"HomeFree: Homeless In America"

An article written by Rod Woods and published today. It will also be published shortly in The Independent, a local Santa Barbara, California newspaper. Look for my next article- "Horizons: A Day In My Life"- at homelessinsb.org next week.

Homeless in Santa Barbara at homelessinsb.org.

लैटर तो बेर्ट वाग्गोनेर- सीनियर पास्टर, VCFUSA

09/03/2009 National Director & Senior PastorThe Vineyard उस Mr। Waggoner: I propose that we, The Vineyard, would do well to return to our roots in the context of our original philosophy of ministry as developed by John Wimber। John was the best kind of theologian- an experiential or "true" theologian. He made the spiritual journey inward to God through his psyche as he was drawn to do so by the Father and came back to begin his journey of healing and wholeness but just as importantly not unscathed. He was as we all are now- "wounded healers" in process toward wholeness being used by God in Christ empowered and guided by the Holy Spirit and motivated by an Agaping heart to facilitate the liberation of those being held captive- "Power Healing" & "Power Evangelism", John Wimber. I was shown great Mercy and given Grace by the Father in June of 1984 when the Holy Spirit led me to The Vineyard in Anaheim, California. I figuratively crawled through the door and then began the most astounding process of healing and restoration I could never have imagined possible. Our journey is the destination and truly "the way in is the way on". My great hope and prayer is that The Vineyard will in fact take the risk of ridicule, criticism, and judgementalism that John faced- "The Way it Was", Carole Wimber- and return to the more "authentic" expression of The Church as we have been given a clear view in the manuscripts of Luke and Paul and most certainly the Gospels. Let us begin anew do'in the "Stuff" that Jesus did! Let's do our theology as an act of worship and as our faith in action among those who are perishing in this world today. Please find attached an introduction to the paper I intend to submit for acceptance by the Vineyard Society of Scholars who will hold their first conference in Texas in February of 2010. My Most Sincere Regards, R. "Rod" Alan Woods

A Wholistic Theology: The Both/And: The Best View of Objective Reality

By

R. Alan Woods
San Diego: Rhema Rising Press
Copyright 2009




Why is theology important? Well-defined questions more nearly always produce the most useful answers. I propose that a better question could be asked: What "kind" of theology is important. In the context of the history of the Vineyard I understand that "experiential theology" or real theology ("the attitude which maintains that this kind of theology can only be developed by men who know these realities from personal experience"- Morton Kelsey in his work, Encounter With God: A Theology of Christian Experience) was and is the desperately needed counter-balance to the "intellectual theology" born out of the philosophy of knowing and knowledge developed by Aristotle and promoted within the "Church" by Thomas Aquinas and further ensconced by the worldview produced by Newton's understanding of the material universe. Plato would have been startled and amazed by such a one-sided worldview where Nature is the only experiential reality! Where's the Super Nature? What place has the Archetype? Where the dreams, visions, and auditions just a "figment" of man's imagination? Was sixty-five years of pioneering work by Carl Jung that produced real and tangible results in the healing and wholeness of human beings’ psyches and bodies for naught? Thank God for Jesus of Nazareth! The Numinous made Matter! The God-man. What comes to my mind and memory here is something I remember John Wimber say, "Just be naturally supernatural when you're doing the ‘Stuff’." Both economies/realities are operationally co-existent. As C. S. Lewis has said, "When men adhere to one side of a paradoxical truth and ignore the other, then they go into error." It is the both/and, not the either/or mentality that gives us a view of "objective reality".

. I'm quite sure our call in the Vineyard to "cultural'" relevancy is predicated upon Paul's statement implying that we be all things to all men so that we may win some to Christ. Paul learned quickly through trial and error that men were more likely to be won to Christ when they had a direct, powerful (dunamis) numinous experience with God. In other words he failed in Athens when he used just the intellectual theological approach! It seems to me that regardless of the cultural context in which God makes direct contact with men, it is of more importance that these men have a framework or worldview as it were in which to know that it is possible. In Christ, we as Christians become neither Jew nor Greek nor anything else other than a “new creature” in Christ Jesus that produces or manifests the complementary new culture of Christian community (I refer you to Robert Banks work, “Paul’s’ Idea of Community” as a general theoretical orientation to my meaning here). Paul was adamant about keeping the Gospel pure as it was delivered to him by Christ. In so far as it was possible within that framework, Paul became all things to all men. Once they became "enlightened" or "En-Godded" (a word used often by Leanne Payne, "Listening Prayer"), they were reoriented to a new reality and a lifestyle reflected in Christian community as their newly acquired identity as a unique cultural base.

Rhema Rising Press

Rhema Rising Press

My Power Mall

A Reasoned Ascent to Faith & The Faith

"But faith and knowledge have both equal rights to humanity."

Henry W. Bellows (1814-1882)

"Religious faith rests on the spiritual nature; but its basis is not less real for being indemonstrable, like the axioms of mathematics. That is not real faith which dares not investigate the grounds of its own being....If the artificial feeling that faith is opposed to reason; religious truth to universal truth; that belief in unseen things is less rational or less capable of verification than the radical beliefs of the senses; if these prejudices were sound, or not the reverse of true, the world would be on it's inevitable way to universal infidelity and godless materialism....It is the common, simple, universal truths that are the great, inexhaustible, powerful, and never-wearying truths. Nevertheless, doubtless it requires courage, personal conviction, and self-watchfulness, to maintain personal piety or religious institutions under free and enlightened conditions, when they are just beginning. When sacramental mysteries are exploded, when the official sanctity of the ministry is disowned, when the technical and dogmatic conditions of acceptance of God are abandoned, when every man's right of private judgment is confessed, when common sense is invited into the inner court of faith, when every man is confessed to be a king and a priest in that temple of God which he finds in his own body and soul, when real, genuine goodness is owned as the equivalent of religion, then it is evident that the support of religious institutions, of public worship, of the church and the ordinances, must appeal to something besides the ignorance, the fears, the superstitions, the traditions of the Christian world. They must fall back on the practical convictions men entertain of their intrinsic importance. They must commend themselves to the sober, plain, and rational judgment of men of courage, reflection, and observation. They fall into the same category with a government based not on the divine right of kings, or the usages of past generations, the artificial distinctions of ranks and classes, owing fealty each to that which is socially above itself, but resting on the consent of the governed, and deriving its authority and its support from the sense of its usefulness and necessity....But is the State or the nation ever so truly divine as when it is owned as the voice of God, calling all the people to maintain equal justice, to recognize universal interests, to embody Christian ethics in public law?"[1]

[1] Bellows, Henry Whitney. "A Break between Modern Thought and Ancient Faith and Worship”. Christianity and Modern Thought. Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1873. pp. 8-31.