Grieving the Loss of Home

Vineyard Anaheim, the church I have called home for the past thirty years, is going through a transition that has me looking back and reflecting on all it has meant to me since the day I first crossed its threshold as a lost 14-year old girl.

From the outside, my life looked pretty good at that time. However, that picture-perfect life was not a reflection of my internal reality. Without going into details, home was not a place I felt safe, and although my family was intact, emotionally I felt like an orphan, and I sank into a cycle of depression, despair, and desperation.

My safe haven was a group of friends I was developing through a community theater organization. An avowed atheist since elementary school, I was secretly horrified when I discovered that several of them came from Christian families, but I was starved for the love they offered me, so I was willing to overlook this flaw. My determination was tested when I spent the weekend with my friend Cheryl to save my mom the long trip for several rehearsals (since we lived about a 30-minute drive away), which meant attending church with her family on Sunday morning.

That was the first time I walked into the Anaheim Vineyard, back in the summer of 1991. Cheryl’s dad was helping out in the 4-year old class, which sounded less intimidating to me than going into the youth group, so for several weeks we spent Sunday mornings there with him. On that first Sunday, I remember being horrified that they were “brainwashing these babies!” but by the third week, something had changed in my heart, and I found myself jealous that someone was taking the time to teach these little ones about God, something that had been missing from my own childhood. From that point on, I became a seeker, rather than a sceptic.

Over the next few months, I devoured everything I could learn about God. Cheryl and another friend took me upstairs in “The Shepherd’s Shoppe” to pick out a Bible, which I began reading regularly. We started attending the youth service every week, and I asked my mom to drive me out to church on the rare Sunday mornings I hadn’t spent the night at Cheryl’s. Although I struggled to find faith after years of denying God, eventually I surrendered and committed myself to following Jesus for the rest of my life.

Little did I know how that life would be shaped by the next few years at the Anaheim Vineyard. I came to faith in 1992, and soon after, a powerful season of refreshing came to the church. The Holy Spirit came upon us, and soon I thought nothing of seeing His presence manifested by people shaking, laughing, weeping, prophesying, or speaking in tongues. Our youth group was on fire, and we never gathered (even for birthday parties) without spending some time in worship (thanks to Jeremy Riddle or others always bringing a guitar). While the church came under some criticism during this time, I remember John Wimber telling us that we should judge by the fruit we saw. Looking at the lives of those who went through this time with me, I don’t think anyone could doubt that God was doing something powerful. From our youth group have come pastors, missionaries, church planters, and lay leaders faithfully serving the church and raising up the next generation of disciples.

Most of us attended both the morning and evening services every Sunday, and between outreach, discipleship groups, ministry team meetings, and other weekly events, at one point during those high school years I found myself at the Vineyard six days a week. I couldn’t wait for the school day to end so I could get out to Anaheim where my “real” life took place.

In April 1994, John (brave man!) took a group of high schoolers and young adults for a two-week trip to New Zealand and Australia to serve as the ministry team for some conferences he was leading. It was a life-changing experience. Not only did we see the Spirit fall on people even more powerfully than we had experienced back home, we saw many healed or delivered from demons, and we got to know firsthand what it meant to be “Doin’ the Stuff,” as John called it.

I had always been focused on academics, but that trip shifted my perspective, and I realized that what I wanted more than heading off to a prestigious university was a chance to grow deeper in my faith. I decided to attend a Christian college close enough to home that I could stay involved at church, though many changes came over the next few years. I joined a musical group at the school that often sang at different churches on Sunday mornings. Many of my friends headed off to college out of the area, so even when I made it back to the Vineyard, I often felt lost in the large congregation. John passed away in 1997, and the excitement of the previous few years settled down as we transitioned to the leadership of Lance Pittluck. Like a restless adolescent determined to leave home and discover what else is out there, I decided to start attending a church with some people from my school, but that season quickly revealed to me that there really was no place like home. I returned to Vineyard Anaheim (as it was now being called) and decided that unless the Lord clearly spoke to me about leaving, I was there to stay, for better or for worse.

The next two decades brought a lot of change in my life. I attended a home group with Bob and Penny Fulton, trying to figure out what life was going to look like after college, and they had a profound impact on my spiritual development. I spent some time as a missionary in Kenya, then returned to teach at Vineyard Christian School while also going on staff at the church as part of the children’s ministry team. I met the man I would fall in love with, and he proposed in my 2nd grade classroom. In 2006 we said our marriage vows, and over the next several years we dedicated all six of our children to the Lord and watched our oldest get baptized, all in the sanctuary at Vineyard Anaheim. Through every stage of our journey, we were surrounded by an amazing community led by where we could love and be loved, serve and be served, disciple and be discipled, blessed by the humble and faithful leadership of Lance and the rest of the pastoral staff.

When Lance announced his retirement, we had a meeting with all those who served in any leadership capacity at the church, talking about how to walk through transition. None of us had any idea of how much we would be impacted by the changes about to come. When the search committee announced the selection of Alan and Kathryn Scott to be the new lead pastors, I was excited about a new season beginning. Alan had a lot of vision for how he wanted to see the church grow, and Kathryn was a gifted worship leader with a beautiful heart for God. Every week we saw new people coming on Sunday mornings.

A lot of hard changes came with the transition as well. Alan’s focus was on bringing new people in, and he flat out told us he wasn’t going to “pastor” us for a while. It soon became clear what that meant. Small groups were shut down with a promise to reboot them following a different model. The women’s Bible study that had sustained so many homeschool mamas and other women each week for years was shut down. Within a year or so, every member of the pastoral staff that had been in place when the Scotts came had either been let go for financial reasons or chose to leave because they felt God calling them elsewhere. The entire youth volunteer staff was told they were no longer needed, as were the ushers, to make room for new teams of people yet to be assembled. Those of us who had called Vineyard Anaheim home for decades suddenly found ourselves cut off from the ministries that kept us connected to the body. As I walked in one Sunday morning, I was greeted by someone I’d never seen before who asked me if I was visiting for the first time. What on earth had happened to my home? I was thrilled to have so many new people, but where were the familiar faces? Positions that had always been filled by volunteers were now taken by those who paid to be a part of Alan’s Encounter School of Mission instead.

The emphasis was always on those who were new and those who were outside the church. Alan said the church had been slowly dying for years, and it seemed like he looked down on those of us who had chosen to stay through that time, seemingly oblivious to the many positive things that had been going on and choosing instead to focus only on the problems that most would admit had existed. From the stage, he repeatedly criticized former leaders and the way various ministries had been run in the past, which was deeply hurtful to those of us who loved the brothers and sisters who had faithfully served for many years. I started to see friends leaving the church because they no longer felt at home.

Determined to stick it out through thick and thin, for two years we tried to figure out our place in this expanded family. We tried to connect with a new small group when they started up again, but it was hard to replace the connection we had felt with the group we had been with for years. I tried to start up a small group for moms, but it wasn’t even put on the list of groups passed out on Sunday mornings, so no would would even know it existed unless they looked on the website. No matter what we tried, we just couldn’t seem to find our place in the new church Alan was building.

In desperation, we ended up joining a midweek group not connected with Vineyard Anaheim that was actually intending to be the start of a new church being planted nearby. From the first moment we walked in, I felt a sense of relief. The group was made up mostly of people we’d done life with for decades at Anaheim, and it felt like home after the past two years of feeling displaced. Then Covid hit and all the churches closed down for in-person gatherings. We watched the Vineyard Anaheim services online for months and joined groups meeting online, but was hard for our kids to feel connected, so when we heard that the church plant group was going to start meeting on Sunday mornings in the pastor’s backyard, we jumped at the chance to find some fellowship, even though we still really considered Anaheim our home. However, it wasn’t long before we realized that maybe the reason we hadn’t been able to find our place at Anaheim was because God had a different place for us at this time.

Eventually Vineyard Anaheim reopened, but we decided to stay and be a part of planting the new church. There weren’t a lot of youth though, so our oldest asked to go back to Anaheim where he had so many relationships and we agreed, at least until our new church had grown a bit more. I loved our new church family, and I tried to come to grips with the idea that Vineyard Anaheim was no longer my home. The Lord even spoke to me in a dream about it, showing me how it was being “remodeled” and would no longer even be recognizable as the home where I had lived spiritually for almost 30 years.

Still, on Friday, February 25, when I learned of Alan’s decision to disassociate the church from the Vineyard movement, it hit me like a ton of bricks. While I know the Church is far bigger than any one congregation or association of churches, Vineyard Anaheim has a unique identity and history as what most would call the “mother” of the Vineyard movement, and the idea of it no longer being a Vineyard is almost incomprehensible to most of us connected to it. And now this man who had moved into my home 4 years before and driven me out along with many if not most of my family, seemed to be kicking my mother out of her own home and taking over it for his own purposes.

I don’t want to use this post to get into the details of this decision and the many, many things I feel are wrong about the way it has been made, communicated, and carried out. (You can read some of Bob Fulton’s thoughts on it here.) I am still processing my grief and anger at the hurt that this decision has caused to so many I love, and I just wanted to use this space to touch on a small part of the story of this church body.

Psalm 68:8 says, “God settles the solitary in a home” (ESV). Vineyard Anaheim was the place where God brought a broken, hurting young girl, gave her a spiritual family, and brought her up as His child. I had looked forward to passing that heritage on to my children as they begin to step out in their own faith, and the thought that the Vineyard Anaheim will cease to exist breaks my heart. But as Carol Wimber, John’s wife, wrote in her letter to the VA board, “God is still on the throne,” and I find my peace in that truth.