Vineyard USA

Heritage

The first Vineyard was planted by Kenn Gulliksen in west Los Angeles in 1974; the movement took its lasting shape when John Wimber — a former jazz musician and church-growth consultant converted out of a pack-a-day life — brought his Yorba Linda congregation into the family in 1982 and led it until his death in 1997. Wimber fused George Eldon Ladd's theology of the kingdom — already here, not yet complete — with expectant practice: if the kingdom has come, pray for the sick and expect something. The Anaheim Vineyard became the movement's teaching center, and Vineyard Music carried its quiet, intimate worship around the world.

Theological family

Evangelical and charismatic in a consciously moderate register — the movement calls it the radical middle: the Spirit's gifts practiced today, without the Pentecostal insistence on tongues as initial evidence and without hype. Kingdom theology frames everything: healing, justice and worship as signs of a kingdom already breaking in.

Who decides what

Local churches led by their pastors and boards, associated nationally in Vineyard USA with regional oversight — a movement with real mutual accountability that still resists calling itself a denomination.

What a first-time visitor would find

Twenty-plus minutes of unbroken, intimate sung worship addressed to God rather than about him — the Vineyard's signature; then teaching, and ministry time: trained laypeople praying for anyone who wants it, because "everyone gets to play," Wimber's most quoted line.

What it has always cared about

Worship as intimacy; healing prayer as ordinary church practice rather than special events; church planting; compassion ministry among the poor, which Wimber insisted was a sign of the kingdom equal to any miracle.

Its gift to the wider church

The Vineyard changed the sound of American worship — the intimate, first-person songs now sung across every tradition descend from its music — and it taught ordinary congregations to pray for the sick without a healer on stage.

Commonly confused with

With Calvary Chapel, its elder sibling — the two parted in 1982 over how central the Spirit's manifestations should be; with Pentecostal denominations, which share the gifts but differ on tongues-as-evidence and on polity; and with Bethel Redding, an independent church often mistaken for Vineyard because Bill Johnson's roots pass near it.

Range of views inside it

Congregations vary in charismatic intensity, in size, and in engagement with justice ministries; the worship idiom and kingdom framing are family-wide.

Where Vineyard USA churches are on the map

463 Vineyard USA congregations appear on The Church Map, across 47 states.

• California — 61
• Ohio — 45
• Texas — 36
• Illinois — 29
• Indiana — 18
• Florida — 16
• Georgia — 16
• Pennsylvania — 14
• New York — 14
• Colorado — 14

Moments this body was part of

• 1967–1975 — The Jesus Movement

  A revival among the counterculture — hippies baptized by the thousands in the Pacific — filled Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa and birthed both the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard families, contemporary worship music through Maranatha! Music, and a casual, come-as-you-are church culture that reshaped Protestant worship far beyond California.

• 1982 — The network era of church planting

  From the 1980s onward the energy of American church founding moved into relational networks: Vineyard organized under John Wimber from 1982, Acts 29 formed in 1998 to plant churches across denominational lines, and city after city saw congregations of different traditions fund and coach one another's plants. Networks ask a different question than denominations did — not "whose are you?" but "who are you helping start?"

  Church planting became the ecumenism of practice: a Baptist church coaching a Presbyterian plant sharing a building with a Pentecostal congregation is now ordinary.