No one's addressing, refuting, or challenging your qualifications. My point was to post Mr. Stipe's comments about the River and about the renewal. The original post I wrote was to supplement what the OP stated, not to add to it.
Let me be perfectly clear on a few things:
1. My two posts:
No comment there about the Vineyard, yet you are drawing this back to the Vineyard. What have I said of the Vineyard?
Then, my other comment:
2. I'm stating NOTHING about Mr. Stipe holding my opinion. This has to do with my stating of his experience, not of my opinion.
3. What I know of the Vineyard, and what I have seen, which I do not care to catalog [except to say that it's had a profoundly negative influence in my life], has nothing whatever to do with this topic. The topic is not the Vineyard; it is, rather, "The River", and the various and combined experiences inside that setting.
4. It's so easy for you to dismiss what he has told of his experiences because of your characterization of him as having a wounded spirit. This conveniently absolves you of having to open your eyes and unstop your ears to face the truth of the words that he has written. In one sentence, you so easily and lightly dismiss his vast array of experience and "insider knowledge" from his position of pastor and from serving on the board of directors of the Association of Vineyard Churches (AVC), yet in the next, with a quickness you advertise your 15 years of experience and expect to be taken as serious based upon YOUR merits.
Either both his and your sets of knowledge and experience are of merit, or neither is of merit. It is not one, separate from another. If you would so readily boast of your own 15 years in the capacities wherein you have served, surely you must have an open ear and heart to glean from HIS, must you not? And based on your experience, is it beneficial for you to overlook his?
The issue at hand is with a larger movement, rather than a smaller denomination. The truth of what is ringing aloud here from the disenfranchised and disillusioned can no longer be ignored. God is blowing trumpets in Zion to awaken His people out of slumber. He is using the Paul Gowdys, the Tom Stipes, and many other hearts who will cry aloud and who will spare not.
There will be those who will hear the call, and not dismiss it as "the uncertain sound", but who will arise and acknowledge that change is coming, change must come, change has already come and now is.
He will send the refiner's fire to perfect and purify. In that perfection and purification, there will be some exposing. When the refiner's fire exposes that impurity which floats to the surface, it is not for the sake of drawing attention to the dross, but for the sake of the refiner to draw it out and away from gold tried in the fire. So it will be with the refining of this movement. God will purify and perfect, and dross will be exposed. It is not for the exposing, but for the eliminating. But in the eliminating, exposure will come and must come for that dross to be seen, and therefore extracted out so that only the gold tried in the fire may remain.
It is time for people to stop focusing so much on what this church is doing, and on what is going on in THAT denomination, and to turn their eyes heavenward, and see what HE is doing, and apply it where it fits.
I Corinthians 3:10-13
