Costa Mitchell & Vineyard South Africa

VUSA: Let’s start out with a brief sketch of your faith journey and how you ended up leading in the Vineyard.

Costa Mitchell: I was like most South Africans culturally. South Africa has one of the highest rates of nominal Christianity in the world and in Africa especially. So about 87% of our people, including all of the racial groups, would call themselves Christian. We grew up with that kind of assumption, basically: “If I wasn’t born Jewish, I must be Christian.”

When I finished school, I had always wanted to become a veterinarian. So that’s what I went off to study. I was quite quickly taken with the idea of atheism. So that became my faith start. I was quite a belligerent atheist, trying to evangelize people to my side of that fence.

I was staying at the YMCA, ironically, and met a young guy there. I’d been listening to him, arguing with him, watching his life. Through his testimony, I came to the point one night, a week after my 18th birthday, where the Lord just got hold of me.

I wrestled through until probably 2 or 3 in the morning, and then I finally prayed a prayer that C.S. Lewis calls a “check” – “God, I don’t believe in you, but if you’re there, change my life.”

[bctt tweet=”When I woke up the next morning, I realized that I had fallen in love with people. – Costa Mitchell” quote=”When I woke up the next morning, I realized that I had fallen in love with people.”]

There were two things that made me realize God was real. When I woke up the next morning, I realized that I had fallen in love with people. I loved the people around me, where before, people had really only taught me how much I liked animals.

The second thing was that God had cleaned up my mouth, and I didn’t have a desire to go out and get drunk.

I knew that something had shifted inside me, and that became my journey. Indirectly from that, I began a process of faith. Soon afterward, I was giving my testimony with the guy who started Teen Challenge ministry in South Africa, and I was speaking to young people.

He took me onto the streets where all the dealers and addicts were – this was the center of what was at the time the hippie subculture of Johannesburg. That became indirectly the thing that became the South African version of what you would call the Jesus People movement. Directly and indirectly, through the witness of young people in a youth group I was part of, a church was formed called the Invisible Church.

The guy that was the hippie king in that part of town had a nightclub in a basement, and he converted it to a church and called it the Invisible Church. We saw hundreds of people come to faith over the next couple of years.

To fast forward, it was from that church that were the guys that made contact with John Wimber and brought him to South Africa. Through a guy called Dave Owen, John was invited to come in 1980 for the first time. He finally came again the third time in 1982 and felt he heard the Lord tell him to help us plant the first Vineyard outside of the United States in Johannesburg.

John came with a team of about 80 or 100 young people. Lonnie Frisbee was with him at the time as well as a number of the guys that formed the Vineyard movement initially.

The reality was that up until that time I’d been involved in a Pentecostal denomination. My wife and I had planted a couple of churches, and we had been pastoring some. And when Dave first spoke to me about John, he started talking about the things that were on the radar as far as what it was that Vineyard was all about, what the difference was. What he felt God had invented the Vineyard for: things like intimacy in worship, really taking seriously the idea that everyone is meant to be involved in ministry, evangelism in effective ways, the expectation of signs and wonders.

We were already leaning that way. And it was really a nice fit, a natural fit. Like many others, when I first heard John, my first response was, “This guy has been reading my mail.” He gave language to the things that were in our hearts. That’s how we got started.

Since then, what have you valued, both in terms of your leadership of the South African Vineyard but also in a broader, more global-family sense?

Well, just in saying those words, you’re speaking my language. Some of the things that I heard initially from John and in church growth seminars and in conversations we had about what this church thing looks like was that the word “relationships” and “community” were very strong. We realized that was something that needed to be primary, and I guess that’s been part of my gifting and DNA since the beginning.

Jesus messed me up, got me to love people, as I mentioned. That followed naturally on with a bent toward building relationships with people and doing pastoral care. For me, the ideal of the movement being a “family of families” was front and center and has been for a long time.

I think we have struggled against the entrepreneur-type mentality, that concept of individualism and church planting that doesn’t depend on anybody. Of course there is a strength in that, but it needs to be balanced with the idea of relationship, community and accountability.

Those are the things that I’ve been praying and looking to whatever ways we can encourage people to do that. We’ve done that, particularly in other areas of Africa where we’ve been involved. If we don’t get that right, we’ve missed one of the major reasons why the Lord wanted the Vineyard to exist.

What are some of the things that get in the way of that kind of unity and connectedness?

I think we battle between these two aspects of autonomy – which can sometimes be seen as an either/or, either independence or accountability. I think the either/or thinking is one of the big things that gets in the way.

I also think that, generally speaking, people who are entrepreneurial are often not very relational. Especially when you have as part of your excuse for your entrepreneurial-ness the idea that “the Holy Spirit said so.” That can become an issue where stopping to talk about things can become seen as hindering the work of the Holy Spirit.

[bctt tweet=”In most cases, our strength is our weakness. – Costa Mitchell” quote=”In most cases, our strength is our weakness. We’ve got some very good leaders, but those very good leaders need to realize that no one is an island.”]

So, as we approach this conference this summer in Ohio, what types of things can realistically come out of this type of meeting? It’s a global party in a sense. What are the upsides?

Looking back on some of the things that have been highlights and turning points for South Africa leaders, I would love to see more of those. Those were were really networking opportunities. Meetings other than the plenary sessions. I hope that we make time for connections to happen, for people to exchange information and maybe even to push all the way to asking people to commit to remembering each other, to stay in touch, to build ongoing relationships.

And taking into account what I believe the conference is going to say to us overall, which is that we don’t do this as a bunch of disconnected individuals, but instead we do it with a complete commitment to family, to relatedness, and to humility. It is only together that we see the full picture of God’s love. We should help people to really take that seriously and not forget one another between conferences.

A big-picture question: As you look to the future of the global Vineyard family, what are your hopes and dreams for what could be yet to come?

I would say that I’m looking for a recovery of the mandate and of the sense of momentum that gave birth to the movement in the first place. Part of the reason that I believe the Lord wanted this thing called the Vineyard to exist within the spectrum of the church is that there is a level of making it simple, making it relevant, without any kind of compromise. There’s a real dependence on the Spirit. Out of all of that we have seen a growth of churches with a no-nonsense approach, with grace at the heartbeat of things.

I think in general we’ve seen a number of aberrations and extremes to everything, including grace. And evangelism: relevance becoming relativism. I believe God still has a purpose for us to make a statement by our very existence. To make a statement that Jesus is real, that church growth works and happens through God confirming his word with signs and wonders, and that this happens without hype and without religiosity.

The future story is the old story. That’s still our mandate. It’s still to raise up a multitude of people to “do the stuff” and that nobody gets famous from doing it except the Lord. I see a new season of evangelistic growth where our leaders are practitioners of God’s grace and power. That’s what I see for the future.