If this post doesn’t make sense, you might try looking at Church Hopping. To start off, I enjoyed going to Freedom Christian Center. I think the pastor (well, the husband. They list husband and wife as co-pastors, which is fine, but kind of icky too) was right at my age, so that was a kind of connection point.
First impression: Driving near the church, I was running about 5 minutes late. There was a car in front of me with a couple and two kids in the back. The mother was singing, waving her arms, and encouraging the kids to join in. I thought, “OK, I’ll bet I’m behind some ‘free people'” and I was right. I had been a little concerned that I would be under dressed in my lenin/comfy shorts and shirt. Sometimes charismatic/pentacostal types really dress to the nines. But walking into the building (which was easy to find, thanks to ping’s ‘bird’s eye’ view) I was following a couple with matching pony tails, lots of piercings, and several tatoos in view. I knew then that I would be ok.
Once inside, I was greeted by a friendly lady who handed me a brochure which had what she called ”pretty much everything’ and I could tell that she would have talked more if I wanted, but left me alone when I cruised on by. That was a good move. She was the only person I spoke to for the entire time. The music had begun when I went into the auditorium (probably about 300 or so people were there). The band was playing and the pastor was standing in front trying to stir things up, yelling something about how excited everyone ought to be. That’s one key difference between Vineyard and Charismatic/Pentecostal churches. There’s no attempt to work up the crowd. We want any excitement to be authentic/Spirit born. If He shows up, people will be excited. (Actually, often when he shows up, we’re more in awe and struck silent than anything). Even so, I was ok with the sentiment, as long as it wasn’t going on in my church. After all, I’ve had the message before that we show more excitement at football games than we do for the King of Glory, so I was good with it. It did me some good. They had kids running around the perimeter of the church dancing. Some had banners, others held hands with their friends and mothers, and danced in a circle. I know that kind of thing is distracting, unless it’s a part of your culture. I noticed that as kids got older, they had given up the practice. For them it wasn’t cool. I tried to sense the Spirit’s presence. I was in kind of a funky mood, so I’m not sure what to say about that.
Since there were a number of people up front singing and dancing, and I wouldn’t draw an inordinant amount of attention, I went to the altar to bow down and submit myself to God. In the end, this is basically why I chose this kind of church. I wanted to put myself in a position to hear from God rather than just hear a good exegetical message. It was what I needed to do.
They recited a long confession about their giving just before the offering was taken. Hmmm. It was on the overhead, and was written with a lot of cheese, but it really impressed me. The good part about it was that it kept before the people the church’s position on tithing etc. That stuff is easy to forget, and it’s easy to get sidetracked about money. For sure, I don’t think their theology in the confession was air tight (lots of presumption), but I have found myself trying to figure out how to do it in our context. Again, the Vineyard is just more attentive to good theology, in our humble opinions. All that ‘radical middle’ stuff (a recent Vineyard book on the history of the movement is called ‘The Quest for the Radical Middle‘. It talks about how Vineyard is a ‘radical middle’ between evangelicals and Pentecostals. We do this by having the sound biblical foundation of evangelicals and the empowerment of the Spirit often found in the Pentecostals.).
The pastor gave several prophetic words for some healings just before he preached (people call these ‘words of knowledge’, which is almost certainly not what Paul meant by the phrase when he used it). That worked, I thought. Then the message was on healing. I wondered if he implemented the premessage words because of his topic, or if that was how he normally did it. Even so, I’m so aware of how God is so present during and just after worship, faith is strong, and people are often touched then. I’m going to start paying more attention to this time of the service.
The message was inspiring and helpful. He pretty much taught that without using the words, that healing was in the atonement (God included it in the covenant, he said) and that all we need to do is have faith for it. I won’t duke that out with him here. It certainly is in there, but not necessarily completely accessible to us any more than some of the other things bought for us there as well, such as our sanctification. The ‘already and not yet’ is really helpful here.
I was jealous of their diversity. They had lots of young folks, like our church, more older folks than what we have, and lots of racial diversity.
After church, I went and picked up Dakine Diegos. Ummmmmm.
Catch a Wave 
