Jamie - Vineyard Pastor from Chile

Last night I had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours with a Vineyard pastor from Chile, Jamie. He was here visiting his brother who goes to Seaforth Baptist just down the road, pastored by a great friend Dave Rowe. Our time together was rich, hurriedly telling each other about the Vineyard movement in our countries and our own churches. He has been in chile for over 15 years, having gone there from his home of South Africa on a missionary trip. He ended up marrying in Chile and having 4 children, while pasturing a couple of larger churches and a couple of church plants out of them. He lost his third child at the age of 3.5, just two weeks after they planted their current church. God has really worked in his family and church through the mourning process. I felt such love for him and his journey as we spoke and prayed together, knowing we would likely never have the chance to meet again.

We both kept coming back to the centrality of the presence of God in our churches as we meet. As Vineyard it is in our musical worship that we truly foster this relationship of intimacy with Him. As he spoke about how this intimacy in worship developed in each of his churches, and how each time new people would start to come and be broken by the love of Jesus AFTER the church had begun to surrender in worship. I felt convicted again of the things God has called us to at NorthHarbour – in the old vineyard saying we are to be “people of His presence”. I pulled out Alex Venter’s book “doing Church” and we both emphatically agreed about the importance of the message of this passage:

Church should be structured and done in such a way that the minute the presence of God is not there everything should collapse. If the Holy Spirit withdraws at any point because He is grieved for whatever reason everything should go wrong. We should be as vulnerable as that! The universe is. It would instantly implode if God withdrew His presence and His Word (Heb 1:3). It is my considered opinion that most Churches do not even know if God’s presence is
among them or not. Business continues as usual because what sustains them, what makes them ‘tick’, is their own programmes, personalities, power and control. Would we know it if God withdrew His presence and wrote ‘Ichabod’ over our Churches because ‘the glory had departed’ (as in the Temple in Ezekiel ch. 10)? Would anything change in the Church to show us that in reality everything has changed that ever could change—because God is not there? John used to say that if the Lord did not ‘show up’ when we gathered we should have
the courage to call it a day and go home because there is no other reason for meeting!

The Vineyard in Chile is growing strong, as it is in Australia. My time with Jamie was so encouraging and challenged me to re-visit the very things God put on or hearts when Liz and I reluctantly :-) trusted him to move to the Northern Beaches and help birth this little community from scratch.