At any weekend service at North Jersey Vineyard Church in South Hackensack, New Jersey, you will find a staff and congregation searching for the edge of ministry as they wonder. How far can we go? How much more will God do?
There is no math to their growth plan, no formula they’re trying to leverage to raise attendance. Instead, people encounter the presence of God—in worship, in the message, and especially in church family—and their lives are genuinely changed.
“What really seals the deal is people feel something or they hear something, and they know God is stirring something up,” explains Lead Pastor Phil Chorlian.
He points out how that openness to the Holy Spirit has created a uniquely diverse church when many churches today are still largely divided along racial lines. “The only reason we could experience this diversity is because when people are drinking from the same Spirit, a lot of the walls come down.”
Mary Anne De La Torre, the church’s executive pastor and an Asian American, experiences this diversity in a markedly personal way. “I love our church so much because it does feel like Revelation 7 every Sunday: All nations, tribes and tongues worship together. We are a diverse staff too, and Phil is intentional about that.”
| NORTH JERSEY VINEYARD CHURCH South Hackensack, New Jersey Pastor: Phil Chorlian Website: NJVine.com Denomination: Vineyard Churches Founded: 1997 Fastest-Growing: 83 |
Chorlian has the stats to document how God is moving through and with the church’s diversity. The congregation is about 25% white, 40% Latino, 20% Asian and 15% to 20% African American and African. Eighty different nationalities are represented in the church, and 475 people made first-time commitments to Jesus during services in 2024.
Those numbers sit alongside a rising number of baptisms and a growing interest in connecting to the power of the Holy Spirit, which the church fosters through a quarterly “Holy Spirit Night” where people gather for an extended time of worship and prayer. At those nights and on weekends, the church is seeing something akin to stories from the book of Acts as people receive words of knowledge, are healed of diseases, and experience major life change.
One story in particular, Chorlian says, exemplifies the directness with which God is moving in their community, a story about a young man who found himself losing a street fight in a rough neighborhood. Through a torrent of punches, the youth realized his assailant was going to kill him, so he called out to God for help. Inexplicably, the punches stopped, and the assailant sat down and fell asleep.
After hearing this, Chorlian told the young man, “If you can maybe get a playback of your life someday, you’re going to see that there were angels protecting you when you cried out to God. It’s really cool that you’re here, that you’re in church. God preserved your life because he’s got a plan and a purpose for you, and we want to help you find it.”
Chorlian discovered the Vineyard movement in the 1990s while serving as an associate pastor in the Church of the Nazarene. “The Vineyard movement was trying to take the best of the evangelical world and the best of the Pentecostal world, and find the radical middle. I thought, That’s what I’ve been trying to do my whole Christian life. I didn’t know that there were other people like me.”
After attending a Vineyard location in Manhattan, Chorlian began holding meetings in his living room. A few other small groups nearby wanted to get involved, and he suddenly had a church plant on his hands. They launched North Jersey Vineyard at a hotel on the first Sunday in January 1997 with a little over 60 people.
About a year later, they rented a warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, and hosted multiple Sunday services. Growth quickly exceeded 200 people, which urged another move to a space in Teterboro. They quickly passed the 500 mark, and soon Chorlian was preaching at six services a weekend. Again, they needed a new building.
The church found a building, but came up against stiff resistance from two different zoning boards and other powers at play. Facing rejection and hostility at each level of the zoning process, the church decided to leverage its legal options, hiring an attorney who specializes in religious zoning cases.
The church won its suits against the local boards, but at the cost of its capital campaign fund. They moved in, but had no way to renovate the space. However, even more twists were soon to come.
“God miraculously provided the money to do the build-out,” Chorlian explains. “However, the fun part of the story is that when the building was completely done, I did the final walk-through with the architect and the contractor literally right after a meeting where we decided we had to completely shut down because of COVID-19.”
Like many others, the church pivoted and figured out how to create community during lockdowns. They survived, even thrived, and they’re still growing, hosting four services each weekend, one of which is fully in Spanish with over 250 in attendance.
“You know, it’s just super encouraging,” Chorlian reflects. “I think out of the 30 years I’ve been a pastor, I’ve never seen as many people that are hungry for God as right now.”
North Jersey Vineyard hasn’t found the edge of ministry yet, and that’s fine. They’re content to simply keep searching.