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Wimber, Storms, and the Practice of the Gifts

The argument of this casebook is about what Scripture teaches. But a doctrine is practised by somebody, and these two figures made the practice visible. John Wimber put the gifts on the front line of evangelism and healing in the 1980s; Sam Storms, a generation later, wrote the careful manual. Read together, they show why the question has moved: the live issue is no longer "did the gifts cease?" but "how are they used faithfully?"

The claim

The people who took the gifts seriously in the late twentieth century produced both genuine fruit and serious disorder. The disciplined practice of the gifts is therefore a theological achievement, not a mood.

Wimber and the Vineyard

John Wimber was a musician and church-growth consultant before he was a pastor, and the Vineyard movement he led in the 1980s carried his instincts: the church exists for the kingdom, and the kingdom is not a doctrine to be defended but a power to be encountered. Power Evangelism (1985) and Power Healing (1987), both written with Kevin Springer, are the manifestos.

The central idea is the power encounter, a term Wimber took from the missiologist Alan Tippett. The gospel is not only proclaimed; it is demonstrated, and the demonstration is a collision between the kingdom of God and the powers that hold people. Healing, deliverance, and words of knowledge are not decorations on the church's message. They are the message arriving.

Wimber's theology was explicitly a theology of the already and the not yet. The kingdom has broken in, but it has not filled the earth; healing is a sign of the age to come, not a guarantee in this one. He insisted that not everyone is healed. But the atmosphere of the movement — the expectation, the risk, the prayer that assumes God might act now — was the point, and it is not nothing.

The controversy came through Fuller Theological Seminary. From 1981 to 1986 Wimber and C. Peter Wagner taught MC510, "Signs, Wonders and Church Growth," a course that drew students from around the world and drew a fight at home. Faculty objected that the course did not subject its claims to the testing that scholarship requires; the seminary reviewed it, and in 1986 it was discontinued. The episode made the question academic in a new way: not whether the gifts exist, but whether a seminary can teach their practice (the renewal).

The criticisms are real. Wimber was theologically unschooled by the standards of the academy, and the "power encounter" framework, borrowed from missiology, was never integrated into a full doctrine of God and providence. The movement over-claimed: its publicity could suggest a uniformity of results that the evidence did not carry. And its style — the falling, shaking, and "resting in the Spirit" that later became the Vineyard's public face — invited both imitation and contempt. None of that is an argument against the gifts. All of it is an argument for order, testing, and honest reporting.

Storms and the practice

Sam Storms is a Reformed pastor-theologian who came to the gifts through the text rather than through a revival. The Beginner's Guide to Spiritual Gifts (2002) and Practicing the Power (2017) are the mature statement: the gifts are for the church, the church should seek them, and the church must practise them with discipline.

Where Wimber was a pioneer, Storms is a pastor. His distinctives are worth naming.

  • Prophecy is fallible. Following Wayne Grudem's argument, Storms treats New Testament prophecy as a genuine revelation that is nevertheless mixed with human fallibility, and therefore always to be weighed (1 Corinthians 14:29). He warns against "thus saith the Lord" as a way of shutting down discernment.
  • Healing is already and not yet. Storms insists that God heals, that he does not always heal, and that the sick are not to be blamed for their sickness. He writes about disappointment as a pastoral reality, not an anomaly.
  • Tongues are for the church, with interpretation. The private use is real, but the public use is governed by 1 Corinthians 14: two or three, in turn, with interpretation.
  • Order is a gift. Storms gives practical instruction for a meeting where someone might bring a word: how to test it, how to weigh it, how to say "I think" rather than "God says," how to stop.

That last point is the one that matters for this page. Storms has moved the argument from the existence of the gifts to their grammar — the shape a church gives them so that they build up rather than damage. The question is no longer only "are they for today?" but "what would it look like to use them well?" The answer is on the gifts in the local church and in seeking the gifts.

What this pair gets right

They get the expectation right. A church that never expects God to act has already answered the question by its practice, and its answer is not derived from Scripture. Wimber's instinct here was sound even where his theology was thin.

They get the priority of the kingdom right. The gifts are not the church's possession or the minister's brand; they are signs that the age to come has touched this one.

And Storms gets the pastoral discipline right. The answer to abuse is not abolition. Paul's answer to a chaotic church was "let all things be done for building up" — and still, "do not forbid speaking in tongues" (1 Corinthians 14:26, 39). See why so much of it is fake for the failures this discipline is meant to prevent.

What this does and does not prove

It proves: that the gifts can be practised with order, honesty, and pastoral care; that the move from doctrine to practice is possible without hype; and that the Reformed tradition has produced serious teachers of the gifts, not only critics.

It does not prove: that Wimber's results were what his publicity suggested, that every Vineyard practice was wise, or that Storms's grammar settles the exegetical question. Practice is not proof. It is the shape obedience takes — and it is where most readers will actually meet the question.

Further reading

  • John Wimber and Kevin Springer, Power Evangelism (Harper & Row, 1985).
  • John Wimber and Kevin Springer, Power Healing (Harper & Row, 1987).
  • Sam Storms, The Beginner's Guide to Spiritual Gifts (Regal, 2002).
  • Sam Storms, Practicing the Power (Zondervan, 2017).

See also