Meet Our Pastor

Bill and Lainie Elander planted the Vineyard Christian Fellowship here in New Haven. A native of the New Haven area, Bill moved to Californiain 1977 to work with Campus Crusade for Christ. Soon after his arrival God gave him a call and vision to return to New Haven and minister in a relevant, non-religious way to his friends. He then spent the next nine years being trained; first under the teaching and ministry of Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel and then under John Wimberand the Vineyard. During that time, Bill met Lainie, a native Californian, at Talbot Theological Seminary in La Mirada, California, where they were both students. Lainiewas preparing to teach on the mission field. They were married in January of 1984, and in June of 1986, Bill and Lainie were sent from the Vineyard in Yorba Linda, California to start a new work in the New Haven area. They have two children, Sara, 21, and John, 16.

The church began as a home group in the fall of 1986, which shortly expanded to three groups meeting throughout the New Haven area. As the home groups started to multiply, the church started meeting corporately on Sunday evenings in the back of an Episcopal church in Westville. That meeting grew and soon moved into the sanctuary of the church. In 1994, the church leased a building in New Haven and started to meet on Sunday mornings After a subsequent move to Hamden for a brief period, the Vineyard moved to it’s current location in West Haven in the fall of 2000.