Sojourn: Becoming Vineyard & Anabaptist Again (Part Four)

Hawaiian shirts and Kingdom hearts—some Vineyard traditions run deeper than style, tracing back to John Wimber and our California roots.

This is Part Four of the Sojourn Series. You might enjoy reading the earlier chapters before this one. In this story, I share how I found my way back to the Vineyard—carrying with me the convictions I discovered in the Anabaptist movement and learning, at last, what it means to lead a quiet life.

When I look back, 2020 feels like both a lifetime ago and just yesterday. It was the year the world stopped, the year we all faced ourselves, and the year I found myself standing in two worlds at once—one I was learning to let go of, and one I was slowly coming home to again.

At that time, in the throes of COVID and rising cultural tensions, I was serving as Lead Pastor at East Petersburg Mennonite Church. I had been there long enough to feel settled, familiar, and even a little comfortable. We had weathered seasons of transition, disagreement, and growth together. It was a difficult time, but I genuinely loved the people, and I thought I might stay there for a long time. Yet beneath that settled rhythm, something in me was shifting.

A Conversation at Panera

I still remember the late morning when I ran into a fellow pastor from our district at Panera Bread. We were both tired, both leading through one of the most polarized and exhausting times in memory. He was getting something to go, and I was working on my sermon and some discernment. Between COVID, politics, and all the cultural tremors shaking the church, it often felt like we were holding everything together with duct tape and prayer. As we talked, he made a comment about his own church—how “you can only stretch an old wineskin so far.”

That sentence stuck with me. It wasn’t cynical; it was freeing. God used it, at least I think it was God. It permitted me to name something emerging in me that I already knew. I couldn’t keep stretching the limits of the community in that season. The container I was in had served its season well, but it could no longer hold the next thing God was forming in me. I had done what I could do; it was time for another season for that church. They needed something else, I needed healing from a really rough journey, and God was birthing something new and convicting in me.

Letting Go

Letting go is never tidy. The process didn’t unfold quite like I had envisioned during my own prayer and discernment. There were tensions, misunderstandings, and a few painful exchanges that made it more complicated than it needed to be. Still, I knew God was inviting me into something new.

That summer, I began serving as the Director of Pastoral Ministries at Water Street Mission, overlapping my final months at East Petersburg. It was one of the strangest seasons imaginable—ending one pastoral role while stepping into another during the height of COVID. On August 31, 2020, I led my last Sunday at East Petersburg Mennonite Church. Two months earlier, on June 24, I had already begun my new ministry at Water Street Mission.

Water Street Mission is a rescue mission serving those experiencing homelessness in Lancaster, and my new role centered on advancing the Kingdom of God through the gospel—offering care, discipleship, and pastoral presence to men and women walking through some of life’s darkest valleys. It was, in many ways, a return to my earliest ministry convictions: that the church exists to bring hope where hope has run out. I was going to get to walk with others on a spiritual search, which has always been a passion of mine.

Coming Home to the Vineyard

As I was learning how to pastor differently at Water Street Mission, something else was stirring in my family. We found ourselves back at Sanctuary Vineyard Church in Lancaster—a small, Spirit-filled community that was trying to do church differently. Sanctuary had taken a hit after COVID, like many small congregations, but it was a place full of warmth and worship. I was excited that our kids would get to experience the movement of churches that shaped me early on in my faith.

Walking into that building felt like coming home. The Vineyard had always carried a sense of authenticity and freedom for me—something raw and real that cut through the noise of religion-as-performance. There were no masks to put on, no ladders to climb, and no need to pretend. I didn’t have to pretend to be something or dress up like I was someone. The people weren’t perfect, but they were present. Worship wasn’t about spectacle; it was about encounter. Teaching wasn’t about control; it was about formation. Community wasn’t about conformity; it was about belonging.

In those simple gatherings, I reconnected with the heart of what had first drawn me to the Vineyard years earlier: an expectation that God still meets ordinary people in ordinary spaces. The values of worship, discipleship, community, mission, and restoration weren’t abstract ideas—they were lived realities. The Vineyard’s theology of “the already and not yet” gave language to the tension I felt between hope and heartbreak, between faith and fatigue. And in that space, I felt again the grace that first found me.

Katie McLain and I felt that sense of belonging almost immediately. Our kids did too. They loved it. For them, this was church—simple, real, and relational. I had been away from the Vineyard for years, and yet I realized I had carried its DNA all along: the worship, the expectancy, the belief that the Holy Spirit still moves among ordinary people. After almost every gathering, a few of us would grab pizza or some other late-night meal, and it led to great conversations and memorable memories that our kids still talk about.

I joined the preaching and leadership teams and loved being part of a community that felt alive and honest. But the world was still fragile, and so was the church. Post-COVID realities hit hard. Sanctuary struggled to survive. In December 2021, the church closed its doors after some discernment from the senior leadership. I felt it could have continued, but I didn’t have the history, and in many ways, seeing the community fracture after finally feeling home was heartbreaking, but even in its final days, I felt immense gratitude for what it had given us.

Two Worlds Overlapping (Vineyard & Anabaptist)

During this same season, I was also working part-time with Rosedale Bible College, an Evangelical Anabaptist/Mennonite school, overseeing its experimental and emerging accredited online distance learning program. It was a strange overlap—pastoring those experiencing homelessness through Water Street, teaching leaders in the Anabaptist world, and worshiping again with Vineyard people.

Some might call that complicated. I call it home. My spiritual life has always lived at the intersection of movements—Vineyard’s worship and freedom, Anabaptism’s peace and community, and a deep contemplative longing to hear God’s still, small voice. It worked in a strange way, but I also didn’t feel like I was totally home in the way that I thought I would feel at home years before.

The Quiet Life

Around that same time, I was reading Scripture in a quiet time when a passage I’d seen countless times before felt like it was suddenly highlighted in yellow ink straight from heaven.

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”
— 1 Thessalonians 4:11–12 (NIV)

Those words have never let go of me since then. In reading them that day, I was convinced it was something to explore personally and for churches in this season. These two verses from Paul have become my anchor, my framework, and eventually, the name of this blog. The pursuit to lead a quiet life isn’t about retreat or apathy—it’s about faithful presence. In this season of my life, that calling has become both personal and pastoral. I sense God inviting me—and the churches I lead—to resist the noise and hurry of a world that constantly demands more. Leading a quiet life is about living with a stillness before God that becomes contagious, even questionable, in the best kind of way. It’s about tending to the small, slow, steady work of God in our midst and letting that quiet faithfulness speak louder than striving ever could.

Somewhere between Water Street Mission, Sanctuary Vineyard, and my roles in education, I realized that this was what God had been forming in me all along. The quiet life isn’t passive—it’s intensely active, deeply rooted. It’s the life that moves at the pace of grace.

Then Came River Corner Church

When Sanctuary Vineyard closed, we weren’t sure what was next. We visited a few churches, including some in the Vineyard network—even a historic one in California that caught my imagination for a moment. But if I discerned correctly, then the Holy Spirit had other plans.

Around that time, a local bishop in the LMC Churches, whom I knew, and I had coffee. There was a small, rural Mennonite church that had closed but wanted to reopen. It had no governance, no air conditioning, and no clear direction—but it had a few faithful people still praying and gathering in that space.

At first, I said no and pursued other ideas. But the stirring wouldn’t go away, and they reached out and asked us to reconsider. Eventually, we said yes—we started officially on April 1, 2022.

That’s how we found ourselves at River Corner Church, a small, simple church community nestled in the countryside of Conestoga, Pennsylvania. River Corner is a Spirit-led, quiet fellowship of Jesus followers—rooted in the way of Jesus, shaped by the Anabaptist tradition, and drawn together by a desire to live with purpose and humility.

We don’t have lights or polish—just a shared desire to worship, grow, and follow Jesus together. Each Sunday, we meet in a modest meetinghouse on a quiet hillside. Our mission is simple: to love God, follow Jesus, partner with the Holy Spirit, and love our neighbors.

It’s not big, but it’s beautiful. It’s quiet. It’s home. It seemed to match what I was exploring as part of 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, a calling I was sensing.

Where the Quiet Life Found Me

Though my roots began in fundamental and Calvinistic soil, and my growth was shaped by Vineyard and Anabaptist streams, I’ve learned that the Kingdom of God is vast, wondrous, and wild. There are many faithful ways of following Jesus.

This blog—Lead a Quiet Life—is my attempt to live out that invitation. To write with humility, to speak with grounding, and to keep things simple. It’s a way of making sense of life, formation, and faithfulness in a loud world. In that way, this blog is my journey that I am on.

Lead a Quiet Life explores what it means to lead a quieter life at a slower pace, discovering a simple life and faith that embraces downward mobility in a chaotic world and a church often obsessed with excess.

The quiet life isn’t glamorous. But it’s the soil where joy, patience, and hope take root. And it’s where I’ve found Jesus—again and again.

I believe that the quiet life is a resistant, faithful way of being present to God and others—and maybe even a vision of renewal for those who are disillusioned but still hopeful for what Christianity could look like in this chaotic world.

Though this journey started in this season, I am only learning now how far it is becoming who I am and how it shapes my Rule of Life and expectations for life.

Coming Next: Becoming Missional

When simplicity finds its footing, it tends to walk toward the margins. The next part of this sojourn traces how God led us into missional life—how Jesus kept meeting us among the poor, the overlooked, and those who are learning to start again.