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| John Wimber and the Toronto Blessing |
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The Charismatic Challenge Thursday, March 25 I was reading one of your pages (the one about Rick Godwin). And I noticed you listed one of the errors of his mentor John Wimber as supporting the 'Toronto Blessing.' However, in the interest of historical accuracy, you will want to note that Wimber severed relationship with the Toronto Airport Vineyard, and had them leave his denomination (Association of Vineyard Churches), because of these excesses. Any defense of the expressions there were early in the "Blessing," and prior to his and the Vineyard leadership's ultimate theological review of the Toronto Blessing. Cheers, B — On Doctrine Reply Hello B—, Welcome to On Doctrine Thank you for your visit and Contact message. I am aware of the break that occurred between John Wimber and John Arnott of the Toronto Ariport Vineyard Church in December of 1995. However, doctrinal questions were the minor elements in the parting, and political and control issues were the major, because the TAVC was acting outside the authority of the Vineyard Fellowship and the control of John Wimber. In a 1997 article in Christianity Today, John Wimber said: "Toronto was changing the definition of renewal in the Vineyard. Our decision was to withdraw endorsement; their decision was to resign. At the Vineyard, we see renewal not only of individuals but of the forms and practice of the church. For instance, when an individual is stirred by God, it will be reflected in a new attitude toward witnessing and cooperating with the work the Lord is doing in his or her life. I don't have any objection to phenomenon per se. I think Jonathan Edwards has adequately addressed the issue of phenomena in revival, and I would generally take his position. However, I think if it's fleshly and brought out by some sort of display, or promoted by somebody on stage, that's abysmal. But if God does something to somebody, that's between them and God.John Wimber's claim in relation to the phenomenon made no real sense, because there is no connection between the Toronto phenomenon and human birth, even if both are messy. Whatever direction the Toronto Vineyard was headed, would have had no relationship to the phenomenon had it actually been a moving of the Holy Spirit, unless of course, the direction the Vineyard was headed was wrong prior to the manifestation. If it was a moving of the Holy Spirit and contradicted the direction of the Vineyard, then John Wimber and the Vineyard should have altered their direction. But that minor issue of integrity was swept aside, as John Wimber invoked some type of cultural bias regarding conduct in relation to the phenomenon and instructions by the apostle Paul. John Wimber did not deal with the elements taught by the apostle Paul, because to have done so would have required that he admit to the fact that the instructions of the apostle Paul had nothing to do with cultural factors, and he would then have had to explain why those instructions could be ignored. The reason for the confusion in the Vineyard churches points right to the core of John Wimber's theology, which was as messy, unorganized and unkept as he claimed the Holy Spirit revealed in His various manifestations. The problem with John Wimber's theology was the same as was reflected in the Toronto phenomena, which was to accept first and ask questions later; but that even presumes that questions would be asked later, which, in the opinion of the Toronto promoters, was something close to being heresy. John Wimber accepted the Kansas City prophets and then the Toronto Blessing, because he was undiscerning, refusing to apply first, the biblical principles that he chose to ignore and then chose to redefine by his own standards. Messy childbirth has nothing to do with the teaching of the apostle Paul on orderly behavior in the church and the "messy" history of the working of the Holy Spirit was the production of Wimber's own imagination. Presuming authority over the Scripture, he asserted that authority by redefining the nature of orderliness to be non-orderliness, which defines everything from the stoic impassion of liturgy to the barking, snorting, laughing impunity of the Toronto phenomenon. By his new definition, he made the apostle Paul's teaching on orderliness to be absolutely worthless as to any reasonable application of standards regarding the regulation of behavior in the church, because virtually anything was defined by John Wimber as acceptable, until it was judged against the Vineyard model which he had created himself. Through his definitions, he conveniently bypassed any Scriptural authority that could be applied to the phenomenon in relation to conduct. In the process, his definitions of orderliness present the Toronto phenomenon as acceptable and he provided a defense for its existence. By his equivocation on the validity of the Toronto phenomenon, John Wimber, by default, validated the claims of the proponents, including the major players, such as Rodney Howard- Browne and John Arnott, as to how it should be accepted. "Stop and receive and let the Holy Spirit fill you. Be like a sponge and desire the Lord with everything that's within you. Every case that does that, they are on the floor receiving. People pray for you, that's your time to receive. Pray on the way out, you can pray later. Don't take control, you can take control later. The whole deal is, you lose control, He takes control. He gets you our of your comfort zone, makes you feel vulnerable, right? You can analyze it later can't you?"Accept first and analyze later is the claim about which John Wimber agreed, denying the Scripture in 1 John 4:1, which commands that the spirits be tested first before they are accepted. He provided no means by which any claim could be validated prior to its implementation or acceptance, because the claims and phenomena were validated outside the biblical sphere, by the experience of the one who accepted whatever was presented. Those claims and phenomena were considered to be "new things" being accomplished by the Holy Spirit and were forced on believers, because to deny the "new things" was said to be the same as denying the Holy Spirit, and the authority for that claim was the assertion by leadership to "Trust us, we know." Just as in the acceptance of a belief in continuing revelation, biblical principles were not applied, because the phenomena were "new", having never before been seen in the Scripture and revelations were "new", never having been revealed in the Scripture, so they could not be judged by Scripture, but only through the feelings and emotions of the participant, by which a person placed them self in a place of authority over the Scripture. In the several years from the inception of the Toronto mess, until his death, John Wimber never made a real decision on whether the phenomenon was true or false, and never considered the doctrinal difficulties that were presented in the phenomenon and the resulting unbiblical claims by its proponents regarding its acceptance, because his criteria were not based on biblical authority. His criteria for acceptance were the same as for his other beliefs, which was simply whether it felt good or "worked" in the manner that he defined within his "model" of the Vineyard and his ministry. The worst that he could conceive was that the phenomenon could be abysmal as an expression of the flesh (not even considering that it could be Satanic in origin), but even if it was from God, he considered it to be a personal incident between an individual and God, so rather than the authority of the Scripture defining its acceptability within the boundaries of given biblical revelation, each individual was to determine for themselves the reality of whether the Holy Spirit had been manifested and the value of that manifestation, which took John Wimber's definition of messy combined with a claim of orderliness to new heights of what was considered to be acceptable as orderly chaos. In relation to his acceptance of the Kansas City prophets, John Wimber said: "However, their entrance into the Vineyard was entirely my fault, and I take full responsibility for that . I turned my brain off for a couple of years. My son Sean went through years of alcohol and drug addiction. Some prophetic people came and said, "God is offering you a grace package. If you'll do thus and so, God will retrieve your son." This man prophesied when and how. And it came to pass exactly as he said.John Wimber's acceptance, as truth, of that which had not been verified by the Scripture was a tragedy for the Vineyard and for his ministry. It is the major difficulty faced by the church today in the acceptance of the various forms of charismatic phenomena. John Wimber provided many excuses why the Toronto phenomena and the Kansas City prophets were accepted by him and then eventually excluded from the Vineyard, but they all ignored the reality that biblical principles were never applied, because the authority for acceptance was in the experience as it applied to the Vineyard model and not the authority of the Bible. John Wimber found to be false, the "presupposition that a gift in itself authenticates you," but that was as a result of his bad experience with the Kansas City prophets and not a result of the application of biblical principles. He could have saved himself a considerable amount of grief had he actually gone to the Scripture in order to discover if the Kansas City prophets were authentic or not, and he could have done the same with the Toronto phenomenon in relation to the commands of the apostle Paul and he could have determined the legitimacy of the claims of the proponents by a comparison of the doctrines that they taught with the Scripture, which he did not. He could have also considered the advice and biblical evidence presented by numerous individuals who pleaded with him to deal with Toronto and Kansas City from a biblical standpoint, which he also did not do. Sincerely, Gary A. 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