by Trish Ryan
As I opened my mouth to sing along, my throat closed and my eyes welled up with tears. Mortified, I stared at a rope ladder dangling from the ceiling, ignoring the lyrics and their applicability to my life: how despite all my efforts to fake it, I was still searching for my place in the grand design of things, a break that would put me where I was meant to be. Suddenly, I felt like they knew everything about me, these people—like God clued them in before my arrival: This one is a tough nut to crack—let me show you her soft spot. I distracted myself from the tears by staring at the drummer—an indie-looking guy in a goatee and cargo pants. He was rather hot, by spiritual standards (new age men are not noted for their rugged masculinity). Then I noticed his wedding band. Damn.
Stop it! I scolded myself. You’re a spiritual seeker. You’re here to find the truth, not find a man. Okay, that’s a lie, I admitted. But at least stop gawking.
Looking around, I saw that the gym was filled to capacity, with people sitting on bleachers and on the floor. The music was good—catchy, upbeat. Certainly preferable to what I’d heard at other spiritual gatherings. (New age “music” can be anything, I’d learned in the course of my travels—a woman plucking a harp; an angry man yelling poetry while pounding on a drum; hippie folk singers stuck in a Woodstock time warp, celebrating the early work of Judy Collins. The common denominator is that it’s mostly bad. Exceptionally bad, as if musical excellence somehow diminishes the spiritual value of the effort. Enthusiasm is the sole requirement in new age circles, and if your effort is heartfelt, well, you’re guaranteed a healthy esteem pump from any number of similarly untalented seekers celebrating your effort.) Not so here at the Vineyard, I acknowledged, somewhat relieved. These guys were good. As the band finished the song, a giant man in a polo shirt and khakis took the stage, welcoming us and inviting us to join him in prayer. Again, my guard went up. I’ll stay until he says something obnoxious about hating women, or how Democrats will be scourged in the tribulation, I told myself. As soon as he starts that Jerry Falwell stuff, I’m out of here.
IF YOU’D ASKED me during my early years at the Vineyard to describe that first visit, I would have told you that it was Mother’s Day, that they gave chocolates to all the moms, and that a very tall pastor named Dave gave a helpful sermon about money.
As it turns out, though, that’s not what happened. Recently, I listened to the download of that first sermon and found myself in a different scenario. Yes, it was Mother’s Day, and, yes, there were chocolates. But when Pastor Dave took the stage, it was to introduce a man named Ron, an earnest traveling missionary whose “testimony” ended with the story of how a homeless man slit his throat one day and left him for dead by the side of the road. The take-home point, I guess, was that he didn’t die; he lived to offer more rides to homeless strangers in the name of Jesus.
I’ll admit that the first time I heard it, Ron’s story didn’t stir up in me a sense of God’s amazing grace. But it does now. Not so much because of Ron’s survival, although I agree that this was a good thing. What strikes me now is how God blotted this story from my mind. I wasn’t looking for a church where I could risk my life for the Lord, so this could have been one more sermon about Jesus that had nothing to do with me, one more church I wandered into, then wandered back out of, never to return. But God kept me blind, deaf, and dumb that first week—not to mention distracted by the prospect of handsome men—and then brought me back to this gigantic group of casually dressed church goers so I could sort this Jesus thing out once and for all.
THE NEXT WEEK I came back to more music, and more shiny, happy people, clapping and celebrating Jesus. “God, thank you for being here with us this morning,” Pastor Dave prayed after the opening song. “We trust that you have something for us today. Speak to us, Lord. In Jesus’ name we pray.” I didn’t understand why Christians had such a compulsion to tag In Jesus’ name onto the end of every thought and prayer. It bugged me. A lot of things about Christians bug me, I thought, sitting in my pink chair at the top of the key. I squirmed in my seat, agitated. I bet they have terrible sex lives, I reassured myself, looking at the couples sitting around me. Yet I had to admit that these couples—holding hands, leaning into one another to whisper secret observations, sharing smiles and nods—didn’t look starved for conjugal affection. In fact, they might have been the happiest collection of married people I’d ever seen. One couple in particular caught my eye—the guitarist from the band came down off the stage to join his wife for the sermon, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and squeezing her from time to time. They looked like they were on their honeymoon. Later, when their three-year-old son ran in to join them, I felt like I was on the set for a Disney commercial: “Cue the cute kid!” I ached for a life like that. I wanted to run up to them and ask, “How did you get here? What did you do?” and, more important, “Where do I go to sign up?” I couldn’t imagine having a boyfriend or husband come to church with me. Sure, one or two dates had accompanied me on my various spiritual exploits, but only because they were trying to impress me, never because they were looking to satisfy any spiritual hunger of their own. I had never dated anyone who was curious about God. This guitar player with his arm around his pretty wife seemed curious, though. It was as if he liked being here, that this was something they did as a family, part of the fabric of their week. I couldn’t imagine what that might feel like.
An elegant girl with auburn hair turned to me after the music ended. “Hi—I’m Gwen,” she said with a smile.
“I’m Trish,” I responded, trying to hide my surprise at her chic outfit—were Christian women allowed to shop at Ann Taylor? Perhaps she’s new, too, I thought. “Have you been coming here long?” I asked.
“For a little while,” she said, in what I’d later learn was a classic Gwen understatement. She was practically a founding member of the church, as it turned out, and had been there since the days where the “congregation” was twenty people sitting in a circle singing along while one guy played the guitar. She introduced me to her mother, an equally elegant woman with a lilting British accent. Their sophistication blew my preconceived notion about Christian tackiness to pieces, and I snuck glances at them throughout the service, trying to pick up cues on how to fit in.
Afraid Gwen might think I was stalking her with all my sidelong looks, I tried to focus on the sermon. It was about money. I tensed up, waiting to hear some declaration about how I should write the church a huge check before expecting anything from God. Instead, Dave suggested that our financial health depended more on God’s blessing than on our earning power. He quoted several passages from a book in the Bible called Proverbs, warning us not to trust in money to keep us safe or make our lives work. Money disappears, Dave pointed out, which makes it an unreliable foundation for our lives. I had once read something on a wall plaque about how if we build our house on sand it will be blown away when a storm comes, but a house built on rock will survive (I didn’t learn until later that these were Jesus’ words). Money was sand, it seemed, but I still didn’t know where or what the rock was.
“Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops,” Dave read from the Bible verse printed on our programs. “Then your barns will be filled to overflowing and your vats will brim over with new wine.” He suggested that passages like this teach us how to leverage our lives to get the most return, how to position ourselves so that God will shower us with blessings. He told a story from his first year as a pastor, when he and his wife were newly married and thinking of starting a family. Supported by this fledgling spiritual enterprise, they were just scraping by. They gave God the “first fruits” of the little money they had but didn’t see how this would be possible if they added kids to the equation. “So I asked God what to do,” he said. “And I felt like God asked, Dave, will you continue to be faithful with your money in the ways that I have taught you? I said yes, and I sensed God promise, If you stick to what you’ve always done, I will provide for you.
“O
f course,” Dave continued, “we got pregnant right away. And then we had a major financial windfall. We trusted God, we put it all on the line, and God provided.” The extent of that provision was obvious when I saw his wife—a pretty blonde in the front row with not one but three children, all of whom looked happy and well cared for.
Surprisingly, Dave closed his sermon on money without asking us for any. Instead, he prayed for us, asking God to bless us with a feeling of being abundantly provided and cared for. I was still living in the chopped-up, fly-infested house near Harvard, surviving on the remaining pennies from hawking my diamond ring. Could this stuff teach me how to “leverage my life” for more? I wondered. I’d never read Proverbs, but it sounded like the quintessential self-help book. No stories, no parables, just a straightforward collection of suggestions from God: Do this, and your life will go well. Do that, and your life will be a disaster. I pulled my Bible out of my bag and flipped through while one of the other pastors read announcements.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding” was the first thing I saw. That seemed like good advice. I wasn’t sure I had any understanding of my own at this point; all I had were questions. I flipped to the end of the section: “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.” This was certainly a novel perspective on marriage. It suggested that men who marry get something good, not the burden of a ball and chain the way our culture tends to depict it. I noticed the use of the verb “find,” as if men should be looking for wives—not hanging back until they were captured by some determined female. I tried to picture what it would be like to be pursued in that way, to be seen by a man as the good thing he wanted, the connection to receiving increased favor from God. I filed that away to think about later and sat up a little straighter. Maybe I could be the “good thing” God designed for one of the single men I saw around me?
After leading us in a closing prayer, Dave called the band back up on the stage. They sang lyrics that made my eyes well up again, even though I had no idea why: “Will I not lift my hands? Will I not sing? Can I not rejoice in the land you have given me? Will I not choose to praise? Will I not believe? Can I not dance on the day that you set me free? For you are worthy to be lifted above the highest honor, you are worthy to be praised beyond what words can say. Jesus, I leave all that I’m worth, and come into this place. For you are worthy and I’ll sing of your glory, you are worthy to be praised.”
Gwen and her mother sang with arms stretched heavenward, while all around us people were singing and crying and waving their hands in the air. It was clear something was going on, something I wasn’t part of. “Jesus, I leave all that I’m worth, and come into this place,” they sang. Was that something I was willing to sign on for? I was overwhelmed but intrigued—by the music, the message, the people, the tears that filled my eyes for no discernible reason every time the keyboardist hit a note. I want more of this, I realized—more of what Dave could tell me about this book, more of what the Bible said was possible, more songs about taking my place in God’s design. Suddenly, next Sunday seemed too far away.
After the service, Gwen invited me to a barbecue she was having the following weekend. I accepted enthusiastically, knowing I wouldn’t go. How could I face a whole yard full of Christians without their catching on that I had no idea what I was doing? I didn’t want to feed these people lies about my spiritual status; I wanted to lie low for long enough to see if they knew anything about taking Jesus seriously.
Gwen introduced me to a few people on the way out. Everyone was friendly, and smart. I was taken aback by their résumés—in twenty minutes, I met PhD’s from Harvard and MIT, accountants and entrepreneurs, writers and artists. Dave and his wife were Stanford graduates, I learned; the associate pastors included an investment banker and a chemical engineer. I’d assumed you had to “dumb down” to follow Jesus, eschewing common sense and reason in order to accept what the Bible insisted was right. Instead, I found myself surrounded by people who were certifiably smarter than me—many of whom were cute men without wedding rings. This might be the best place in Cambridge to meet a husband, I thought, munching on my bagel. It never occurred to me for a single moment that I wouldn’t be back the next week.
Over the next few Sundays, I learned the Proverbial take on relationships, career, family, and friendship. Dave talked about Jesus, considering, “What Would Jesus Say?” about things like “My Desperation to Be Happy,” “My Disappointment with God,” and even “People Who Annoy Me.”
“What if the universe is relational?” he posited one Sunday. “What if our highest level of happiness and satisfaction is found by getting rid of the things that keep us from the relationships we were created for, with each other, and with God? And what if Jesus is the key to making that happen?” Dave’s suggestions and ideas helped me, making me feel better about myself in ways I didn’t necessarily understand.
I was drawn to this church, counting the days to the next Sunday, the next sermon, the next infusion of guidance for applying the Bible to my life. I still watched Joyce Meyer every morning on TV, but Sundays at the Vineyard were different. There was something about being surrounded by hundreds of people—all experiencing the same talk, the same music, the same prayers—that seemed deeper than watching television from the seclusion of my couch (although it’s possible that this something deeper was simply the mind-blowing presence of single men who also made the effort to show up to church on Sunday morning). As divided as my attentions were, I soaked in Dave’s suggestions like a sponge. His sermons excited me about what might be possible in life, living this Bible way.
I still didn’t get the fixation with Jesus, though. They—Dave, the singers—made it sound like it was Jesus who did the work, rather than each of us climbing our own mountain of spiritual understanding; it was like they believed we could all just stand around singing and expect Jesus to change our lives. I knew better. There was, I knew, spiritual work to do, as I’d been taught by my endless reading and seeking. I didn’t understand why these people spent so much time thanking Jesus instead of doing the work.
BURNED BY MY lack of due diligence in previous spiritual endeavors, I read everything I could find about Vineyard churches. I wanted to make sure this church was supported by something stronger than the voluminous hallucinogenic experience of a single college professor. I read a biography of the movement’s main leader, a man named John Wimber. Wimber had been an atheist. He was a musician who played with the Righteous Brothers, enjoying incredible professional success while his personal life fell apart. He’d opened the Bible in an attempt to save his failing marriage. After a few weeks of reading and attending a local church, he cornered the pastor and demanded, “So, when do we do the stuff?”
“The stuff?” the pastor responded, “What do you mean, the stuff?”
“You know!” Wimber replied, exasperated, “The stuff in the Bible—healing the sick, making the blind see, raising the dead . . . the stuff that Jesus did—when do we get to do that?”
“We don’t do that,” the pastor informed him. “We don’t believe that happens anymore.”
“For this,” Wimber responded, “I gave up drinking?”
Determined to “do the stuff,” Wimber spent the rest of his life praying for the sick to be healed, the blind to see, the dead to be raised, and people to receive the supernatural gifts and power Jesus said his followers would walk in. Shockingly, after weeks and months where nothing happened, he had years of success praying for healing in the name and power of Jesus. The Vineyard movement, I learned, evolved out of his belief that people today, like the people in the Bible, were more likely to believe Jesus’ claim to be their personal messiah if they experienced a personal miracle, if Jesus met them in a personal need. The key to spreading the good news of Jesus, he believed, was in what he called “Power Evangelism”: calling on God’s supernatural power to reveal Jesus through signs and wonders in our midst.
Fro
m the Vineyard Web site, I learned that Dave and Grace Schmelzer started their church on this same core belief: that God is alive today, that He acts in our lives, and that Jesus’ promises of healing, deliverance, and infilling of the Holy Spirit are just as applicable today as they were two thousand years ago. Starting with thirty people at an Easter service in 1998, their church had doubled in size each year, moving from a living room to a room at the Y to a high school cafeteria—which inspired them to post an ad on the T bragging “Matt Damon ate lunch in our sanctuary!” Now they met in an elementary school gym, unpacking hundreds of chairs, building a stage, and setting up a sound and projection system every Sunday morning for anyone who decided to wander in. Their motto was Practical. Spiritual. Fun. I wasn’t sure I’d found any of those three in a spiritual practice before, certainly not in combination. It sounded too good to be true.
As I watched Dave and Grace each Sunday, they also seemed too good to be true. I was captivated by their interactions with each other, how they seemed to speak from the same playbook; it was like they were two halves of a larger whole. They didn’t compete for attention; one wasn’t alpha dominant while the other stood in the background nodding submissively. They worked as a team. I noted the affectionate way Grace touched Dave’s back to get his attention, and how he leaned down and listened to her—ignoring everything else around him—and adjusted his comments to take her suggestions into account. I’d never seen that in spiritual leaders; I’d never followed anyone whose romantic life wasn’t a disaster. I wanted to get to know them, ask them questions, find out if what I saw was for real.
