Since those early days, the church of Jesus Christ has been marked by our care for the least, the last, and the lost. When the marginalized and forgotten of any society are brought into the center of a loving community that worships Christ, powerful things begin to happen. Jesus has called us to care for the poor – both for their sake and our own.

This intuition goes to the heart of one of the most important distinctions of the Vineyard — that we are a church of people who want to learn to live like Jesus lived, not simply believe what Jesus believed. And we don’t want this limited to the professional clergy; we believe that anyone can learn to live the kind of life that Jesus did. This is what we mean by, “Everyone gets to play.” The Holy Spirit will empower anyone to do what Jesus did.

From the moment Jesus arrives on the scene in Israel, he begins to proclaim the reality of what he calls the “kingdom of God.” Through stories and metaphors, miracles and healings, Jesus sends out one important declaration to everyone who will listen:

The kingdom of God is breaking into this world – and it changes everything.

Today, you will hear this simple prayer, in some form, being prayed in virtually every Vineyard church around the world. It is because we are learning in the Vineyard what the Body of Christ has had to learn again and again throughout history – that with the power of the Holy Spirit at work within us, we can do the works of Jesus. We can join him in the advancing of the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth. We are a people of the presence of God. So we pray, “Come, Holy Spirit.”

We believe that authentic people make for a great community. Without being real about who we are (including our struggles and our failures), it is impossible to grow, heal, and mature into the people God wants us to be. We encourage each other to be honest about how we are really doing. Pretense among one another is not what we want. Everyone has a bad day, a past, a struggle, and we want to bring encouragement rather than judgement.