History
The Vineyard Guild began as an attempt to discern how to help clergy and laity to grow spiritually, and to offer spiritually vibrant ministries to others. It began with a meeting of 20 people, laity and clergy, in November of 2000. This was a diverse group that included members of the Episcopal, Lutheran, roman Catholic, Brethren, Presbyterian, and United Methodist denominations. It included church pastors and laity, seminary personnel, religious organization leaders, and judicatory personnel. The commonality among all of them was that they were involved, one way or another, in finding ways to make their churches and organizations more spiritually vibrant through prayer, discernment, and practicing the spiritual disciplines.
At that first meeting, several questions were posed: Should we be creating a training program for those interested in spirituality? Should we be creating a training program for those interested in spiritual direction? Should we be creating a program to help counselors integrate spirituality into their practice? Should we be creating a training program to help pastors bring spiritual formation into their churches?
After discussing these questions, and prayerfully discerning over the next year what God was calling us to do, several themes began to surface. We didn't feel called to create new spirituality training programs (at least not in the traditional ways of offering certificates or accreditation). Instead, we felt called to create a new kind of organization. This organization would offer some kind of training for people in spirituality with the express purpose of making their churches and organizations more spiritually aware, but it would do so in a peer-focused way. In other words, we would not hire experts to teach theories on how to grow spiritually, but we would teach each other as people who are actively experimenting with and engaging in spiritual ministries. At the same time, we believed that this organization should be a community that would support and nurture people involved in spiritual ministries. In effect, we felt called to create a "guild".
Traditionally, a guild was a medieval community of master craftsmen and who trained others through apprenticeships, and who also experimented with new techniques in their craft and shared their successes with others. Guilds were communities of people trying to improved their craft by nurturing, supporting, and training each other. We felt called to do this for people interested in creating spiritually alive churches, organizations, and ministries.
We also felt called to focus on "spiritual leaders" - both clergy and laity involved in leadership positions - who wanted to ground their ministries in the purposes of God the Creator, open their ministries to the blessings and presence of God in Christ, and created avenues for the grace and power of God the Holy Spirit to work through them. We believed that by focusing on the spiritual leaders of churches and organizations, we could help churches and organizations ground their ministry in God's will and grace.
In addition, we found scriptural inspiration for our work in John 15:1-17, in which Jesus says, in part, "I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing." Our focus became on how we could help spiritual leaders and their communities of faith become places that were alive in Christ and that could bear much fruit. With our grounding in John 15 and our desire to become a guild, we formed our name: "The Vineyard Guild".
The Vineyard Guild is a community and an organization devoted to nurturing, supporting, caring for, and training each other as together we discern and create ways to make our churches and organizations more spiritually alive and blessed.