Vineyard Fellowship Finds Groundswell of Followers : Religion: John Wimber’s merging of supernatural power and biblical prophecy has led to a ‘boom church.’

After John Wimber stopped working as a music arranger for the Righteous Brothers to become a pastor, he began leading a small prayer group in Yorba Linda 13 years ago, preaching from the Gospel of Luke about healing the sick and casting out demons.

For 10 months the fledgling church repeatedly prayed over the sick without seeing one person healed or a single demon expelled. Many people left in disgust.

Wimber was about to give up when he was asked to pray for a woman with a high fever. She eventually jumped up, apparently cured. When the realization of what had happened hit Wimber later, he yelled, “We got one!”

That experience galvanized Wimber’s convictions that the spiritual gifts of healing, speaking in tongues, and “words of knowledge and prophecy” referred to in the Bible were still relevant and that he could bash Satan, sin and sickness with the ultimate power of God.

A trickle of reported healings became a flood. And in Southern California’s fertile religious soil, John Wimber’s Vineyard Christian Fellowship took root as the latest “boom church.”

The Anaheim congregation has grown to 5,000. A network of nearly 300 Vineyard churches with about 100,000 followers--most of them “baby boomers”--stretches across the nation and into four countries overseas.

The Vineyard’s origins hark back to the hippie-era “Jesus People” movement that neighboring Costa Mesa pastor Chuck Smith helped launch in the late 1960s and 1970s through his chain of Calvary Chapels. But Wimber’s emphasis seems to reach a different stratum: Younger believers who want to wed an orthodox, Bible-believing faith with immediate and palpable spiritual power and emotional experience.

The Vineyard story underscores recent findings of experts on church growth: More and more Americans are reaching outside the traditional, established denominations to find spiritual identification. Indeed, a high percentage of the nation’s fastest-growing congregations are either independent or affiliated with new and loosely formed movements like Vineyard and the Calvary Chapels.

“I was into organized religion most of my life--Presbyterian and Evangelical Free churches,” said Sandy Younger, who has been attending the Anaheim Vineyard for four years. “But something was always lacking until I heard John (Wimber) preach. It was so different, so down to earth.”

Wimber, 56, is the undisputed mogul of what has come to be known as the “signs and wonders” ministry.

To Wimber, it’s all very simple: A new wave of supernatural power is rolling in, based on the Bible message that Jesus’ followers would see “signs and wonders” from the Holy Spirit certifying his ministry and resurrection.

The cutting edge of the Vineyard, says Todd Hunter, executive pastor of the Anaheim congregation, is that “ordinary Christians can be used (by) God to do extraordinary things.”

So extraordinary, it seems, that Wimber has been accused of fostering excessive emotionalism and anti-intellectualism and misinterpreting Scripture.

“I don’t have time to refute all that,” he said.

Wimber’s friend, C. Peter Wagner, professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, says the controversial signs-and-wonders phenomenon is the “third wave” of evangelical Christian renewal to occur this century. The first wave was the rise of Pentecostalism, the movement that sprung up in the early 1900s among poorer and less-educated churchgoers. It emphasized the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and speaking in tongues, or what is said to be “praise language” not understood by the person who utters it.

The second wave was the growth of the charismatic renewal movement, which burgeoned among Protestant mainliners and Catholics in the 1960s and 1970s as they adopted spiritual healing and other Pentecostal practices into their churches.

The third wave, Wagner and others say, is characterized by an emphasis on supernatural manifestations that now appeal to fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals. Until recently, these Christians tended to deny modern-day faith healings and regarded prophetic “gifts” as theologically suspect.

According to a 1989 study by sociologists Robin D. Perrin of Seattle Pacific University and Armand L. Mauss of Washington State University, the great majority of Vineyard recruits who listed a denominational background had been reared in mainline Protestant or Catholic homes. More recent Vineyard recruits, however, had left their liberal religious upbringing and had been “circulating” among the conservative denominations.

“John began to draw into the Vineyard the boomers of the late ‘70s,” Wagner said. “Many were in their teens. When they were meeting (10 years ago) in Canyon High School (in Anaheim Hills) the median age was 19.”

Ten years later, the average age is 29 at Vineyard congregations, which are composed mainly of middle- and working-class people.

Wimber and his Vineyards hardly reflect traditional church patterns.

At the Anaheim Vineyard, nearly 4,000 worshipers jam into a boxy, flat building--formerly a Pacific Stereo warehouse--for two Sunday services, morning and evening. The crowd, casually dressed and most carrying Bibles, sits on folding chairs under long rows of florescent lights.

“If you see a man wearing a tie or a woman a dress, they’re probably visitors,” quipped Kevin Springer, Wimber’s publication director.

There are no songbooks; the lyrics are projected on the front walls. Neither is there an altar, organ, candles, cross or other religious trappings, a setting typical at the other Vineyards.

Many of the worshipers raise their arms, praising God. Most songs have been composed by members and extol spiritual empowerment and an intimate relationship with Jesus. A few worshipers kneel along the back wall, their heads in their hands, or touch their foreheads to the floor. A young woman, barefoot, gracefully dances to the music.

Although there are 70 Vineyard congregations in Southern California, including seven in Orange County, this congregation is special because Wimber preaches here.

If you expect a Pentecostal fireball delivery, you’ll be disappointed. Wimber, dressed in cream-colored slacks and a print sport shirt, is talking about tonight’s special offering for the poor and homeless. No emotion. No big pitch. (Later, it’s announced that the day’s contributions for this project total $180,000. That’s on top of the $70,000 that comes in each week to run the church.)

The Wimbers do not live ostentatiously; their neatly kept ranch house in Yorba Linda and moderately priced cars bespeak middle class. Wimber’s $80,000 combined salary and housing allowance are drawn from about $260,000 in annual royalties generated from sales of his many books, and lecture and music tapes. The balance goes to the Vineyard.

“I want a reward in heaven, not here,” intones Wimber, drawing applause during his 50-minute sermon.

Although the Vineyard staples are ecstatic worship, prophecies, supernatural healing and “deliverance from demon activity,” Wimber and his 12-pastor staff also take social action seriously.

The Anaheim Vineyard has been the meeting place and staging ground for Operation Rescue rallies and demonstrations against abortion. Staffer Monte Whitaker spearheads the Vineyard’s benevolence arm, which distributes food and clothing to the area’s needy and puts on a Saturday lunch and Bible service for about 300 transients and their children from the predominantly Latino neighborhood.

While Wimber is quick to admit that “only a few” of the people he prays for are healed of physical ailments and that “I am alive today because of the medical profession,” he and Wagner launched a course at Fuller Seminary in 1982 that included an optional “laboratory” in divine healing. The class, popularly known as “Signs and Wonders,” was the evangelical school’s most popular class ever--until a theological ruckus among faculty and trustees shut it down for a year in 1986.

The question about how to explain people who aren’t healed was foremost in the minds of many of the faculty, Presbyterian pastor Ben Patterson wrote in Christianity Today magazine at the time.

“Did Satan win one?” Patterson asked. “If so, then Satan holds a commanding lead in the game because the majority of people who are prayed for do not, in fact, get well physically.”

After an evaluation, the class was reinstated, with Wimber taking a less-prominent role. And Fuller officials released a 100-page report that urged caution in claiming miracle cures and attempting exorcisms of “evil spirits.”

Wimber was dramatically converted to Christianity at the age of 29 from a show-biz, rock ‘n’ roll background. After completing three years of biblical study at Azusa Pacific University in 1970, he served as co-pastor of a Quaker church in Yorba Linda.

In 1977 he began shepherding the little home group that his wife, Carol, had started. Soon he was preaching from Luke on signs and wonders. And, after the feverish woman jumped from her sickbed, the trajectory of the Vineyard movement also shot up.

Now the Vineyard movement is facing the growing pains of an incipient denomination. The name has been trademarked, about 500 men have been ordained, and two or three women licensed to preach (Wimber doesn’t approve of women’s ordination). Regional and area pastoral coordinators have been established. A larger, 200,000-square-foot building in Anaheim Hills is being purchased and renovated for $15 million to house the expanding work.

Vineyard congregations typically multiply in one of two ways: An established Vineyard pastor and a cadre of his leaders select a new area and begin Bible studies and evangelistic meetings or an existing congregation petitions to be “adopted.”

The newest congregation to officially link with the Vineyard--after a year’s probation under Wimber’s supervision--is the 3,000-member Kansas City Fellowship. Two congregations that started from scratch this year are in San Diego and Oceanside. The San Diego Vineyard, pastored by Ken Blue, has grown from several families to 250 members in nine months.

Which congregations and which ministers are accepted out of the many that apply for Vineyard status is pretty much up to Wimber.

“I wield a lot of authority in the movement,” Wimber acknowledged. “But I take instruction and counsel well.”

The Vineyard has avoided being trampled with major scandal. And Wimber, who seems to have gained wide respect, is clearly in control, keeping tabs on his staff and what they teach.

“I trust Wimber and the movement,” says Charles Kraft, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Mission who helps lead the “Signs and Wonders” class. “But there are a lot of very young people involved. . . . It’s in its adolescence.”

And if Wimber should die?

“Most of us think the movement would disintegrate,” said Vineyard international minister Jack Deere, who was fired from the faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary three years ago when he refused to renounce his identification with Wimber’s beliefs.

“There would be no force to hold it together; he’s the cohesiveness, the central figure.”