The Wine Press is all about thinking. You see, to serve God well, we must think straight. Our problem is that often we don’t – our assumptions about life, the things we allow to occupy our minds, our spiritual blindness, and perhaps the fact that sometimes we have never really thought things through leave us lost, ripped off and bankrupt.
As part of His call to “Follow Me,” Jesus offers to renew our minds – to help us to think well. What He knew was that if He could change some of the ideas that we live our lives by, we would begin change. Right thinking positions us in the path of grace and before the Spirit of God. It is here that we are transformed.
To serve God well, we must think straight
Primarily this transformation happens through our interaction with the bible. But there is also a place for spiritual reading to encourage and direct us in this. For some it may even become a spiritual discipline that we employ to position us to take on the mind of Christ.
It is our hope that The Wine Press will be a resource that you can use to encourage, and nurture and spark right thinking. We have made it our aim to seek out good books and materials – resources that will challenge, and stretch you. Resources that will refresh and inspire you. Resources that will be like welcome companions on this journey of long obedience. It is our hope that these books and tapes will be like seeds to you – as they have been to us. Seeds that the Holy Spirit will use to prompt, and hone and change you – as we have sensed Him doing in us.
With this in mind, here are a few qualifications. We are the UK distributor for Vineyard International Publishing and so are contracted to promote their titles. As part of the Vineyard movement we would also like to draw attention to other material that is coming out of the Vineyard. But what you find here is not a "Vineyard" recommended reading list, and neither are all the books here "endorsed" or "approved" by any official Vineyard body. So we offer these books to you to take and read - hold on to what is good, and let go of the rest.
We are also honoured to be allowed to distribute some of Dallas Willard’s teaching material from various conferences he has led. This is material that we have found highly significant in our own discipleship and that has done much to set our own thinking straighter.
...welcome companions on this journey of long obedience
Also on this website you will find some of our own recommendations. You see, we love to read. And we have found that sometimes the hardest thing is finding good material when there is so much to choose from, and when time is so precious. Our aim is to help you by making some suggestions. Let us here say that we don’t recommend anything unless we have first read it or listened to it, and unless we rate it with five stars!
It is always hard to recommend a book to someone because we all have different tastes. Our measure for highly commending something is not simply that it was well written, although this goes a long way. We are looking for books that left us in the presence of the Master, books that left us thinking for days (sometimes because we disagreed with them), books that somehow seemed to leave us different from having read them. These are they, and we trust that they will bless you as they have us.
These are they...
And so as we hope you now see, the Wine Press is a ministry, a hobby, and a labour of love. It is run from our garage and spare bedroom alongside a family and a growing church. My wife and I are the Senior Pastors of the Salisbury Vineyard Christian Fellowship. What an honour for us to serve in the Kingdom and to walk the long obedience of discipleship – may He grant us each grace and peace to run our race.
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