Vineyard Churches

About Vision & Values

We have over 100 Churches across England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales,with new churches being planted on a regular basis. For more details on new church plants please visit our church planting pages.

What are our values about the role of Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland?

There are four main values we adhere to:

Minimal bureaucracy

Whatever organisational and oversight structure we construct should be built on people who, for as long as possible, continue to remain in the role of senior pastor. Once you begin appointing large numbers of people whose only role is to govern a movement, the emphasis inevitably becomes more on bureaucracy and status quo, and less focussed on the original mission. Hopefully, by maintaining a system where those in government are also on the frontline in pastoral ministry, we can avoid losing the vision in the process of carrying it out

Importance of relationship

Developing relationships among leaders who like to be together, work together, and get things done together, is primary to maintaining a highly relational movement. If we do that, we have the pleasure of serving God with our contemporaries, equals, friends, and colleagues. Holding all these friendships together are the values, goals, theology, and practices we share in common. Though we are not all equally gifted in any area of ministry, we value one another’s distinctive contributions

The autonomy of the local Vineyard church

We want the local church freely to express itself and govern itself, within the constraints of the values, theology, and genetic code of the Vineyard.
In other words, we want each Vineyard to resemble the family, without necessarily having an identical personality, while at the same time enjoying local autonomy, which means being a registered charitable organisation in its own right, establishing its own policies, leasing or owning property etc. etc. We do not want, and have not set up, a bureaucratic system that controls the local church.

Spiritual versus structural authority

Our understanding is that power and authority resides both in the spiritual and relational aspect of our ministry as well as the structural.
We are, we trust, a ministry, initiated and led by the Holy Spirit, and we move on as the Spirit gives us opportunity and as relationships develop. In the wake of that happening, we then will follow along behind with the necessary structure.


Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland is not a structure, which has (or wants) legal jurisdiction in the local Vineyards. We have assumed that if we have spiritual authority, we don't need legal authority. And if we don't have spiritual authority, we certainly don't want legal authority ! In other words, we don't want to govern people and churches who don't want government and oversight from us, and we don't want to give direction or bring correction to people who don't recognise our spiritual authority to do so.


So, if a local church or its pastor doesn't want to take pastoral counsel from us, then the obvious conclusion is that they are not under our authority. In that circumstance, as a matter of integrity, we would simply ask them (without rancour or belligerence) to change their name, and become identified with a movement or denomination whose leaders they can submit to.


Assuming that a Vineyard and/or its senior pastor had not strayed theologically or morally, we would not need to resort to the procedure for Termination of Membership as outlined in the By-laws. Why ? Because this (hypothetical) situation is not an issue of church discipline, but merely a relational/pastoral one. We would simply ask them to change the name of their church by removing the name ‘Vineyard’, and in so doing, we are not implying anything negative about their behaviour or beliefs, nor are we attaching any blame to either side. We are simply recognising ‘after the fact’ something that has already happened, namely, that we do not have spiritual authority and that we are not their leaders.

Low Profile

The role of Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland is to give help, support and encouragement to pastors and leaders, and providing resources to the movement. So its profile needs to be high enough to accomplish these goals, but not so high that it contradicts our assumptions or violates our values about organisations. There is a balance to be struck, so that we don't end up with a monolithic, bureaucratic monster.

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