This summer, look for the VJN table at your local Vineyard regional conference. In fact, we’ve already kicked things off with a VJN table at the Great Lakes South Conference this week!

Here’s where we’ll be later this summer (we’ll be updating the list as we get more reps):

SouthWest Regional Conference (6/9-6/12)

South Central Regional Conference (6/11-6/14)

Southeast Regional Conference (6/11-6/13)

Midwest South Regional Conference (6/23-6/25)

NorthWest Regional Conference (7/9-7/11)

Eastern Regional Conference (7/15-7/17)

Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference (7/15-7/17)

Midwest North Regional Conference (7/16-7/19)

Southern California Regional Conference (7/31-8/2)

For more info, contact[at]vineyardjusticenetwork[dot]org.

How VJN Started

For those of you who are still curious about how VJN got started, here’s a re-post of the October 2013 VJN interview from Vineyard USA:
Introducing Vineyard Justice Network: A Conversation with Kathy Maskell

Recently, Kathy Maskell sat down with Vineyard USA to discuss the launch of the Vineyard Justice Network. Kathy was the assistant pastor at The River NYC and served on the VUSA Executive Team. Click here to read about how this new network seeks to equip our movement to pursue God’s justice in a kingdom way.

HOW DID THE VINEYARD JUSTICE NETWORK (VJN) GET STARTED, AND WHAT IS IT?
The Vineyard Justice Network actually began as the Vineyard Anti-Slavery Team (VAST) back in 2009. The steering committee, made up of Steven Hamilton, Cheryl Pittluck, and myself, were driven by a vision of God’s holistic justice from the beginning—but we wanted to start from where we were planted, and that was specifically in the area of fighting human trafficking, or modern-day slavery. Over the past five years, VAST witnessed Vineyard USA’s growing reputation as a movement that effectively engages with critical injustice of human trafficking.

This year, we (and the VUSA national leadership) agreed that now was the right time to build on the fruit of VAST by expanding our “justice response” to create Vineyard Justice Network. So, VJN just launched at the national conference in July! We exist to empower Vineyard pastors and leaders to pursue and enact the justice of God’s kingdom by offering resources and facilitating conversations on the interconnectivity of God’s justice. VJN focuses on three key entry points into addressing systemic injustice: freeing slaves, ending poverty, and tending creation.

At the national conference, we connected with over 200 Vineyard pastors and leaders during the week (representing over 30 states), most of whom had been engaged with justice and compassion work from the beginning of their church plants. I was deeply encouraged by the countless conversations with Vineyard pastors who are leading the way in our movement. They are partnering with their city to coordinate foster care placements with Christian families, serving refugee and undocumented immigrant families with legal assistance, developing community gardens, providing emergency housing for trafficking victims, facilitating Muslim-Christian dialogue, and creating long-term partnerships within a neighborhood to open community centers.

So, VJN aims to create a new space for these pastors and leaders to be networked so that they can encourage, challenge, and learn from one another.

This is why the new VJN resource site focuses on highlighting and celebrating the wealth of resources and the depth of work already represented by Vineyard churches: http://www.vineyardjusticenetwork.org.

HOW IS DOING THE WORK OF JUSTICE IN LINE WITH THE VINEYARD’S MISSION OF “JOINING GOD’S MISSION IN THE WORLD BY BUILDING A COMMUNITY OF CHURCHES THAT ARE PROCLAIMING AND PRACTICING THE FULL MESSAGE AND REALITY OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD?”
In a lot of ways, I see VJN as a means to honor the roots of our movement. In fact, John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard movement, once said that the purpose of the Vineyard could be summed up with two words: “worship” and “compassion.” Wimber regularly highlighted Jesus’ mission on earth to “release the oppressed:”

Christ came to liberate mankind from the penalty of sin and to release individuals from the consequences of sin and from the oppression of evil spirits. Oppression in the world manifests in many forms: economic, ethnic, political, religious, cultural, and demonic.

To fully express the love and compassion of God to the community, we must address all the needs present: social, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Jesus has come to set those people free and to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord. He’s come to redeem and save them, forgive their sins, take them out of their plight, and set them on a new road leading ultimately to their total redemption and deliverance when Christ’s kingdom comes in its fullness.¹

Wimber’s understanding that oppression must be equally addressed on a spiritual, physical, cultural, economic, and political level is a constant reminder to me that the work of justice is truly a physical manifestation of the kingdom of God being at hand today, a sign that points to the reality that we serve an “upside-down” King, one who teaches us that “the last shall be first.”

WHAT SPARKED YOUR PASSION FOR PURSUING GOD’S JUSTICE?
Nine years ago, my husband Caleb and I waited impatiently for a Cambodian taxi to whisk us to the airport, onward to our next leg of adventure in Vietnam. The world’s smallest girl, in a discarded Michael Jordan T-shirt, sidled up to me and tugged at my elbow. She feverishly pointed with her other hand at my plastic bag, which contained a baguette. She was hungry. I easily surrendered the bread. In a flash at least ten other children scurried over to tear at the bread, and just like that it was gone.

I cried throughout the flight to Saigon. So many questions haunted me: Does she have parents? How many hours a day did she beg? Was she going to eat dinner? While this wasn’t the first time I had been confronted by the face of extreme poverty, there was something about her. In that moment, I was confronted with a choice to care, to say “Yes! I see you. Yes! You have been fearfully and wonderfully made.”

After college, I had taught public school for three years in the South Bronx, once known as the “murder capital” of America—but it hardly prepared me for the moment of encounter I experienced in Cambodia. It brought into stark relief my desire to find a vocation that insisted on the work of justice, mercy, and transformational love while not objectifying or reducing the poor to statistics, to an it. Her real face and real story allowed me to enter into the real stories of millions of street children who are most vulnerable to the abhorrent injustice of sexual slavery.

Working with people like my friend Pastor Yeng in Cambodia has shaped my understanding about interconnectivity of injustice. Yeng trains community leaders on how to prevent human trafficking. He trains them to think not only about the act of human trafficking but also about the “push factors” that increase the vulnerability of a child to being trafficked. During one of Yeng’s seminars, a local pastor fell to his knees in grief as he realized that he had been tricked into selling several of his own children to traffickers. He simply had not understood what was happening.

In another church community, Yeng provoked frank discussion of the correlation between poverty, sexual abuse, sexual addiction, domestic violence and the trafficking of children for sex. The veil of shame and social taboo was lifted, truth and light came in, and hope began to dawn.

That first encounter in 2004 has led me to work for anti-trafficking and anti-poverty organizations, plant a Vineyard church, and go to seminary! And all along this journey, I have been challenged by God to marry our call to radical acts of justice with radical repentance and vulnerability. To execute Biblical justice, I could not simply become an activist who just wanted to “do something.” To paraphrase Ron Sider, we are not social activists; we are followers of Jesus. We respond to Jesus’ invitation to be filled up by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit to live justly in the world—an invitation to enlarge our imaginations and actions to go beyond the Facebook Cause of the Day or our spasms of compassion.

By pointing toward Jesus, I can participate in a relationship with the Holy Spirit who guides, empowers, and sustains me to ask the deeper questions, to take time to consider the interconnectivity between human trafficking, poverty, and the environment. Following Jesus frees me to ask for help and share my shortcomings and mistakes. And following Jesus helps me to live a kingdom-oriented lifestyle that stands on this truth: Death, poverty, and exploitation do not have the last word in this world, because the God of the Bible I serve is a poverty-free God.

HOW ABOUT THE OTHER VJN STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBERS? HOW DID THEY CATCH THE VISION FOR VJN?
I want to share steering committee member Cheryl Pittluck’s story of how she started her journey into tackling injustice:

A few years ago I got involved with the Anti-Human Trafficking Movement. I fell into it when a friend asked me to teach on the subject at an upcoming women’s event. After four to five weeks of googling, I finally had the facts, figures, and stories to present my well-ordered teaching designed to educate and inform. I was scheduled to give the same teaching three times in a row.

As I stood before about 50 women, I began my first presentation. Partway through, I was suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed with emotion. I could hardly speak. I struggled through, finished and, after a 10-minute break, started all over with the second group. The same thing happened, only this time it was worse. By the third delivery, I had to literally steel myself against the emotion and plow through it as quickly as possible.

For the next several days I felt as though I had been hit by a truck. What I finally realized was that in speaking the words out loud, the reality of what I was saying had gone from my head to my heart. While preparing the teaching, I had actually prayed that God would make the information “real to me” so that I could be genuine, but I never expected this kind of answer. God impressed upon me that His compassion was breaking into my heart. Once again, I realized that I didn’t know my God very well. So I went to His Word:

“Is this not the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice… to set the oppressed free…to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter…?” -Isaiah 58

What does God value? How can I demonstrate God’s compassion to the world? I must put my money where my mouth is and my hands where God’s heart is, because God’s heart is overflowing with compassion for the poor, the orphan, the alien, the widow, the lost, the lonely, the last, and the least. What a way to serve Jesus, bring light into the darkness, and beautify the bride of Christ.

Here’s a bit of Steven Hamilton’s story telling how he became aware of the need to understand the interconnectivity of God’s justice:

I first encountered the interconnectivity when I was doing some research on migration crises from countries like Cuba or Haiti to the U.S. I was researching mass migration and looking at the typical “triggers” that people point to (e.g. natural disasters like hurricanes, or civil unrest) that cause people to make certain choices. I quickly realized things like natural disasters and civil unrest were only triggers because there were other issues placing these people in desperate situations. In a situation like that, a natural disaster or civil unrest was the final trigger that propelled them to leave their homes for something—anything—else.

The desperate situations and issues before the final trigger include poor health and immense poverty. The fact is, most victims of human trafficking were already living with the consequences of the environmental and economic crisis prior to being lured into that life. As I continued to dig further in my research, I found it was indeed an environmental factor that had set off so many people’s treks down this treacherous pathway into the vile clutches of human traffickers and of those who prey upon the weak.

But the dots were connecting for me: I saw illegal immigration and human trafficking connecting to the situation of extreme poverty, which in turn was rooted in an environmental crisis. As I was talking to my boss at that time about my research, I said, “If we could get to work on the root ‘push’ issues of poverty and environmental crisis, while still working on the ‘pull’ issues of sexual dysfunction and deviation in the U.S.—if we could do something about them, these ‘homeland security issues’ might evaporate!” He looked up at me and said, “Steven, please, we’re not the church; we’re just the government.”

Unfortunately, the church today is a place where the broken run from. In truth, the church should be the safest place for the broken to run to. This fact grieves me so, because I know it to be a fact. I have sat and given permission to survivors of trafficking to speak their minds and tell God the lamentations of their hearts. And do you know what I hear? They complain and lament to God that His people have failed them. I have been part of that problem and I lament that too.

How many poor are in your local church? Do those trapped in prostitution find a safe place without condemnation in your fellowship?
¹http://trirobinson.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Wimber-on-the-Purpose-of-the-Church-2.pdf