Naturally Supernatural

When people find out that I am planting a new church in Brooksville, they always want to know what kind of church is it. When I tell them that it is a Vineyard Church most have not heard of a Vineyard and if they know anything at all they often try and pigeonhole it as a Pentecostal or Charismatic church, and they are confused when I am tell them that we are neither. Then I proceed to explain that we are an empowered evangelical church. Meaning we embrace the power of God as for today but that our theology is evangelical more than Pentecostal or Charismatic. Those big words just don’t do much for anyone but a theologian. So now I just say, we are a naturally supernatural church.

What is naturally supernatural? It often gets thrown around as a buzzword in some circles, especially in mine, but it is an ideal of pursuing God, who is supernatural, in ways that are free from hype, spiritual superiority, and religiosity. It means that there is enough weird stuff that happens when the divine intersects the mortal without me having to become weird in order to be filled with the Holy Spirit and do the works of Jesus. It means the kingdom of God can come into a room and bring order rather than chaos. It is a value of letting God be extraordinary with out us needing to be anything but ordinary. Unapologetically, this is the way that I lead the Hernando Vineyard. We don’t need to get worked into a lather to experience the power of God. In fact, I believe that this often keeps people from following God’s leading, when their flesh is whipped into a frenzy, and all they can hear is the dull-roar of someone shouting in tongues.

Granted there is some pretty weird stuff in the Bible: Dry bones that grow flesh on them, and Balaam’s talking donkey, Prophets walking around naked, and what about the serpent in the garden? It’s true that God does some weird stuff. At the same time, we have Jesus’ example, of praying for the sick with hot one-liners like, See! Or Come out! We have Jesus sending away the crowd so that he can pray without the crowd hovering. All I am really saying is that God does not need me to act strange for him to get glory.

Why does that matter? Well the majority of the Christian church worldwide believes that God heals, that he saves, that he delivers and that God does all he has ever done. This is not a Vineyard thing, it is Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Alliance, Orthodox and Reformed, et al. We pray for the sick, we pray for help in times of need, we sometimes see answers that we cannot explain apart from those prayers and we call it a miracle. The more often we ask, trust and believe God for those things, the more often we seem to see them. Other times we receive not because we ask not.

The only way I know how to categorize this church is naturally supernatural. Not Pentecostal, not liberal, not fundamentalist. Just Christian. If you are looking for Pentecostal we aren’t it. On the other hand, if you are looking for fundamentalist you need to know we believe that the Holy Spirit did not retire when he wrote the New Testament, and we believe in the freedom of the believer, apart from sin management. But we are not liberal either, we believe the Bible, and we are trying to live it in a way that is naturally supernatural. We are just ordinary people serving an extraordinary God. I hope you will join us.