgin Mary. He lived a sinless life in perfect obedience to the Father and was crucified for our sins. He suffered, died, and was buried, and He rose bodily from the dead on the third day. As the God-man, Jesus Christ ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of God the Father interceding for His people. At His first coming, Jesus inaugurated the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God.

D. HOLY SPIRIT

We believe in the Holy Spirit, who came forth from the Father and the Son to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. He also regenerates, sanctifies, and empowers for ministry every believer in Jesus Christ. We believe that we have been born again by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit and He is also our comforter. He is the abiding Helper, Teacher, and Guide. He graces us with Christ-like character, producing fruit in our lives, and He gifts His church for loving service. We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit and in the exercise of all Biblical gifts of the Spirit.

E. BIBLE

 

We believe that all men and women are sinners by nature and choice and therefore are under condemnation and God’s just judgment. While we were yet sinners, Jesus Christ died for us. We are counted as righteous before God only by the merit of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, through faith alone in Him, and not by our own works of righteousness. For the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

G. THE CHURCH

We believe that the church is intended by God to be a worshipping community of believers, observing the ordinances of Christ, governed by His law, exercising the gifts, privileges, and discipline invested in the Church by His Word and His Holy Spirit, and seeking to extend the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the end of the earth. We believe it is the mission of the Church to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) in the spirit of the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:36-40) by the power of the Holy Spirit.

H. THE SACRAMENTS

A sacrament is a sacred moment: a moment when we choose to personalize the message of the Gospel. We believe that Jesus gave the Church ordinances to follow including water baptism and The Lord’s Supper. We believe that once believers accept Christ as their personal Savior, they should be baptized in obedience to the Lord’s command in Scripture. We believe that the Lord’s Supper is open to all believers and is a memorial to the price that Jesus Christ paid for our salvation. Through the working of the Holy Spirit, the Lord’s Supper nourishes our souls. It brings to our remembrance the sacrifice of Christ for our sins, our communion with Christ and the Church and our obligation to persevere in faith and holiness to the end of our lives.

I. RETURN OF CHRIST

We believe in the personal, visible, triumphant return of Christ to earth. His purpose will be to manifest His government on the earth. Christians are exhorted to be watchful and obedient until His appearing. We believe in the resurrection of the dead, in the final judgment, and in the eternal blessing of the righteous and endless suffering of the wicked.

J. EVANGELISM

We believe in world evangelism. We accept the commission of Jesus Christ, who is Lord, to make disciples of all nations, to baptize them, and teach them to observe His commandments. We join with all those believing in Him to accomplish this urgent task. We accept this as a personal commission as well as a commission of the entire Church.

K. TITHES AND OFFERINGS

We believe the church should be supported by the tithes and offerings of those committed to its mission. Further, we believe that when people serve God in willing obedience, there is financial abundance to accomplish God’s purpose.

Our Core Values:

Interested in joining us in the Kingdom Ministry of Jesus?

What can you tell me about the Vineyard movement?

The Association of Vineyard Churches is one of the fastest growing church-planting movements in the world. The Vineyard story is about ordinary people who worship and serve an extraordinary God. The Vineyard is simply one thread in the rich tapestry of the historic and global Church of Jesus Christ. But it is a thread of God’s weaving.

Our primary aim is to love and glorify God and expand His Kingdom in relevant ways in the time allotted us. As communities of the King, Vineyard churches should model what the Kingdom looks like when God has His way with a group of people. John Wimber

The Vineyard is a community of churches sharing the same values and vision. We want our Christianity to be simple, relevant, practical and supernatural…No hype…No manipulation. We want to say “yes” to Jesus while saying “no” to religion. The Association of Vineyard Churches is one of the fastest growing church-planting movements in the world. The Vineyard story is about ordinary people who worship and serve an extraordinary God. The Vineyard is simply one thread in the rich tapestry of the historic and global Church of Jesus Christ. But it is a thread of God’s weaving.

From the beginning, Vineyard pastors and leaders have sought to hold in tension the biblical doctrines of the Christian faith with an ardent pursuit of the present day work of the Spirit of God. Maintaining that balance is never easy in the midst of rapid growth and renewal.

John Wimber was a founding leader of the Vineyard. His influence profoundly shaped the theology and practice of Vineyard churches from their earliest days until his death in November 1997. When John was conscripted by God he was, in the words of Christianity Today, a “beer-guzzling, drug-abusing pop musician, who was converted at the age of 29 while chain-smoking his way through a Quaker-led Bible study” (Christianity Today, editorial, Feb. 9 1998).

In John’s first decade as a Christian he led hundreds of people to Christ. By 1970 he was leading 11 Bible studies that involved more than 500 people. Under God’s grace, John became so fruitful as an evangelical pastor he was asked to lead the Charles E. Fuller Institute of Evangelism and Church Growth. He also later became an adjunct instructor at Fuller Theological Seminary where his classes set attendance records. In 1977, John reentered pastoral ministry to plant Calvary Chapel of Yorba Linda.

Throughout this time, John’s conservative evangelical paradigm for understanding the ministry of the church began to grow. George Eldon Ladd’s theological writings on the Kingdom of God convinced John intellectually that the all the biblical gifts of the Holy Spirit should be active in the church. Encounters with Fuller missiologists Donald McGavaran and C. Peter Wagner and seasoned with missionaries and with international students gave him credible evidence for combining evangelism with healing and prophecy. As he became more convinced of God’s desire to be active in the world through all the biblical gifts of the Spirit, John began to teach and train his church to imitate Jesus’ full-orbed Kingdom ministry. He began to ‘do the stuff’ of the Bible that he had formerly only read about.

As John and his congregation sought God in intimate worship, they experienced empowerment by the Holy Spirit, significant renewal in the gifts and conversion growth. It became clear that the church’s emphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit was not shared by some leaders in the Calvary Chapel movement. In 1982, John’s church left Calvary Chapel and joined a small group of Vineyard churches. Vineyard was a name chosen by Kenn Gulliksen, a prolific church planter affiliated with Calvary Chapel, for a church he planted in Los Angeles in 1974. Pastors and leaders from the handful of Vineyard churches began looking to John for direction. And the Vineyard movement was born.

In 1985, the various Vineyard churches formed a formal church association called the Association of Vineyard Churches. The churches are self-governing, but overseen and encouraged on a voluntary basis by mature pastors who serve as Regional Coordinators, and in each region, Area Pastoral Overseers. Until his death in November of 1997, John Wimber served as International Director of the Vineyard. Bert Waggoner presently serves as the National Vineyard Coordinator in the USA, while Bob Fulton serves as the International Vineyard Coordinator.

Today, there are 650 Vineyard churches in the USA (twelve in Iowa), and more than 1,200 Vineyard churches worldwide, an international church planting movement, a publishing house and a music production company. Vineyard worship songs have helped thousands of churches experience intimacy with God. Many churches have been equipped to continue Jesus’ ministry of proclaiming the Kingdom, healing the sick, casting out demons and training disciples.

To learn about the Vineyard church movement, we invite you to visit the national website which has information about beliefs, our history, our future, and national events. The website is www.vineyardusa.org

JOHN WIMBER.
The turning point came one night in Detroit when the Lord clearly spoke to me, “John, I’ve seen YOUR ministry (in a ‘and I’m not too impressed’ tone of voice) and now I would like to show you MINE!” John Wimber

John Wimber (1934-1997) was the founding pastor of the Anaheim Vineyard and leader of the Vineyard movement, which now numbers nearly 1,200 churches worldwide. He authored several books, including Power Evangelism and Power Healing. An average Christian man pursuing his faith – “just a fat man going to heaven,” – he would say, when God called him to a much larger task: to lead the Church into dynamic renewal. He learned – and taught us – to touch God in worship, to move in the power of the Holy Spirit, and to see God’s Kingdom break out everywhere. Before his death in November of 1997, this ordinary man of faith had been raised up as an international speaker, a best-selling author, pastor of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Anaheim, California, and founder of the Vineyard Movement worldwide.

What’s Vineyard believe about worship?

Worship, the act of freely giving love to God, forms and informs every activity of the Christian’s life. John Wimber

Worship: Intimacy with God by John Wimber

Many people who visit Vineyard Christian Fellowships remark on the depth and richness of our worship. This has not come about by chance: we have a well-thought-out philosophy that guides why and how we worship God. To understand how we worship God, it is helpful to learn about our fellowship’s history, which goes back to 1977. At that time my wife, Carol, was leading a small group of people in a home meeting that evolved into the Anaheim Vineyard. I’ll let her describe what happened during that time.

‘We began worship with nothing but a sense of calling from the Lord to a deeper relationship with Him. Before we started meeting in a small home church setting in 1977, the Holy Spirit had been working in my heart, creating a tremendous hunger for God. One day as I was praying, the word “worship” appeared in my mind like a newspaper headline. I had never thought much about that word before. As an evangelical Christian I had always assumed the entire Sunday morning gathering was “worship” – and, in a sense, I was correct. But in a different sense there were particular elements of the service that were especially devoted to worship and not to teaching, announcements, musical presentations, and all the other activities that are part of a typical Sunday morning gathering. I had to admit that I wasn’t sure which part of the service was supposed to be worship.

‘After we started to meet in our home gathering, I noticed times during the meeting – usually when we sang – in which I experienced God deeply. We sang many songs, but mostly songs about worship or testimonies from one Christian to another. But occasionally we sang a song personally and intimately to Jesus, with lyrics like “Jesus I love you”. Those types of songs both stirred and fed the hunger for God within me. About this time I began asking our music leader why some songs seemed to spark something in us and others didn’t. As we talked about worship, we realized that often we would sing about worship yet we never actually worshipped – except when we accidentally stumbled onto intimate songs like “I Love You Lord”, and “I Lift My Voice”. Thus we began to see a difference between songs about Jesus and songs to Jesus.

‘Now, during this time when we were stumbling around corporately in worship, many of us were also worshipping at home alone. During these solitary times we were not necessarily singing, but we were bowing down, kneeling, lifting hands, and praying spontaneously in the Spirit – sometimes with spoken prayers, sometimes with non-verbalized prayers, and even prayers without words at all. We noticed that as our individual worship life deepened, when we came together there was a greater hunger toward God. So we learned that what happens when we are alone with the Lord determines how intimate and deep the worship will be when we come together.

‘About that time we realized our worship blessed God, that it was for God alone and not just a vehicle of preparation for the pastor’s sermon. This was an exciting revelation. After learning about the central place of worship in our meetings, there were many instances in which all we did was worship God for an hour or two. At this time we also discovered that singing was not the only way to worship God. Because the word “worship” means literally to bow down, it is important that our bodies are involved in what our spirits are saying. In Scripture this is accomplished through bowing heads, lifting hands, kneeling, and even lying prostrate before God.