About

What is NothinsGonnaStopIt!?

After Bill Jackson graduated from Wheaton College in 1975 he worked for the Christian youth organization called Campus Life. One day, in his intern class, a professor from Trinity Seminary went over the storyline of the Bible in three hours on an overhead projector. Bill was mesmerized. In his many years in the church he had never understood how the story worked until that day. Prior to that all he had had were pieces, random biblical stories without a context. That day on that overhead projector God gave him a glimpse of his future. He too would learn to tell The Story.

Fast forward to 1990. John Wimber, the national director of the Vineyard churches, had asked Bill to go over the storyline of the Bible at their pastor’s conference that summer in Denver. In five, half-hour talks Bill took the pastors from Genesis to Revelation painting the picture of God’s plan for human history that will culminate with every tongue, tribe, language and nation worshipping God at the heavenly throne. When he got to the book of Acts he began tracing the “nothing can hinder it” theme that is clearly one of Luke’s purposes in his story of the early church. To dramatize the telling he repeatedly asked, “Can anything stop the gospel?” The pastors began to shout, “Nothing’s going to stop it!” On the last day John got up on stage and announced that he wanted Bill to continue doing the talks throughout the Vineyard churches.

Since that time Bill has traveled around the United States and in various countries of the world sharing the storyline of the Bible in churches and lecture halls in a seven hour seminar that he has called NothinsGonnaStopIt!.

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NothinsGonnaStopIt! in a nutshell

St. Augustine tells the story of a young priest who came up to him frustrated with the immense task of teaching the Bible to one of his catechumens. Augustine told the priest that although all parts of the Bible are equal in terms of God’s inspiration they are not all equal in their importance in driving the story forward. He told his disciple to determine which stories were the most critical for the storyline and then help the student understand their meaning and how they connect with the other parts of the story. This is exactly what NothinsGonnaStopIt! does.

It seeks to:

In order to:

Why is this called NothinsGonnaStopIt!?

We have already told the story of the pastors in 1990 who, to Bill's question, “Can anything stop the gospel?” began to shout, “Nothing’s going to stop it!” The reasons for calling this seminar NothinsGonnaStopIt!, however, goes much deeper than this initial experience so here we want to delve more deeply into the theology behind the “nothing can hinder it” motif in the Scripture and demonstrate that it is a major biblical theme.

The key verse for NothinsGonnaStopIt! is Isaiah 46.10: "I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand and I will do all that I please."

This verse says that encapsulated in the stories recorded for us in the early chapters of Genesis are the themes and motifs that will one day culminate in the end of history, thus vindicating God's purposes for creation. Central to the drama of human history, made so clear at the beginning, is that God's plan is opposed by a serpent, who is later identified in the narrative as Satan. In the biblical narrative human history is cast as a war between the seed of the woman, Eve, and the seed of the serpent, Satan. As we shall see, God promises to bring forth from the seed of the woman a male child who will destroy Satan's kingdom in a battle that is really no battle at all because God's purpose will stand and he will do all that he pleases.

The story of God’s unstoppable kingdom, then, begins in the book of Genesis. Most readers aren’t aware that the creation narratives are written as an apologetic against the ancient gods and the creation stories of the Ancient Near East that depict the creation of the earth as the result of a great battle. The God of the Bible, however, is completely sovereign over the realm of the deep, thought to be the dwelling place of the mythical creature called Leviathan. In the biblical creation story the deep is not pre-existent matter but just water that God creates simply by speaking. And the great Leviathan thought to be the god of the underworld? He’s just a really cool fish in the sea. And the two greatest deities in the ancient world, the sun and the moon? Genesis says that they were just lights in the sky. This is the greatest put-down in ancient history. The writer of Genesis is making a mockery of these so-called gods. The creation account is depicted as a mock battle that is really no contest. We might call it the "un-battle."

The un-battle motif continues in the story of Noah's flood. In response to the power of human sin, God easily returns the earth to its chaotic state and essentially starts over. He preserves a remnant by his grace and re-commissions Noah as a type of new Adam to multiply, fill and rule the earth as God’s co regent, as he had done with Adam. God set his war bow (his light manifest as the colors of the rainbow) in the sky as a giant post-it note to "remind him" to preserve the earth until his plan of redemption had come to its consummation.

The ultimate Old Testament expression of the un-battle theme occurs at the exodus. Most people are not aware that each one of the plagues sent by God through the hand of Moses was a defeat of one of the Egyptian gods. After the Egyptian magicians can’t duplicate the third plague they say, “This is the finger of God.” Defeating these so-called gods was so easy for Israel’s God that he would do it with his finger!

The un-battle is demonstrated very clearly in the ministry of Jesus. He casts out demons with only a spoken word, just like God’s victory in the un-battle at creation. Jesus connects his deliverance ministry to the exodus saying that he too casts out demons by using only his finger. The un-battle is ultimately demonstrated, of course, in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus defeated Satan by apparently losing the battle at the cross but and then the finger of God simply raised him from the dead. It was so easy the grave clothes were just vacated and sunk down onto the stone.

So, when we get to the book of Acts, we can see that the advance of God’s unhindered kingdom continues the story of the battle that is really no battle at all. The last word in the Greek text of the book of Acts is the word “unhindered.” As was already mentioned, in Acts Luke bends over backwards to show that despite overwhelming obstacles the story of God will march forward from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth and nothing can hinder it.

All this culminates in the book of Revelation where history crescendos with a great "battle" between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. God defeats the kingdom of darkness by the testimony of those who follow the way of the male child who destroys Satan's works. Creation then enters New Creation where the themes and motifs set in motion at the beginning of the story find their completion at the end.

God has made known the end from the beginning. His purpose will stand and he will do all that he pleases. NothinsGonnaStopIt!

So…that’s how this material got its name and I like what it communicates. Human history is not some deadlock between good and evil. This is not a light-saber battle between Darth Vadar and Luke Skywalker. When we hear God's story we realize that he is not only in complete control of our lives but that he is in complete control of human history as well. His purpose will stand and when human history plays itself out God will get all the glory that is due his name.

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How the story works

The astute reader of the Bible needs to understand that the story of the Bible is being told at three different levels simultaneously. We might envision a movie. First there is the basic plot line: boy meets girl, girl plays hard to get, boy makes a fool of himself to prove his love, and boy gets girl in the end. Micro-ing in we next get another layer to the story. Boy meets girl in college, girl is engaged to another guy, boy sings for girl outside her window in her dorm, girl breaks it off with her boyfriend and marries the foolish lover who has proved himself. The final layer has to do with the details of each scene in the movie that moves the story along.

Classic to the way narrative works then, the story of the story of the Bible is being told at three different levels.

The BIG PICTURE

The basic plot of the story might be called the big picture and has to do with God’s purpose in history through the creation of Humankind, the fall of Humankind, the promise of redemption, the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of the Savior to reestablish the rule of God on earth, the return of the Savior to earth to redeem those who love him from all the peoples of the earth, and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

This is the big picture referring to the WHAT of God’s plan. We will not be able to really understand the Bible apart from understanding God’s purpose in history as it is layered underneath each passage and functions as the controlling subtext that drives the story forward.

The STRATEGIC PICTURE

The second layer of understanding to the story might be called the strategic picture and refers to the HOW of God’s plan. God has a purpose – that’s level one. God also has a plan – that’s level two.

God’s strategy to accomplish his plan involves the creation of a nation called Israel, the summing up of that nation in their Messiah, the Savior of the world, and the grafting of all the nations into the people of God through that Messiah. Israel, then, ifunctions as the missionary nation calling each unique culture to take its place in God's global plan.

The DETAILED PICTURE

The last level might be called the detailed picture. This level refers to all the rest of the Bible’s stories that flesh out the big and strategic pictures of of the narrative. It is here one finds the flood of Noah, the felling of the walls of Jericho, Elijah calling down fire from heaven, the annunciation to Mary, the multiplication of the bread and fish, the cleansing of the temple, and angel appearing at the empty tomb, and so many more. Without a larger context to understand them, these remain as they have for so many generations of believers, just a great set of stories. Understood within a greater scheme, however, how rich they become! Indeed, I will go so far as to say that it is not really possible to interpret them without understanding how they fit into the larger story.

David and Goliath

Take for instance the story of David and Goliath. In the Detailed Picture one might think that this story is about doing impossible things through God’s power, and yes, this might be one of the applications of this story. But seen within the other contexts of Scripture, it means so much more!

When seen in light of the Strategic Picture, however, one can see that this is a story about the man God would use to finally establish Israel in the land of Canaan as the people of God for the sake of the world. David was the only Israelite that understood that Goliath's curses against Israel should be understood in light of the promise that God had made to Abram when He said, “I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I will curse” (Gen. 12.3). As Goliath stood against Israel he was standing against God's plan to redeem the world.

When seen within the Big Picture, one might see here that David is a type of Christ fulfilling God’s plan for Israel to image him before the nations and to cut off the devil's head to bring redemption for the world.

The metanarrative

One of the current definitions of the new, emerging, postmodern worldview is that there is no one, overarching human story, often called a "metanarrative." It is believed that the accounts of every people group concerning their gods and their worldviews are equally valid. The Bible teaches, as we shall see, that there is ONE God who created the heavens and the earth and that this ONE God is guiding human history strategically toward its ultimate goal with ONE Plan and ONE Story.

The ultimate goal of NothinsGonnaStopIt! is to help people know what God is up to in history to help them better understand the Bible and know where they fit in what C.S. Lewis has called "the great dance" of human history.

The strategy is to tell the story in new and fresh way in one weekend. We can’t really understand the meaning of a scene in the movie until we’ve seen the movie all the way through at least once!

Six major themes

In the seminar the student will see six major themes emerge, three in the Big Picture and three in the Strategic Picture.

The three themes of the Big Picture

The three themes of the Strategic Picture

Putting it all together, we might want to frame it as the answer to the following question, What is the purpose of life?" The Bible's answer is that life is about the establishment of God’s kingdom through God’s Savior for God’s glory via all peoples according to the obedience of faith through the power of the Holy Spirit. How these themes work together to form the biblical narrative is what NothinsGonnaStopIt! is all about.

Giving it away

After almost twenty years of doing NothinsGonnaStopIt! Bill began to think and pray about developing the seminar into curriculum so that others could learn to teach it. The problem was time. In the pastorate he seldom had an opportunity to work his way toward that goal. When Bill was at a pastor's meeting In 2005 the speaker asked, “If money was no object, what would you do?” Bill immediately said in his heart that he would find the next pastor for the church he and his family had planted in San Diego and would devote himself to developing NothinsGonnaStopIt! into a reproducible form. So, that’s what he did and what this website represents.

To fund the project Bill started a nonprofit corporation called Radical Middle Ministries (see under Partnership) to raise the prayer and financial support to fulfill the NothinsGonnaStopIt! objectives to develop curriculum and train a new generation to tell the Story of the Bible in fresh and exciting ways.

Why NothinsGonnaStopIt! is important

No one knows the story

Bill can say with some degree of authority now, having done this for almost twenty years that almost no one has heard the story from beginning to end. He recounts that the most profound thing anyone has ever said about NothinsGonnaStopIt! was by an elderly woman in Florence, Kentucky. She came up to him after the seminar and said, “I’ve been in the church all my life and today is the first day I get it.” He thought to himself, “What a tragedy!” How could this precious woman have been in Sunday school all her life, listened to thousands of sermons and only have pieces of a story? Bill has come to the conclusion that most of us are like film critics making authoritative comments about scenes from a movie that we have never watched all the way through. How will we know how to interpret the scenes without the larger context?

In a You Tube clip of Oprah Winfrey, who is essentially the pastor of the largest church in America, Oprah describes being a part of a dynamic church in her twenties and hearing the pastor describing the bigness of God. In the midst of his description of this big God the pastor also mentioned that God was a jealous God. Oprah could not fathom how God could be so great but be jealous at the same time. This is a very simple concept to understand within the context of the larger narrative but since Oprah did not really know how the story worked she saw it as a biblical inconsistency and began from that point on to look for other ways to get to God apart from historic Christianity. What would have happened if Oprah’s pastor had brought in a seminar like NothinsGonnaStopIt!? What if her Sunday school teachers had had curriculum that showed how the story worked? How different might things have turned out for one of the most gifted and influential people in our generation?

Competing stories

N.T. Wright is fond of noting that human worldviews are constructed not of propositions but of stories. Human beings, then, all stake their lives on the stories they are taught be their cultures. The one foundational human story is this: that if a person lives a good life he/she will live happily ever-after in their culture's version of an afterlife. On top of this most basic of stories are built the plethora of local stories unique to each particular culture. The problem is that these stories are many and varied. Can they all be true?

The relativism story:

On another You Tube clip Oprah states that God is not a belief but a feeling, and that there are many ways to connect to this feeling. An idea such as this is not new of course. Authentic followers of Jesus have been interacting with these kinds of theologies since the days of the New Testament. Today they are indicative of a new, emerging worldview that is known as postmodernism. Postmodernist thought sees Western culture moving beyond the so-called “modern” worldview that was developed in the Enlightenment. It believes that it is surpassing the arrogance of scientific law to embrace a relativistic universe where truth is defined by the individual. The highest value of postmodernism is tolerance. The codependent mantra of the new culture asks, “I’m OK, you’re OK, OK?” Above all postmodernists reject any higher authority that dictates what they can and can’t believe or can and can’t do.

The many ways story:

The French philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge: Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10. (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1984) writes that for the postmodern mind, “the grand narrative has lost its credibility” (p. 37). Postmodern people completely reject that there is one, overarching story of human history, what is commonly referred to as a metanarrative, and affirm that each local story told by a culture is equal to the stories told by other cultures. The derivative of this is that it is believed that there are many paths to God.

The idea that there might only be one way to God is seen as both arrogant and dangerous. This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the story of the Bible where God declares that he has an unstoppable purpose for history that encompasses all the nations and that one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. In light of this, one would be logically inconsistent to say that the biblical story as defined by the Christian canon, which includes the New Testament, is equal, for instance, to the Jewish story. One says that Messiah has come and the other is still waiting for the Messiah. Can both of these stories be true at the same time? Either one of them is correct or they are both in error. In either case the postmodern value of tolerance as defined as "anything one wants to believe" makes no sense; the idea of tolerance at any price ultimately nullifies the concept of truth and the word no longer has any meaning.

Other stories:

Besides the foundational human story and the postmodern relativistic stories that are built on the basic platform, modern world offers a whole series of other stories that compete with the biblical story for people’s attention. Some of these competing stories are:

The Darwin story: Darwin’s theory of evolution and the big bang is assumed to be a scientific fact by many, thus standing against the Bible’s story of God's sovereign creation of the world out of nothing. Those who want to avoid referencing the Bible here offer the theory of Intelligent Design as the best explanation of science, to the horror of the Darwinists. Darwinism is experiencing a resurgence in the present day by a very sophisticated group of atheists who believe that the earth's problems can be blamed on religion--any religion--and they have become aggressive Darwin evangelists.

The Eastern story: Many have bought into the principles of Hinduism and Buddhism that see life as an endless cycle of birth and rebirth where advancement in the next life is based in the laws of Karma where the power of one’s choices accumulate in a kind of frequent flyer point system that teaches that if you rack up enough flyer miles (good deeds) you can fly to a better location (come back as a higher life form) in the next life. In this scenario, history has no meaning, no purpose, no direction. The goal in these systems is to deny pain by rising above it through meditation. In light of the current global financial crisis I can hear Dr. Phil asking, “How’s that workin’ for you?”

The Dark-side story: Throughout history people have sought to gain power over their lives. If good choices prayers don’t seem to be doing it then alternative power sources are often sought. Some have discovered that the dark side offers real power to manipulate circumstances, but before it's too late they find that they are caught like a fly in the proverbial trap. Suddenly the power has them, not they the power.

The Islamic story: five simple actions earn one’s way to heaven for Muslims, believing Mohammed is God’s ultimate and final prophet, observing a fast during the month of Ramadan, praying toward Mecca five times a day, giving alms, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca once during one’s lifetime. Seems simple, but it is based on the foundational human story of works, not grace. One of the principle motivators for blowing oneself up for the cause of Islam is the promise of eternal life for martyrs. This is the only type of assurance of salvation in the Muslim system. And if Islamic followers are true to the Koran they must be committed to jihad against the infidels until Islam dominates the globe. No love or tolerance here.

The Pleasure story: since ancient Greece Epicureans and Hedonists have pursued pleasure as the highest value of life. While Epicureanism sought pleasure in a modified form, Hedonism was an all-out pursuit of the philosophy “if it feels good, do it.” When taken to its extreme this pathology is known as "narcissism" and often manifests in either the pursuit of sex or escape through drugs. This too is a trap that numbs pain all the way to the grave.

The American dream story: Too smart to destroy life with sex and drugs? There’s always culturally acceptable pursuit of power and toys, which is considered a prerogative for people who grow up in America. Apparently we are entitled to happiness no matter what the cost. The ends justifies the means so we can roll people over in the process. Somehow this mindset came over on the Mayflower with an inflated sense that God had given America a manifest destiny and that we are under a divine commission to take our way of life to the world. Problem is that many many nations of the earth are happy with the way things are. In the end power and toys don't fill the soul and, oh, by the way, we can’t take it with us. All we really leave behind are the kind of people we were while we were here and the impact we made on others.

Do these competing stories spell disaster for the cause of Christ in the postmodern world? If postmodernists don’t believe that there is one story that explains all others, what is the Church to do?

Based on the Bible’s premise that God has left enough of the imago dei (God’s image) within human beings that deep inside the soul something resonates when the story is told (e.g., Ecc. 3.11; Rom. 1.19), the answer must be that we must tell the story afresh—contextualized to this generation. Jesus said that the gospel has its own power. The kingdom of God is like a farmer who sowed his seed and went away. When he came back he found that the seed had grown on its own. Jesus said, To him who has ears to hear, let him hear the word of the kingdom. The apostle Paul also explained that the power is in the gospel itself (Rom. 1.16); something deep within bears witness to a simple presentation of God’s redemptive events, even if this bearing witness is suppressed to support people’s lifestyle choices (Rom. 1.18).

This is exactly what we see in people’s eyes during a NothinsGonnaStopIt! seminar. The gospel resonates with those who have ears to hear. They begin to connect the dots of all the Bible stories they know and see how God has, and is continuing to do, one thing as he moves human history toward its appointed destiny. Even those who are not Christians often sense that the story of the Bible is somehow their story too.

So, as was mentioned above, we are at a crisis point in Western culture and only revival empowered by the Holy Spirit and a return to our biblical moorings will stop the free fall we are in. This is why it is so critical that people hear the story that the Bible is telling. God breathes life on it through the Holy Spirit and awakes the eternity that the Bible says is still in the heart (Ecc. 3.11). This generation is awaiting the good news of Christ and his free gift of release from the captivity of sin.

Acting our parts in the play

In a recent survey researchers wanted to find out if American followers of Jesus acted any differently than those who did not profess faith in Christ. When Christians and non-Christians were compared against fifteen behavioral characteristics survey results showed no noticeable difference between the two groups. Why is this? One answer could be found in an analogy by N.T. Wright in his book The Last Word.

Wright describes human history as a five act play. The first four acts are outlined in the Bible: Act 1, the creation prologue showing how and why the world is the way it is through the power of sin; Act 2, the story of Israel in the Old Testament showing God’s covenantal solution to solving the human problem of sin; Act 3, the gospel accounts of Jesus, the true and faithful Israelite who not only paid for sin through the exchange of his life for ours but showed perfectly how to be the people of God for the sake of the world; Act 4, the account of the beginning of the Spirit-empowered witness of God’s people to the ends of the earth. The book of Acts ends open-ended, thus implying that the Spirit-empowered witness of the church would continue throughout history until the consummation of the age as described in the book of Revelation.

In this analogy, Wright says that we are now acting out our parts in the fifth act. The problem is that we have no script. How, then, are we to know what our lines are? The answer is that God intends for us to be so familiar with the first four acts that we know how our parts are supposed to acted out. We, then, align our behavioral choices with how our characters ought to be living out our parts in the play.

This is a great analogy and gives us at least some insight into why there is often little difference between Christians and non-Christians in terms of our behavior. Not only are we the most biblically illiterate generation in the history of America, even those of us that do know lots of stories from the Bible don’t know THE STORY the Bible tells. Consequently, we cannot improvise lines to a story that we’ve never really heard or deeply understood.

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The Challenge Before Us

We have already seen why it is imperative that we train a new generation to share the story of God with the world…but what exactly does this mean? In order to get a handle on the urgency of the hour and why a movement must be initiated to teach people how to share the biblical narrative, we need to look at the growth of world population. The birth of every child represents another human being on earth that, according to the biblical view, would very likely have one of the competing stories unless someone shared with him or her that there is One God, One Plan and One Story that nothing can stop.

The following PowerPoint presentation should bring it home.

Population Growth
Download - PPT - 3MB

 

NothinsGonnaStopIt! Objectives

For years Bill has been working on NothinsGonnaStopIt! very part-time. As will be seen, there are so many more things that need to be developed in order to enable another generation to be able to tell the Story of God. If you have read to this point you can see why we have a sense of urgency about this. It is time now to develop a delivery system that will get this out into the larger church, to Bible study teachers, small group leaders, home school parents, and even people who will begin to travel and do this seminar like Bill has been doing. In order to do this the NothinsGonnaStopIt! Partnership is committed to bringing to completion the following objectives.

  1. Rework the book that goes along with the seminar and get it published
  2. Rework the power point presentation that goes along with the seminar
  3. Doing a 20 minute version of NothinsGonnaStopIt! for You Tube
  4. Finish the fully footnoted, scholarly version of NothinsGonnaStopIt! and get it published
  5. Develop an online NothinsGonnaStopIt! course that people can take anywhere in the world
  6. Expand the seminar penetration into a host of new denominations
  7. Experiment with doing NothinsGonnaStopIt! live before a secular audience
  8. Develop home school and Sunday school curriculum for different ages
  9. Write a teacher’s manual
  10. Develop a NothinsGonnaStopIt! certified teacher training program
  11. Host an international NothinsGonnaStopIt! teacher’s conference releasing a host of new teachers to take God’s story to the world

This is a huge undertaking and it does not take a rocket scientist to see that we need to pray that God raises up other people that will catch the vision of NothinsGonnaStopIt! and put their hand to the plow to help us accomplish these objectives.

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Theological Statements

What we believe about the inspiration of the Bible

We stand solidly in the Protestant commitment that the 39 books comprising the Old Testament and the 27 books that make up the New Testament are inspired by God. Inspiration does not mean that God dictated his words to his human writers but that his messages were expressed through human beings in such as way that the Bible models divine perfection bursting through the literature, methodology, and personalities of those living during the iterations of God's various invasions into real history.

What we believe about how to study the Bible

Bible readers have used the Bible to justify every manner of human behavior, from the sublime humanitarian efforts of Mother Theresa to the grotesque horrors of the Crusades. The Bible cannot sustain both the holy and the profane: the point of departure is in the discovery of the original author's intent in what was written. Good interpretation means hearing a particular text in the language, literature, culture and historical context of the writer and his recipients. Once the original meaning is ascertained the interpreter has the exciting task of asking how that original meaning applies in the third millennium A.D.

To do either of these jobs well, especially the latter, the Bible itself explains that the interpreter is dependent on the help of God’s Spirit mediated through meditation and prayer. The good Bible interpreter prays continually, studies seriously, has common sense and is a perceptive student of current affairs. When all these disciplines converge, the interpreter can use God’s Word accurately to speak to the pressing issues of the day.

What we believe about the reliability of the Bible

We believe that the events recorded in the Bible that weave together to form its basic storyline are accurate in what they affirm to teach. This historical accuracy has, and is, being verified through the constant stream of archaeological evidence testifying to the Bible’s veracity.

What we believe about the doctrines of the Bible

We believe that there is one living and true God, eternally existing in three persons--the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, equal in power and glory; that this triune God creates all, upholds all, and governs all.

We believe that the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, fully inspired, without error in the original manuscripts, and the infallible rule of faith and practice.

We believe in God the Father, an infinite, personal Spirit, perfect in holiness, wisdom, power, and love. We believe that he concerns himself mercifully in the affairs of men, that he hears and answers prayer, and that he saves from sin and death all who come to him through Jesus Christ.

We believe in Jesus Christ, God’s eternal, only begotten son, conceived incarnate by the Holy Spirit. We believe in His virgin birth, sinless life, miracles and teachings, his substitutionary death, bodily resurrection, ascension into heaven, perpetual intercession for his people, and personal, visible return to the earth. We believe that in his first coming, Jesus inaugurated the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God and that at his second coming the kingdom will be consummated.

We believe in the Holy Spirit who came forth in the Father and Son to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment to regenerate, sanctify, and empower for ministry all who believe in Christ. We believe the Holy Spirit indwells every believer in Jesus Christ and that he is an abiding helper, teacher, and guide. We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit and the exercise of all the Biblical gifts of the Spirit as proleptic evidence of the dawn of the life of the future into the present age.

We believe that all human beings are sinners by nature and choice and are, therefore, under condemnation. We also believe that God regenerates and baptizes by the Holy Spirit those who repent of their sins and confess Jesus Christ as savior and Lord.

We believe in the universal church, the living spiritual body, of which Christ is the head and all regenerated persons are members.

We believe that the Lord Jesus Christ committed two ordinances to the church: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We believe that in baptism and communion God’s people supernaturally encounter the risen Christ.

We believe also in the laying on of hands for the empowering of the Holy Spirit, for ordaining of pastors, elders and deacons, for receiving gifts of the Holy Spirit and for healing.

We believe in the personal, visible, appearing of Christ to earth and the consummation of his Kingdom; in the resurrection of the body, the final judgment and eternal blessing of the righteous and endless suffering of the wicked.

We believe in what is termed “The Apostle’s Creed” as embodying fundamental facts of Christian faith and endorse the historic orthodox creeds of the church.

Bill Jackson Bio

Bill Jackson (Jax) grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and became a committed follower of Jesus Christ during his junior year in high school. He graduated from Wheaton College with a degree in literature in 1975 and spent two years starting high school clubs with the ministry of Campus Life. Jax has been joyfully married to his wife, Betsy, for thirty years. The Jacksons have three adult children, Luc, Megan, and John.

 

The Jackson Family

 

After graduating with his M.Div. from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 1983, Bill and Betsy have planted and pastored churches with the Vineyard. Bill has directed the Year of the Bible program at William Carey International University, started the Vineyard School of Pastoral Ministry in Champaign, Illinois, and now functions as the academic dean of Trinity Learning Community in Corona, California. Bill is also the president of Radical Middle Ministries and makes his living speaking, teaching and writing, now concentrating on the development of NothinsGonnaStopIt!. Jax is the author of the book, The Quest for the Radical Middle: A History of the Vineyard (Capetown, South Africa, Vineyard International Press, 1999). He has also authored courses for Vineyard Bible Institute such as Biblical Overview, the Pentateuch, The Historical Books, and the Life of Jesus. He is also pursuing his doctorate at Fuller Seminary; his dissertation is on the barriers and breakthroughs in the book of Acts in the New Testament. Jax is a well-traveled conference speaker and has been an avid scuba diver since the '70s. Before he lost his elbows to tendinitis he was a serious rock climber making ascents from Maine to Baja. Now, while continuing to travel and teach, Jax is a renal patient receiving dialysis treatments throughout the week as he awaits either a kidney transplant or a healing from the Lord. His life mission is to train people from within a kingdom paradigm to glorify God among the nations through the ministry of the local church and his main vehicle for doing so has been his NothinsGonnaStopIt! seminar.