 Official Logo | |
| Formation | 1996 |
|---|---|
| Founder | John and Eleanor Mumford |
| Location |
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| Website | www |
Vineyard Churches UK and Ireland (or VCUKI) is the national body for the Association of Vineyard Churches in the United Kingdom and Ireland. There are more than 100 churches under its direction. The organisation is both a registered charity (number 1099748) [1] and a registered company (number 04839046). [2]
The Vineyard church was established in the UK by John and Eleanor Mumford. After visiting John Wimber in the US, the Mumfords returned to the UK to establish the first British Vineyard church, South West London Vineyard in 1987. VCUKI became its own national organisation in 1996, when it was released by the international body.
The Vineyard Churches UK and Ireland is headed by its national directors, John and Debby Wright, who officially took over from John and Eleanor Mumford in September 2015. [3] There is then a Leadership Council, with members responsible for different specialisms within the church (church planting, church development, and financial and legal issues).
In addition to the central leadership, the UK and Ireland are divided into 13 areas. [4] Each area is run by Area Leaders, who are responsible for that area of the country. Areas tend to hold their own training and events for the local people, leaders and churches.
One of the first academic studies of a Vineyard church in the United Kingdom was Cory E. Labanow's Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church: A Congregational Study of a Vineyard Church. [5] Within the congregation studied ("Jacobsfield Vineyard"), there was a common identity as an "emerging church".
However, Labanow reports that the meaning of this common identity was contested within the congregation. Even more significantly, the decentralised, non-creedal nature of the Vineyard churches in the UK and the Republic of Ireland makes it such that one church cannot be seen to be representative of the whole of the Vineyard movement in the UK and Ireland.
Presbyterianism is a part of the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition within Protestantism that broke from the Roman Catholic Church. Presbyterian churches derive their name from the presbyterian form of church government by representative assemblies of elders. Many Reformed churches are organised this way, but the word Presbyterian, when capitalized, is often applied to churches that trace their roots to the Church of Scotland or to English Dissenter groups that formed during the English Civil War.
The United Reformed Church (URC) is a Protestant Christian church in the United Kingdom. As of 2022 it had approximately 40,000 members in 1,284 congregations with 334 stipendiary ministers.
Congregational churches are Protestant churches in the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition practicing congregationalist church governance, in which each congregation independently and autonomously runs its own affairs.
The Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) was founded on 22 June 1977, when most congregations of the Methodist Church of Australasia, about two-thirds of the Presbyterian Church of Australia and almost all the churches of the Congregational Union of Australia united under the Basis of Union. According to the church, it had 243,000 members in 2018. In the 2016 census, about 870,200 Australians identified with the church; in the 2011 census, the figure was 1,065,796. The UCA is Australia's third-largest Christian denomination, behind the Catholic and the Anglican Churches. There are around 2,000 UCA congregations, and 2001 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) research indicated that average weekly attendance was about 10 per cent of census figures.
The United Church of Christ (UCC) is a socially liberal mainline Protestant Christian denomination based in the United States, with historical and confessional roots in the Congregational, Restorationist, Continental Reformed, and Lutheran traditions, and with approximately 4,600 churches and 712,000 members.The UCC is a historical continuation of the General Council of Congregational Christian churches founded under the influence of New England Puritanism. Moreover, it also subsumed the third largest Calvinist group in the country, the German Reformed. Notably, its modern members' theological and socio-political stances are often very different from those of its predecessors.
Baptists Together, formally the Baptist Union of Great Britain, is a Baptist Christian denomination in England and Wales. It is affiliated with the Baptist World Alliance and Churches Together in England. The headquarters is in Didcot.
The Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) is an evangelical Christian denomination in the Radical Pietistic tradition. The EFCA was formed in 1950 from the merger of the Swedish Evangelical Free Church and the Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Free Church Association. It is affiliated with the International Federation of Free Evangelical Churches.
British society is one of the most secularised in the world and in many surveys determining religious beliefs of the population agnosticism, nontheism, atheism, secular humanism, and non-affiliation are views shared by a majority of Britons. Historically, it was dominated for over 1,400 years by various forms of Christianity, which replaced preceding Romano-British religions, including Celtic and Anglo-Saxon paganism. Religious affiliations of United Kingdom citizens are recorded by regular surveys, the four major ones being the national decennial census, the Labour Force Survey, the British Social Attitudes survey and the European Social Survey.
The Evangelical Alliance (EA) is a national evangelical alliance, member of the World Evangelical Alliance. Founded in 1846, the activities of the Evangelical Alliance aim to promote evangelical Christian beliefs in government, media and society. The Evangelical Alliance is based in London, with offices in Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast and Stockport.
The Congregational Christian Churches were a Protestant Christian denomination that operated in the U.S. from 1931 through 1957. On the latter date, most of its churches joined the Evangelical and Reformed Church in a merger to become the United Church of Christ. Others created the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches or joined the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference that formed earlier in 1945. During the forementioned period, its churches were organized nationally into a General Council, with parallel state conferences, sectional associations, and missionary instrumentalities. Congregations, however, retained their local autonomy and these groups were legally separate from the congregations.
Newfrontiers is a neo-charismatic church network of evangelical, charismatic churches founded by Terry Virgo. It forms part of the British New Church Movement, which began in the late 1950s and 1960s combining features of Pentecostalism with British evangelicalism. Other streams of the British New Church Movement with which it shares some features include Together, Ministries Without Borders, and Life-Links. Groups like Pioneer, Ichthus Christian Fellowship, and Vineyard are more distantly related. Newfrontiers describes itself as "a group of apostolic leaders partnering together on global mission, joined by common values and beliefs, shared mission and genuine relationships". Its theology is distinctively Reformed. Newfrontiers is committed to building churches according to "New Testament principles". One of the slogans of the movement has been "changing the expression of Christianity around the world", which is based on a prophecy given to the movement in 1990 by Paul Cain, a Latter Rain revivalist.
The Evangelical Presbyterian Church in England and Wales (EPCEW) is a reformed and conservative evangelical Presbyterian denomination based in England and Wales with churches in Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden. Founded in 1996, the denomination is small but growing.
The Congregation of Christian Brothers is a worldwide religious community within the Catholic Church, founded by Edmund Rice.
New Wine is a not-for-profit Christian evangelical organisation based in England, United Kingdom. It assists Christian churches with organisational leadership training and fundraising.
The Evangelical Methodist Church (EMC) is a Christian denomination in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. The denomination reported 399 churches in the United States, Mexico, Burma/Myanmar, Canada, Philippines and several European and African nations in 2018, and a total of 34,656 members worldwide.
The Conservative Congregational Christian Conference is a Congregationalist denomination of Protestant Christianity. It is based in the United States.
The Congregational Union of England and Wales brought together churches in England and Wales in the Congregational tradition between 1831 and 1966.
The Vineyard Life Church, Richmond, which is a member of the Evangelical Alliance, was formed in 2013 as the result of a merger between Richmond Borough Church and The Vineyard Church, Richmond. It meets in a 19th-century church building located in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. The congregation run a community centre, a food bank and a charity shop, and also use the building as a music venue for young people.
Congregationalism in the United States consists of Protestant churches in the Reformed tradition that have a congregational form of church government and trace their origins mainly to Puritan settlers of colonial New England. Congregational churches in other parts of the world are often related to these in the United States due to American missionary activities.