WCV is hosting a parenting workshop with guest speaker Cathy Dyck.
Due to low registrations this workshop will be cancelled. Stay tuned for a future KidUnique workshop.
The goal of the workshop is to equip parents, leaders and other adults who have a relationship of influence in the life of a child or a teen, to intentionally reflect God’s heart to the kids they care about, helping them begin to discover who it is that He has created them to be and what He has created them to do.
Participants will: • Get an overview of ways in which culture is impacting their children and their families. • Identify character qualities that they as parents can cultivate that will help them engage with their kids in positive and meaningful ways. • Receive practical tools and ideas which will help them get and stay close to the kids they care about, using the 4 window model. • Create 1 or 2 doable actions steps which will have a positive impact on the relationship they have with the kid they care about whether they are 5 or 15. • Have opportunity to consider an optional workbook that is both a guide and a journal.
This is an excellent opportunity to learn strategies for engaging with your kids and youth, to walk alongside them as they navigate the challenges of developing a deep relationship with God in a digital era.
>>>The Details:
February 22, 2020
10:00 am – 2:30 pm
There is a $10 fee to help cover a light lunch. To register contact Andy Arthur or the WCV Office.
We are hosting a workshop designed to help us understand our responses to traumatic events and how to establish good boundaries in traumatic relationships. Understanding our own and other people’s responses and the way they deal with difficult news or situations as well as learning what appropriate boundaries might be are two topics that will be covered in this evening workshop.
We’re bringing in Jaymie Friesen from MCC to facilitate this event. Jaymie is the Abuse Response and Prevention Coordinator for MCC in Manitoba and comes to us with experience in helping churches and communities deal with the impacts of betrayal of trust, sexual misconduct and other similar topics. You can read her bio here.
Exciting news! We have identified three areas in which the Winnipeg Centre Vineyard church community needs more support and have created three positions that will help meet those needs. We are looking to expand our staff team with the following Pastoral Resource positions:
1) Community Care & Development. The purpose of this position is to provide leadership for the development and care of House Groups, Triads and volunteer engagement in WCV. Expectations include promoting, developing and envisioning participation in life-building relationships for those who call WCV home as well as creating systems and processes that promote a flourishing volunteer culture.
2) Neighbourhood Engagement & Outreach. This position is responsible for the care and development of Winnipeg Centre Vineyard’s (WCV) relationships with the neighbourhood including the Street Parish, outreach activities and Care Portal.
3) Enfolding & Hospitality.The purpose of this position is to care for all aspects of welcome and hospitality in Winnipeg Centre Vineyard (WCV). This position is responsible for creating, envisioning and tending pathways for new people to become part of WCV. Additionally this role cares for people in difficult or transition stages of life.
These positions are all part-time. We are open to one person filling all three positions if they have the gifts and skills for doing so. Alternately, we may have one separate person for each position. We are excited to see what God wants and who God brings to meet these needs.
Should you be invited to participate in the next stage of the hiring process, we will be asking for three references, one from each of the following categories:
Current or recent leader you have served with.
Spiritual mentor.
Team member or co-worker.
Applications will be accepted until February 9, 2020.
UPDATE (Feb 10, 2020): Please note we are no longer receiving applications for this posting. Thanks.
It’s that time of the year again… when folks from all across our country gather in Edmonton for the annual Vineyard Prayer Summit.
Here’s the purpose:
Since 2003 the Canadian Vineyard family has gathered together every year to simply seek the face of the Lord and worship Him. Come join us this year and take the opportunity to devote two days for this very purpose.
Summit: February 28 & 29 Symposiums: February 27 (Suhail is speaking at one of the Symposiums)
Check out the website for more information including registration, location, schedule, etc.
Who wants to go? If you are planning on going we’d like to know about it – please let Ang Falk know.
We’re hiring! We are looking for a part-time Custodian (20 hrs / week). This position requires a friendly, clean, tidy and efficient person who would love to serve our community by keeping our building clean. This position includes janitorial and set-up responsibilities as well as some security services.
If you’re interested, please read on. If you know of someone who might be a fit, please forward this posting to them.
The EHS Course is over and by all accounts was a great success! If you’re wondering what’s next, here are a few specific resources that we’ve put together to continue to fuel the journey. If you’re interested in taking the Emotionally Healthy Relationships course, or if you missed the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality course and would like to do it, let us know!
Books for further exploration:
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality – Peter Scazerro (the book the course is built on)
God in my Everything: how an ancient rhythm helps busy people enjoy God – Ken Shigematsu
The Celebration of Discipline: the path to spiritual growth – Richard Foster
The Spirit of the Disciplines: understanding how God changes lives – Dallas Willard
Liturgy of the Ordinary: sacred practices in everyday life – Tish Harrison Warren
The Common Rule: habits of purpose for an age of distraction – Justin Whitmel Earley
Prayer Guides:
Celtic Book of Daily Prayer – Northumbria Community
Guide to Prayer for All God’s People – Norman Shawchuck and Rueben P. Job
Common Prayer: a liturgy for ordinary radicals – Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove & Enuma Okoro
Apps / podcasts:
The Overflow – bible reading plan which has a variety of options for reading scripture.
Pray As You Go – a Jesuit prayer guide that includes daily meditations and examples of prayer practices like the Examen, Gospel Contemplation and Lectio Divina.
The Daily Disconnect – a short, simple guided Christian meditation from a guy with a great accent.
More in-Depth:
Emotionally Healthy Relationships Course
Sustainable Faith has a number of schools that explore similar content and take it deeper. A number of WCVers have found them to be tremendously life-giving:
Nepali Women’s Co-op will be at the upcoming Third + Bird Christmas Market in the downtown Hudson’s Bay basement! Here at the dates and times:
November 22 – Pre-Shop (tickets bought online before the sale)
November 23, 10 am – 5 pm
November 24, 11 am – 4 pm
This is a fun event; please consider attending! Visit the NWC booth and enjoy a time of shopping local. We are very thankful for the partnership with Third + Bird.
We are still looking for people to bake cookies! If you are interested in volunteering or baking cookies for the sale, please contact Debra Kelly.
In the spirit of keeping our regular updates both extensive and, well, regular, we hope you’ll find this both encouraging and informative. As always we value your prayers and feedback regarding any of the topics covered in this update.
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Course & Series
We are super encouraged by the response to the EHS course we are piloting for eight weeks this Fall. Not only was it great to see over 70 of you sign up, the reports about the content and what God is gently doing in us are the reasons we’re doing it in the first place. Currently we are a little over 1/2 way through and are starting to get to the good stuff. As is the way with the Kingdom, the “good stuff” is often the hard stuff, but always leads to life! Our prayer is that God will continue to confront unhealthy patterns in us and that we would submit to the slow, beautiful and transformative power of emotional health and contemplative spirituality that this course is built on. Emotional health is important because it is intimately linked with spiritual maturity. Contemplative spirituality is important because it is what walking with Jesus is all about – being aware of his presence with us at any given moment in any given day. It is about “practicing the presence of God” as Brother Lawrence has said. Let’s pray that those who are taking the course would collaborate with God in the deep beneath-the-surface transformation and that we would emerge a much more robust and healthier community as a result.
If all goes well, we will be offering the EHS course on a regular basis, so if you’ve missed out on this round, there likely will be another chance in the future. Also, the EHS course is Part 1 of what is called the Emotionally Healthy Discipleship courses. Part 2 is entitled “Emotionally Healthy Relationships”. Where EHS grows our ability to love God, the Emotionally Healthy Relationships course grows our ability to love others in very practical and powerful ways. We’re exploring this as another option in the future. We’d love feedback and thoughts on any of this.
Gifts 4 God
November and December is always an exciting time for our children because it’s Gifts 4 God season! This year we’re going to be having four classes – Cooking, Art, Sports & Dance. We have volunteers and youth helpers lined up to create spaces for our children to discover their gifts, learn new skills and how these can all be used as worship of the One who gave them these gifts.
Christmas & Advent
We’re going to be exploring what we’re calling “The Invitation” which is centred on the theme of opening God’s invitation to us through practicing hope, peace, joy and love. Each moment in our lives is pregnant with opportunity from God – each moment contains an invitation, if you will. We can let the moment pass without awareness of what that invitation entails, or we can say “yes” to the Holy Spirit and discover what God is up to – and then join in – much like Jesus when he said he only did what he saw the Father doing (John 5:19). However, each of these moments meet a certain resistance within each of us. Part of opening the Invitation is understanding our own resistances to the Holy Spirit.
If you haven’t noticed, we always try to have an inviting and clear theme for the Advent season. This is partly so that you could feel comfortable inviting someone to our gatherings who isn’t normally part of a church community. This season is a good opportunity for people to come to know Jesus in a personal and deeper way. We think “The Invitation” is can really facilitate this.
As always we’re going to be having our annual Kid’s Service and Community Feast. This will be on December 15. Watch for details about this action packed Sunday – including how you can contribute to the Community Feast.
Leadership Team:
The whole leadership team (Pastors, Elders and BOD) continue to meet regularly as well as separately. We seem to be getting into a good rhythm of togetherness and separateness – coming together to hold the whole community, and separating into each team’s unique responsibilities and purposes.
Among other items, the BOD is working on the constitution review. The team that has been struck is Stephen Fligg, Cornelius Martens and Beckie Wood (as a rep from the Elder team). They are working to develop a proposal that can be presented at our next AGM in 2020. This will be a full review and update of our governance and decision making structures as a church. Additionally, the BOD is looking toward 2020 to determine funding priorities and budgets.
The Lay Elders are working on expanding the team. The New Elder process that was initiated in the Spring is underway and we hope to have a few names to offer the community in the near future. This would initiate a time of new people being prospective elders. If this prospective time seems right to us (meaning both the prospective elders and the current team) and the Holy Spirit (this whole process is a process of discernment), these prospective elders would then be brought to the membership for a ratification vote at the next AGM in 2020.
The Pastoral Elder / Staff team is working diligently on managing and providing leadership where necessary to all areas of life in WCV. The most significant news here is that John Rademaker has recently completed a personal discernment process that has led him to step away from his pastoral responsibilities in WCV. We’re still digesting the implications of this. We will be having a special time to honour John and Violet for their contributions to WCV over the past 24 years (note that it’s only John who has stepped down). They’ll still be around and involved in various capacities, but this does mark a significant transition for John, and we want to honour this. Another item of note is that Andy is back to Full-time. His position was moved to 75% at the beginning of the year. In September the BOD moved him back to 100%.
In our previous Community Update, we mentioned that we were exploring interim pastoral help. At this point there have not been any significant developments in this regard. However, we are very pleased that we’ve seen a major uptick in people stepping forward to help in pastoral ways. The team leading the EHS course, is a great example of people contributing to the overall health of the community. While this does not completely fill the pastoral gaps, especially after John steps down at the beginning of 2020, it is encouraging. We will continue to work on developing more House Groups. Once the EHS course is complete, we will see a few more begin. These are all positive developments.
Why Vineyard? & Orientation
Vineyard Canada has recently produced a great document that outlines the history, theology, posture and practice of the Vineyard in Canada. For now you can access this on WCV’s website but we hope to have printed versions available for you in the New Year. This resource will be the basis for our new Orientation Class which will be for anyone who wants to know more about what it means to be part of WCV and the Vineyard in general. Watch for details.
Vineyard Canada Metanoia & Roundtables
Eight people from WCV went to participate in the Metanoia event held in Calgary over the last weekend in September. Metanoia events occur regularly across the country, and are designed to help us think deeply about different theological themes. This one was meant to provide some theological teaching and reflection on the concept of Human Flourishing – providing a rubric for exploring human sexuality and spiritual formation. Rooting us firmly in the story of God’s redemptive purposes in creation, scholar Matt Croasmun shared many key insights that provide the backdrop for a conversation about sensitive subjects like sexuality and gender.
This Metanoia event kicked off a series of 10 Roundtable discussions that are happening online in closed groups of Vineyard pastors and leaders throughout October and November, that are delving deeper into examining themes of the Christ shaped kingdom of God, theological discernment and interpretation, purpose of creation and humanity, theology of unity and diversity, and pastoral concerns around issues of human flourishing and sexuality. This online forum is meant to foster safe places for deep discussion and learning, and has been formed in a way to support communal discernment with leaders across the country.
The Metanoia event and the round tables are part of the roadmap that Vineyard Canada has laid out which will move towards the eventual discernment process in January 2020 of whether or not Vineyard Canada will modify in any way it’s current position on LGBTQ people in leadership and same-sex marriages. Please continue to pray for this process of communal learning, prayer and discernment.
Nathan News:
There really isn’t any news. But every once in awhile rumours are circulated that he will be released on this or that date. Please know that we will give you notice as soon as we know anything that is solid – like a release date. When Nathan is released we know this will raise all kinds of questions and there is a good possibility that it may stir up various emotions in many of us. We are deeply aware of this reality, and will be attending to the community in the best way possible, seeking advice from others, including our Vineyard Canada national and regional leaders.
Mercy Reset:
There has been some intentional activity with the Street Parish folks over the last months. In the absence of an official start up on Drop-In we have been meeting for Pizza Lunches for discussions and connection. The next Sunday date is Nov 17 at which time we will focus on hamper assembly and distribution by the core group to their friends on the Bell Hotel strip. The theme is “one hand out and one hand in” which means everyone would focus on giving away before receiving. There is a lot of excitement on this. Then the Christmas feast will follow in December and an opportunity for the church to give hampers to those who would benefit from them.
Additionally, we are also considering being involved in the Care Portal. Care Portal is administered in Winnipeg by Forever Families and is a tool that connects churches with needs of families and children in care of CFS. This seems to have a lot of life on it in WCV and we think the Spirit may be highlighting it for us. This will develop into 2020 as the logistics firm up.
A last serious option starting now and into 2020 will be food distribution from our own resources (not a food bank). More details to come.
Finally, we want to encourage EVERYONE to keep a relationship active with someone in need. This is a mutually beneficial initiative for all and really is a non-negotiable option if we want to follow the invitation of scripture to “remember the poor” (Gal 2:10).
Thanks!
Please watch for more info on all these initiatives as well as a process for pursuing reconciliation in our relationships with those who have been disconnected or wounded in some way this past season.
Thanks for reading this and for your continued presence and contributions to the community. If you have any questions or would like to have a conversation about anything in this update, please reach out to anyone on the Leadership Team.
We’re excited to let you know that Flatlanders Inn has a new administrator! Hannah Foulger will be stepping into the 10 hour / week role beginning October 25. This is a key role in the sustainability of our Flatlanders community, providing critical support for the leadership team and helping to keep things in order up there. On the whole it is a slimmer season for Flatlanders with only Jeff and Amanda Leighton living upstairs in a leadership capacity (Andy is still involved but doesn’t live there). Hannah comes to us from St. Benedict’s Table and has a long history with the Vineyard in Cambridge, where she is originally from.
Welcome Hannah!
We invite you to pray for the whole community – that those present would partner with God’s invitations to each of them – that healing, strength and wholeness would come – that God’s Kingdom would advance.
Flatlanders Inn is a diverse and intentional community in Winnipeg’s North End that seeks to cultivate a positive, nurturing, and relational place to live for people who want to get their feet back under them.
Okay – so I’m not a huge podcast guy. But it turns out that spending a lot of time by myself either painting our new house (it takes two coats of primer and two coats of paint to cover that dark grey – who paints their house dark grey anyways?!) and my frequent treks across the prairies to visit my folks in Alberta (my mom is living with ALS) have given me the opportunity to explore a number of offerings. As you may know there are a lot out there but a particular podcast that has a lot of relevance to us at WCV is called “The Ferment: conversations about worship and transformation”.
As I’ve listened to various episodes, I’ve had so many “aha moments” I just had to pass along the treasure to you. It’s put out there by Vineyard Worship and features a wide range of guests and covers a broad gamut of subjects loosely gathered around worship and transformation.
If you’re new to the Vineyard, or have been around since forever, I want to point you toward a great new resource that Vineyard Canada recently published. It is a wonderful tool that will help you understand the history, theology, posture and practices of the Vineyard in Canada. You can view it online, or print it out for yourself – either way, I encourage you to make yourself something warm to drink, settle into a comfy spot, and read this “Why Vineyard?” booklet.
We had a great beginning to the EHS Course on Wednesday night. We are super encouraged by the response – 71 people are taking this ground-breaking course! Over the run of 8 sessions, we’ll be exploring the themes of:
The Problem of Emotionally Unhealthy Spirituality
Know Yourself that you may Know God
Going Back in Order to Go Forward
Journey through the Wall
Enlarge Your Soul through Grief and Loss
Discover the Rhythms of the Daily Office and Sabbath
Grow into an Emotionally Mature Adult
Go the Next Step to Develop a “Rule of Life”
If you’re taking this course, we’ll be exploring these topics in depth. If you’re not in the course, you can always sign up the next time (if this first round goes well). Also, we’ll be exploring the same themes throughout the Fall on Sunday mornings. The past two Sundays we’ve explored the first two topics and this coming Sunday I’ll be sharing on “Going Back in Order to Go Forward”. We will look at Joseph’s life in Genesis 50 as a template for this important idea.
There sure seems to be a lot of life on this course – let’s pray that God deeply meets each person involved and that we, as a community, will become more grounded, healthy and alive in Jesus as a result of the Holy Spirit’s work in us this season.
Thanks for your patience with us as we’ve worked to get our website back up and running. Vanessa Lewis and Ryan Santschi have both worked hard to fix the problems – thanks to both of them!
