BEH XIV

The GATES of HELL Shall Not PREVAIL!
The Vineyard has been equipped for work among those who live on the fringes; the marginalized, the poor, the foreigner, the pagan, the agnostic; the other. We use His tools to advance His Kingdom at the margins. The church was designed to permeate every culture, to “spontaneously expand”25 into all of the cracks and crevasses of our world. We abandon the safety of our walls, and the security of our comforts. We spell faith: “R-I-S-K.”26 We seek dangerous places, dark places, painful places, broken places; the places where the Kingdom is desperately needed. The places where the King desperately wants to be.

The Vineyard is uniquely equipped to navigate the cultural and spiritual realities of poverty in America’s urban environments. The Vineyard Movement is God’s Hammer to drive the nails of His redemptive justice deep into lives of those who suffer the alienation, impotence, and despair of poverty. It is for this purpose that we exist. We possess the ingenuity, the skill, and the paradigm, needed to honestly and powerfully connect broken and despairing people to the beauty, power, and hope of the Kingdom. G. K. Chesterton famously quipped, “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.”27 The question before the Vineyard Movement is, will we equip and empower our brightest and best for the task at hand? Will we follow Jesus to the edge?