Scripture & Spirit: A Conversation With David Parker

Vineyard USA: Can you talk about what the Vineyard can and should and will be when it is both completely committed to the ministry of the Spirit and committed to the will of God as revealed in the Scriptures?

David Parker: For me, one led to the other. I was not raised in church; I didn’t have any religious background at all. I sort of got swept up into things through the Jesus Movement, but I was really converted by reading the Bible. That was my beginning point: encountering Christ in the written Word.

My foundation became the desire to know him and then finding him in his Word. Then it was wonderful to discover the truth (which the Vineyard embodies) that he is present and active and working in the world by his presence and power in the Spirit. One really led to the other.

I had a sense of the authority and presence of Christ in the Bible, which led me to the conviction that we needed that same presence and power in our engagement with people in our actual lives. That’s what I’ve always thought it should be. I think John Wimber was such a great storyteller. He was able to make the Bible come alive and not just seem like a story from the past, but a blueprint for today too.

So, if we’re a Scripture-and-Spirit movement, how does preaching fit into that? How then do we preach?

It seems as though historically, it’s almost like if you have a lot of the Spirit, then you think less of preaching. I don’t know if that’s completely fair, but it feels that way sometimes. To me, it’s having that commitment to the Spirit that makes preaching powerful. That God is actually present and speaking and engaging people’s lives.

I didn’t grow up with any sort of spiritual things. After I became a Christian, I had a few encounters with more charismatic churches. The ones I experienced were very controlling, which turned me off, and the Pentecostal stuff I saw on TV turned me off too.

It wasn’t until I encountered the Vineyard that I saw a model that I thought fit what I believed about Scripture: that Jesus is alive, that he’s still healing people. He doesn’t deal with history in dispensations.

The Vineyard gave me a model to say, “This is the way it could be.” But believing that God is working on people doesn’t lessen the importance of preaching; it elevates it. I think our biggest mistakes, when the Spirit is really present or really powerful, is that we would then de-emphasize preaching. We have a tendency to almost make preaching about explaining what’s happening, instead of just preaching the gospel.

I think if we had really moved toward proclaiming the gospel in times of outpouring of the Spirit, those times would have been healthier, more fruitful, maybe even more significant. I think believing in the fullness of the Spirit and believing in that God is working elevates the sense that God wants to use this “foolish thing” of presenting and proclaiming and inviting in a life-changing way.

It’s a tragedy, really, that the people who sometimes seem to care the most about preaching and the most about being scripturally sound have so little interest in the activity of the Spirit. And sometimes those who have the most interest in the activity of the Spirit have so little commitment to the work of scriptural exegesis.

Steve Nicholson said something once like, “Whenever the Spirit gets poured out in my church, that’s when I preach the biggest scriptural themes, because I want to attach the work of the Spirit to the big things of Scripture.”

Yeah. That’s so smart.

How do you learn to be that way?

It’s hard, because you get knocked off your feet sometimes simply by what’s happening. You lose your bearings. In the final analysis, though, when you go through a few of those things, you see what happens when you don’t stick to the middle of the road. So you begin to realize, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get this right.”

People always want to ask preachers how they prepare for preaching during the week. Like, “What do you do on Mondays? on Tuesdays?” and so on. What I want to ask instead is, how do you become a person who preaches well? What are the habits and disciplines forming a heart and mind that can preach well in response to the Spirit?

The way I look at it is, you have to have a deep dependency. There’s this sense of, “It’s not me. I can’t do this.” If I’m really going to do an adequate job of talking about this One that I love most in my life, then I just need him to help me.

It was summertime, and I knew my legs would shake delivering it in the air conditioning. So I put long underwear on underneath my jeans, hoping I’d be warmer and then not shake so much. But I stood there and shook anyway, and I read the whole thing word for word, and I’m sure it was the worst sermon these people had ever heard. After it was over, I said, “I’m never doing that again!”

But the Lord pulled me up short and told me that this is what he had asked me to do. So I went on this journey. Because he told me. And because I wanted to do him justice.

[bctt tweet=”Dependency on the Lord needs to be combined with compassion and identifying with the people you’re speaking to.” quote=”The most critical thing to me is that to be a pastor and to preach well, month after month, year after year, requires such deep dependency on the Lord. You are doing this for the Lord, from the Lord, and to the Lord. And this dependency needs to be combined with compassion and identifying with the people you’re speaking to.”]

If those two things are there — compassion and identification — that goes a long way. A lot of pastors are in their own world; they’re not connecting with the people. I know what it feels like to not be connected with the leaders talking to me. I deeply empathize with people who don’t have hope, who don’t have a sense of God in the world. So I’m able to speak to them in a way they actually hear.

So as a pastor, can you speak more to habits specifically about Scripture?

When people ask me how long it takes to work on a sermon, I’ll usually give the trite answer, “It takes a lifetime!” But for me, it really does ring true. I first met the Lord in the Scripture and have spent so much time reading it and studying it and wrestling with it nonstop going on 40 years. It’s just true for me.

I don’t do huge prep for any particular message; I’m just consistently engaged. But of course, I do have my own process. I read through the Bible in a particular way, following a particular pattern. I work with the Bible by sections rather than books, because there are so many interrelated parts, and I try to read them in that relationship.

That prep is always ongoing. I do a Q-and-A with myself as I study. I have notebooks to write those down. “What is this really about? What does this phrase mean?” That’s a continual process.

When I decide what to talk about on Sundays, I have three criteria. First, I want to cover all seven sections of the Bible as I understand them over a two-year period. Second, I want to speak to the things that people are wrestling with and need to hear. And third, I want to follow the Lord and whatever he tells me to do. That one trumps the other two.

I always speak in series, because I want people to get the process. For a lot of people, coming to faith is a process, sometimes a lengthy one. And going through a sermon series seems to help with that.

In the next 30 years of the Vineyard, what are your hopes for how we steward and preach and teach the Scriptures?

[bctt tweet=” My hope would be that we would be faithful, not that we would be reactionary. – David Parker” quote=” My hope would be that we would be faithful, not that we would be reactionary.”]

Wow. My hope would be that we would be faithful, not that we would be reactionary. I fear for us becoming part of the culture wars or something like that. My fundamental belief about the Vineyard is that we were made for the lost.

This is something I believe that I’m not sure everyone has vocalized; I’m not sure if even John Wimber did. Back in the day in Lancaster, we were doing things a bit differently at our church and were seeing some of the fruit of our efforts. John came to visit me back then, and he asked, “David, why do you want all these non-Christians in your services?” I looked at him and smiled and said, “Because that’s what we were made for.”

He said, “You mean as Christians?” And I said, “No, as the Vineyard.”

I told him, “John, look what God gave you. He gave you this stewarding of worship that’s intimate and personal and contemporary.” I always joked that it was like The Eagles getting saved. I said, “Who’s that gift for? Is is just to make sure the church gets into the 20th century in regard to worship? Or is it for people like me, who couldn’t even imagine going into a church with a full-on pipe organ playing? You have this great Southern-California relational style. Who’s that for, if not for people with no church background?”

So my hope is that 30 years from now, the Vineyard will be a thriving movement that is faithful to Scripture, but not reactionary or pharisaical or fundamentalist. I hope we will continue to have this deep engagement with our culture, that we remain close enough to actually speak to people where they’re at and compassionate enough to walk with them along the path. I think the Vineyard was made for that.

I travel a lot, and when I go to other places, I often think, “My goodness, do they need a Vineyard church here that cares about lost people!” We were birthed in Southern California, and our gifts are really made for outward focus. So I hope our preaching and commitment to Scripture would remain that way. It is extremely hard to be a rigid religious type when you are around people who are perishing.

We need to continue to find the authority and power of the Scripture to fuel our ministry to the distant, to the poor, to the broken. It will require some creativity and courage, given the way things are going culturally. But I see and have hope. There are a lot of younger people that want to do just that.

What are your hopes and dreams for the VUSA conference coming up?

Well, taking time and thinking and hearing and wrestling with preaching is not a comfortable thing to do. I think that most people who go the seminary route and have to take a preaching course find it to be a pretty painful experience. My hope for our time together is that it will first of all be hope-giving and refreshing to people in a way that doesn’t burden them or make them feel less adequate or less successful, but somehow gets in there and empowers them in a way to both be themselves and engage with the Lord in a focused way. I want people to find the freedom and the ability to connect with people to move hearts and set compasses. I hope it’s encouraging and hope-filled. I hope people leave very glad they came: empowered, able to take on the task of preaching.

It’s an incredibly costly thing that we do, to pour ourselves out and put things out there. There is that old quote, “I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.” Most preachers who preach every week know that feeling. I hope we can add fuel to that ability to set yourself on fire.