The Holy Spirit and the Liberal Arts: Why the Vineyard Needs to Establish its Own College in Order to Fulfill its Mission
Gustavio Gutiérrez and Walter Principe trace four distinct stages in the life of those rare spiritual movements that stand the test of time. Using the river of Ezekiel 47 as a metaphor, the first stage begins when a leader or congregation so profoundly encounters the Spirit of God that a Wellspring of new life bubbles up within them producing profound personal and communal transformation and new insights into Scripture (even if the movement is only ankle deep.)
In stage two, the waters swell to a knee-deep Brook as followers begin to express their experience in new practices of worship, prayer, ministry, teaching, and artistic expression so that distinctive practices begin take hold in their midst.
In stage three, the movement’s spirituality grows into a waist-deep Stream—a genuine “school of thought and practice” rooted in learning/living/serving communities capable of imparting their distinctives to new communities and generations. Colleges and monastic communities often serve as incubators where the explicit curriculum of the movement’s distinctive teachings and the implicit curriculum of their distinctive practices are allowed to grow in harmony with one another to form a complete worldview incorporating both a “formulation of teaching” and a habituated rule of life.
For those rare movements that reach stage 4, their school of thought and practice gains sufficient distinctive momentum to grow into a great River capable of bringing life to everything it touches, and along whose banks grow societal movements capable of bringing healing to entire nations throughout multiple generations.
Principe emphasizes how the process of growing from Stream to River is greatly aided by guidance and insight garnered from scholars committed to studying the previous stages from theological, historical and comparative
perspectives. So I address this Society of Vineyard Scholars in hopes of evoking just such River-making reflection. My thesis follows the Gutiérrez/Principe paradigm in asserting that if the Vineyard aspires to become a River-level spiritual movement, the movement’s scholars and leaders need to consider founding Stream-intensifying learning/living/serving communities rooted in a distinctively Vineyard school of thought and practice, including a distinctively Vineyard college of kingdom ministry, arts and sciences. It is my belief that such a college is the best hope for forming a multi-generation-shaping community of churches capable of "proclaiming and practicing the full message and reality of the kingdom of God," so that the Vineyard might grow into a movement capable of healing nations. That’s a bit of a stretch for a fifteen minute paper, so let me briefly sketch out three possible arguments in its defense: 1) an argument from Scripture, 2) an argument from History, and 3) an argument from Vineyard Distinctives.
The full paper is attached to this post as a PDF.
