Question: The Toronto Vineyard church, which was the center of the laughing revival, has been ...

Question: The Toronto Vineyard church, which was the center of the laughing revival, has been removed by John Wimber from the Fellowship of Vineyard Churches. Is that not a good sign that Wimber is maturing and rejecting some of the excesses that he once embraced?

Response: Wimber wrote the foreword to the book on holy laughter by Jon Arnott, head pastor of the now disfellowshipped Toronto Vineyard, and he is not in opposition to any of the phenomena. His objection, which caused the breach, was to Arnott’s [Toronto’s] insistence upon providing biblical justification and explanation of animal noises and other manifestations for which no clear correspondence in Scripture can be found.

Vineyard churches continue their involvement in “holy laughter,” for example, the St. Louis Vineyard Christian Fellowship. Its pastor, Randy Clark, is the one who brought the laughing revival to Toronto. Clark “got it” from Rodney Howard-Browne at Kenneth Hagin, Jr.’s Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa and continues to promote it worldwide. Moreover, Clark was attracted to Howard-Browne because “people shaking, falling, laughing” reminded him of what he had seen “years earlier in the Vineyard revivals.” Scheduled to be a featured speaker at the 25th International Lutheran Conference on the Holy Spirit at St. Paul, MN, August 6-10, Clark is described in the conference brochure as the one who “was used of God as the catalyst for the outbreak of the Spirit in Toronto....”

Remember, Promise Keepers is a Vineyard movement. I suspect (but can’t prove) that this removal was necessitated by the fact that the adverse publicity directed to the Toronto Vineyard endangered PK’s reputation.