Don Williams Ph.D., is the Pastor Emeritus and founder of Coast Vineyard in La Jolla, CA.  He was formerly a lecturer in religion at Claremont McKenna College in California and an adjunct professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He has a B.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of numerous books, including Start Here: Kingdom Essentials for Christians.  He is the architect of the Association of Vineyard Churches’ Statement of Faith.

Don, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself?

I came from a non-Christian family and was converted while a sophomore in High School through  Young Life, an evangelical organization aimed at teen agers. Feeling a call to ministry, I studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and received my Ph.D from Columbia University. I then pastored students at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church, becoming heavily involved in the “Jesus Movement.” After teaching at Claremont MacKenna College and Fuller Theological Seminary, I pastored a Presbyterian Church in La Jolla CA and planted the Coast Vineyard in San Diego in 1988, from which I retired in 2002. I am now involved in ministering to the entertainment industry in Hollywood, and helping David Ruis with a Vineyard church plant there (called Baseleia). My wife and I are also caring for her aging mother in West Los Angeles.

What are some things you are working on right now?

I am writing a book on dysfunctional church leaders who are codependent, addicted to ministry. I also meet every Saturday morning with a group of younger men who are  actors, writers and musicians working in Hollywood and spend time with them individually during the week. Along with caring for my mother-in-law I am as busy as I have ever been. I conclude that Christians don’t retire, they simply redirect their calling. I remember Earl Palmer, now preaching pastor of the National Presbyterian Church, commenting on Ephesians 4:1 that for the Christian it isn’t an issue of “vocation.” We all share one vocation or calling. It is the question of location, where the Lord wants us to be to live out that calling. This is clearly the case for me.

How have you seen the Vineyard change in the last 25 years? What are you most excited about for the Vineyard in the next 25 years? What are you most concerned about for the Vineyard in the next 25 years?

The Vineyard has gone through the loss of John Wimber, its charismatic leader. This resulted in a period of instability, followed by increasing institutionalization and organization. Max Weber calls this the “routinization of charisma.”

I am excited about a new breed of younger leaders whom God is raising up to live out and go beyond Wimber’s values (“worship and compassion”) and vision for ministry: ie. “Naturally supernatural ,” “The meat is on the street,” etc.  They want to “do the stuff” and are instinctively connected to the massive cultural shifts which we are now experiencing in the digital age, sociologically and politically. Many want to live radically in community for the sake of the gospel.  

I am concerned that  Vineyard may become functionally cessationist with respect to Jesus’ kingdom ministry of healing and deliverance empowered by the Holy Spirit. I am concerned that we may be naive about the spiritual warfare that we are involved in as kingdom people. I am concerned that we may stay a white middle class movement and miss the huge shifts, for example, as seen on the West Coast in the growth of our Hispanic population. I am concerned that we are becoming an aging movement unable to reach teenagers and reproduce ourselves in them (“the church is always one generation from extinction”). I am concerned that we have no relevant way to address their issues in a culture which has few boundaries and healthy families to offer them as models.  I am concerned that we become another denomination, more concerned about maintenance than church planting. I am concerned that our form (organization) will trump our freedom, especially the freedom for younger leaders to experiment and change the way we do things. I am concerned that we not face cultural, theological and ministry questions which are now dividing the mainline denominations, such as the issue of gay leaders, marriage, etc. I am concerned that we follow the well-trod path of cultural assimilation and denominational elitism and lose our prophetic cutting edge.  This is enough for now!

Do you have book recommendation for young pastors and leaders?

I have two: The first is a very readable study of American church history from the Revolutionary War to about 1830 . It is Nathan Hatch’s,  The Democratization of American Christianity, Yale Univ Press, 1989. Hatch shows that religious populist movements shaped our culture by abandoning the elitism of churches on the eastern seaboard and moving West with charismatic leaders who followed the Jeffersonian ideal of the dignity of each individual and a “lay clergy” who evangelized these new populations and created the 19th century “Christian America.”  Reviewers write, “The so-called Second Great Awakening was the shaping epoch of American Protestantism, and this book is the most important study of it ever published”; “Hatch’s revisionist work asks us to put the religion of the early republic in a radically new perspective….  He has written one of the finest books on American religious history to appear in many years.” As you read this, think, “Early Vineyard.”  Hatch’s book is the antithesis of the excellent work of James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony and  Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford, 2010).

My second recommendation is a modern illustration of Hatch’s thesis: The Diaries of Jim Rayburn, ed. by Kit Sublett (Morningstar Press, Colorado, 2008). The founder of Young Life demonstrates that the “wild leaders” of the Second Great Awakening are not an historical anachronism and gives us hope for God doing it again.

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