Vineyard Spotlight: Bob Wilson and the Ithaca Vineyard
This week the Justice Response/VAST team continues our January ‘Vineyard Spotlight’ series in which we will hear from pastors, churchplanters, ministry leaders and activists who are working in the area of Justice Ministry in order to help empower others to engage.
Today is the first of two articles from Bob Wilson, who is the lead pastor at the Vineyard Church of Ithaca in New York. Bob and his wife Liz had moved to Ithaca in 1994 to start a campus ministry at Cornell University, and in 1997 sensed that God was leading them to be a part of the Vineyard. In February of 1999, the Ithaca Vineyard held its first service in the 3rd floor of the Community School of Music and Arts building on State Street. Over the past few years our church has grown rapidly, and while we still have a large contingent of Cornell and Ithaca College students, more and more people from the Ithaca area who were distant from the church have gotten connected here at the Vineyard! In addition to leading the Ithaca Vineyard, Bob has been a University Chaplain at Cornell University since 1994. Bob has been married to Elizabeth for twenty years and they currently have three teenage daughters, and are looking forward to their fourth daughter in early April 2011.
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One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament tells us that the one who puts on his armor should not boast like the one who takes it off. When it comes to the issues of human trafficking, I’ve seen the armor room, and I know that we need to get in for a fitting, but we are still a step or two away from that.
Like many of you, the topic of human trafficking, or modern day slavery has popped onto my radar over the past few years. What was clear from start was this was not something our church could address by starting a new program. I wanted to share a bit about what our journey here at the Ithaca Vineyard has looked like, and where we hope to go from here.
In 2006, while at a regional Vineyard conference, my oldest daughter Hannah was attending the youth conference. What stuck out to her from that week was a presentation about human slavery made by a person from a group called Justice for Children International (JCFI), now Love 146.
Earlier in the year we talked to our kids about giving money to support causes they believe in. We told them that we would match dollar for dollar any money they gave. The first time we were ever taken up on our offer was shortly after this conference as Hannah decided to money to JCFI.
Over the next couple of years, we looked for ways to be involved, but it always seemed like an issue that was “over there,” rather than here where we could actually do something about it.
So the main things we did over the next few years were simply try to learn more about the issue. We attended a meeting up at Cornell University where Laura Lederer, who was Senior Advisor on Human Trafficking at the U.S. Department of State spoke passionately about this issue. We talked about human trafficking on a Sunday morning, and had Hannah share with the whole church why this mattered so much to her. And then a couple years ago we had a Christmas offering and sent a part of what we raised to Love 146.
While all of that was good, we really wanted to do something more. We wanted to delve deeper into the issue of human trafficking. But every time we would begin the conversation we would end up frustrated, because we simply seemed out of our league. This was not an area where any of us in leadership had any background, and we couldn’t even figure out where to start.
Last year, I read a copy of The Hole in our Gospel, and afterward decided that on Easter Sunday of 2010 we would start a message series entitled “Justice.” We still didn’t feel like we had a handle on it, but we were jumping into the pool with both feet. As the date got closer, however we decided the best thing we could do was bring in someone had a better grasp on the subject than we did.A few years prior to this, I had been at a meeting where Steven Hamilton, from the Vineyard Community Church in Central Maryland had been one of the presenters. In addition, he is a member of the Justice Response national leadership team with VineyardUSA and a founding member of the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force. We contacted Steven, and asked him if he would be willing to help us begin walking through this process.
On Easter Sunday, we kicked off our Justice series, and the following Saturday Steven led a practical awareness seminar for people in our church who were interested in this topic.
If what we had been learning about this topic for the past four years was a trickle from a garden hose, that weekend with Steve was like a fire hose [in a good way :-)]. While there was so much for us to process as we began looking deeper at this issue, a few people began to be envisioned for this, and how it could work at our church here in Ithaca.
This past summer, one of the interns at our church went to a workshop on setting up a Love 146 task force to deal with this issue, and in November 2010, she and Hannah attended Love 146’s Collective Shout Conference. Our plan is to get a task force in place early next year and see what the next step brings.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I don’t come to this issue with many answers, just questions. As we have continued to ask these questions, we’ve found ourselves moving further along this path, and the further we go, the more people we find who are ready to jump in and get involved.
If you’re a pastor and you’ve had this kicking around in the back of your head for a bit, but haven’t known what to do with it, let me encourage you to do something. Try some of the thing we did, or not, but do something.
I’m convinced that this is the big issue that the church confronts in our world today, and I know for us, with each step we’ve taken, not only has the next one become more clear, but so has our desire to be a part of what God is doing.
[Check back on Thursday as our Vineyard Spotlight series continues with another article from Bob Wilson]