Introduction
This post is going to be a bit different in that it’s not just a teaching like a usually do. I’m going to trace through my journey in learning about the prophetic. It will be in three parts:
- Part One – my story and testimony in learning about the prophetic
- Part Two – some teaching about prophecy
- Part Three – more testimony, centered around a prophetic word Emily and I received at the 2017 Open Heavens conference at Bethel Church in Redding, CA in front of 2000 people
I am not a prophet. I am a teacher. And to tell the truth, I’m not particularly “prophetic” in that I get a bunch of words for people. But I’ve been a Christian for over 45 years, and have been involved in a couple of major Christian movements, and have been able to pick up a few things from each. At church we have been encouraged to tell our own stories. So here is ours, although centered around prophecy and gifts of the Spirit.
Testimony
I was saved in Yosemite National Park in the summer of 1974. My girlfriend Emily (whom I married 5 years later) and I went up in the spring of 1974 and put in applications, and then showed up again in June and asked if they had any openings. I was hired to work in the Yosemite Village store, and Emily as a maid at the Ahwahnee hotel.
Emily, unbeknownst to me, was seeking God. The night before we left, she had prayed “God, if You’re real, show me”. We pulled into a campsite, and while I headed off to the bathroom, a couple walked up to Emily, handed her a gospel of John, and said if she read that and prayed the prayer at the end, she would be saved. God heard her! She accepted Jesus on July 4, 1974.
She told me about it, and I respected her for it. She started going to these Christian meetings led by some Christ for the Nations students who were up there for the summer, and there were guys there, so I went too to “keep an eye on her”. About a week or so later I decided that I needed to accept the Lord also. But I knew that if I was going to do this, it had to be a full on commitment. Somehow I had gotten some religious ideas in my head that if you followed God, you might have to give up some of the things most dear to you. For me, it was my music (I was a rock and roll guitar player), and my schooling at U.C. Berkeley. So I hesitated, for a couple of weeks.
One night they showed a Christian movies outdoors in what was called the Church Bowl called The Thief in the Night – basically a “left behind” story about people who missed the rapture. It scared the bejeebers out of me, and knocked me out of my indecision. I already believed in Jesus, and knew He died for my sins, but that night I made Him my Lord.
I remember the very first prophecy I ever heard. The pastor of the little Yosemite Chapel was a wonderful Spirit filled man named John Davis. Sunday services were more generic because you had people from all types of backgrounds attending, but Tuesday nights were real believers’ meetings. I remember one night about a dozen of us were in a circle holding hands, and Pastor John came out with a word from the Lord. I was literally shaking. That was God talking to us!
I remember another special night. Emily had gotten filled with the Spirit and spoke with tongues – she took the lead on that also. Emily and I, and her roommate Suzanne, who had been saved a couple weeks before, were in their dorm room, and we asked Em questions about tongues, and to “do it”. So she went off, and at one point the cadence of what she was doing sounded just like Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall. And then she started singing, and did the William Tell Overture. It struck us so funny, we laughed hysterically. It was just like those YouTube videos where a parent does something silly and the baby laughs uproariously. God was playing with us baby Christians.
Hunger
There were seeds planted in us up there to hunger for the word of God, and the supernatural. One of the Christ for the Nations students named Blaine, told us “If you don’t eat, you won’t grow”. We got ourselves some Living Bibles, and devoured it. I read through the whole Bible six times that first year, and Emily did eight times.
When we got back we got involved in a church that gave us a very good foundation, that was mildly charismatic. We were faithful there, but always hungered more for the supernatural. Mario Murillo would hold meetings about once a month at the Oakland Auditorium, and we would attend those. We went to some home meetings at Dick Bernal’s house, who would go on to pastor one of the largest churches in California, Jubilee Christian Center in San Jose.
We started going to another home meeting hosted by a couple that went to the same church we did, where the teacher was a man named Bill Maginnis, who was a Catholic Charismatic. He had a series of home meetings in the East Bay. He definitely had a prophetic anointing on him, and was very accurate in the Word of Knowledge. When he started what was basically a church, although he called it a “teaching center”, we came with him.
Bill’s teaching was influenced by a movement that was starting to get well known at that time, called Word of Faith. The most well known teachers in that movement were Kenneth E. Hagin and Kenneth Copeland. We had actually been introduced to Kenneth E. Hagin while we were up in Yosemite – Blaine had given us one of Brother Hagin’s mini books on faith which we read – although most of it went over our heads at the time.
In 1977 Bill’s daughter Julie came back from attending Kenneth Hagin’s Rhema Bible Training Center in Oaklahoma. With her came another couple of graduates that came to work with Bill in their ministry. About a year later, Emily went off to Rhema, staying with another couple in the church who were also going. I was finishing up my last year at U.C. Berkeley.
There were a lot of young people under Bill’s ministry. One of the classes they had was called New Covenant Ministers, where we all would outline a lesson from the same book, and turn in the outline, and each week two of us would get up and have a half hour to preach the lesson. The first time I had a turn to preach we were using Kenneth Hagin’s book New Threshholds of Faith, and the particular lesson was How to Write Your Own Ticket with God, based on the story of the woman with the issue of blood. There were five points: Hear about Jesus, Say It, Act on It, Receive It, and Tell About It. I said to God, “Lord, if these are really spiritual principals, there should be another example in the Bible”. And in my spirit, as plain as day, came the words, “Naaman the Leper”. I had read about Naaman before, but I had to look it up to see what the Holy Spirit was talking about, and sure enough, it was there. So I preached that.
Apparently I impressed people. They were used to me playing guitar, but this is the first time anybody heard me teach. Bill said, “Where did you come from?!” That’s when I found out I could teach. A bit later, I received the first prophetic word that would really define my ministry and destiny: The wisdom is in your pen.
Em and I were married in May 1979. We just celebrated our 41st wedding anniversary. The second half of our honeymoon, we went to Anaheim to attend Kenneth Copeland’s West Coast Believers Convention.
Bible School
In the spring of 1981 Em and I went to Oaklahoma to attend a Rhema Homecoming. It was there that the Lord showed me that I should go to Rhema. Em was all ready to go that fall, but I felt we should wait a year and save up. Since we weren’t going to go to school for a year, she suggested we start another project – our first son, Jonathan, was born in April 1982. I applied and was accepted at Rhema.
I gave notice at the company where I was an electronics engineer, and in June 1982 we loaded up a U-Haul and headed off to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma – myself, Emily, and our two month old son. We timed it so we could attend Campmeeting, which was an annual week long conference hosted by Kenneth Hagin, and then I would look for a job. We were able to rent an apartment – with no job! – but there were a lot of students in the town and I had good credentials with an engineering degree and 4.5 years experience.
I was able to get a job as a computer programmer, and have been in that field ever since.
I went to Rhema that first year, and then both Em and I attended second year (it was only a one year school when she attended before).
After we graduated and returned to California, we became associate pastors and worship leaders for Faith Christian Fellowship in Concord, pastored by Bob and Chris Grace. We told them that we knew that sometime in the future we were going to be pastors, but we didn’t know when that would be and weren’t actively seeking it. We were there for 2.5 years, when we felt the tug to leave and start something on our own in our town of Antioch, CA.
So we started a home Bible study because we weren’t sure what else to do. And the people stayed away in droves. There were about three other people that came regularly. Just when we were wondering what we should be doing, Emily’s uncle and aunt showed up with over a dozen people in tow. It turns out that the church they attended had their pastor leave a few months before. Uncle Dick and Aunt Winnie had hosted one of the home meetings that Bill Maginnis had, and Bill was preaching on Sundays for them while they were looking for a new pastor.
So they invited us over, and we talked. We were a bit nervous about taking on a church as Senior Pastors, and said could we come on as associates. Two months later, the Lord told us we were the next pastors of that church. We hadn’t spoken to anybody, but that Sunday Bill walked up to us and said “So when are you ready to take over the church?” He knew. It was November, so we said how about the beginning of the year. It turned out Bill had some commitments in December, so we became the Senior pastors in December, 1987.
After about a year we renamed it to The Church At Antioch, from Acts 13:1. It turns out the town of Antioch was named after the Antioch of the Bible; there’s a plaque in a park downtown that commemorates it. We were there for 16 years. It was a small church – about 60 people at its biggest. I worked a full time job the whole time I was there. We had some great meetings though!
Another thing that was happening at the time, was that we kept having babies – five of them, all boys, over a 10 year spread. Whereas we used to go to conferences, it became darn near impossible with that many kids. We became a bit isolated, and missed out on other movements that God was raising up. This was before the days of the Internet, when you could attend meetings online. Basically, you had to know about the other ministries and order their tapes to hear them. We stuck to who we knew, which was the Word of Faith circles.
A bit about Word of Faith
Word of Faith has gotten a bad rap amongst a lot of people. When we were young, it was the big thing that God was doing in the 70’s through the 80’s. Not to say that God wasn’t doing thing in other streams, but Word of Faith was the one we heard about.
Another thing people don’t realize is that a lot of teachings that people criticized back then have become mainstream even if they don’t know where it came from. When we first became Christians, healing was “if it be thy will”. People didn’t understand righteousness. Most Christians believed that God sent trials and tribulations – sickness being one of them – to teach His people. Even the thought that God wants His people to prosper – which is the subject Word of Faith has been criticized over the most (and where there definitely have been abuses) – has become mainstream. Also, the importance of words is recognized – although nowadays they call it making declarations rather than confessions, as we did.
The Word of Faith approach to the prophetic was that they certainly believed in prophecy and the office of the prophet. Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland being the two most recognized prophets in the that movement. They believed in giving words of edification / exhortation / comfort in prophetic words to congregations. But personal prophecy, especially among the lay people, was somewhat frowned upon. At least that’s what I got out of Bible school.
Also although Word of Faith believed in prophets, and Kenneth Hagin especially had some excellent teaching on the office of the prophet, there seemed to be no clear path to get there. It seemed like only the big names were recognized as prophets.
Expanding our Vision, and Bethel Church
As I mentioned before, we were kind of isolated in the 90’s and early 2000’s. We pretty much kept to Word of Faith. We were ignorant of what was going on in other movements and revivals such as Brownsville and Toronto. We heard of them, but dismissed them because of what we heard were some of the “weird” manifestations happening.
We started looking outside of Word of Faith in 2007 and got involved with Fellowship Church in Antioch. It was about 250 people at the time, but became one of the fastest growing churched in the country. We were there from 2007 through 2014. It grew to about 1800 people in that time, and since then is up to 6000.
I was on the worship team playing lead guitar. I was exposed to music from Jesus Culture, and then Bethel Church in Redding. For a couple of special occasions there were worship teams from Bethel that came down to Fellowship.
There was someone we knew at Fellowship that had gone to Bethel’s School of Supernatural Ministry. When she came back, she was doing things like praying for people in grocery stores and getting them healed. We saw that she had picked up something special there.
My wife heard about ICLV (International Church of Las Vegas) and went to a conference there, staying with a friend of hers that lived in a suburb of Las Vegas, that used to go to our church when we pastored. She said it was the most amazing meeting she had ever been to in her life. She started looking at some of their past meetings online, and the previous year they had Bill Johnson, senior leader at Bethel Church. She thought “He’s really good” and recommended that I listen. Of course we already knew Bethel from the music, so I started listening to some Bill Johnson messages on YouTube on the Sovereignty of God – and I was blown away because it was so similar to things I had heard under Word of Faith, but even more expanded.
We made our first trip to Redding in 2012 for the Open Heavens Conference. Interestingly enough, the guest speaker was the same person who had been at the ICLV meeting Emily attended – Bishop Joseph Garlington. We were absolutely blown away by the presence of God in worship, and with the teaching. It addressed some areas I thought was lacking in Word of Faith – at least in my experience, I can’t speak of others. Eric Johnson’s words especially touched me.
You see, in the latter years our church had shrunk. Inside, I felt like a failure because my church shrank down to nothing and I eventually closed it down. One statement by Eric especially helped me. – “God trusts you more than you trust yourself. He’s not threatened by your poor choices”.
After that conference, we subscribed to iBetheltv and Bethel became our “second church”. The Open Heavens conference became a yearly pilgrimage for us. Redding also had another thing going for it – some of the most beautiful countryside within an hour in almost any direction. Mt Shasta. Mt. Lassen. Burney Falls. The McCloud River. And even in town, the Sundial Bridge, the Sacramento River. Last year I received an inheritance, and we were able to purchase a mobile home as a vacation property in Redding.
Bethel’s Approach to the Prophetic
Getting involved with Bethel meant we had to learn their terminology. Everything seemed to be about prophetic. What we would call being led by the Spirit, they would call “being prophetic”. But they had a much different attitude towards it. First of all, their approach to prophecy was that anyone could do it. They actively encouraged personal prophecies. It does say in 1 Corinthians 14:1 to earnestly desire spiritual gifts, but especially that you would prophesy.
They even teach the kids in their school – “There is no junior Holy Spirit”. One year when we were waiting in line to get into a conference, a bunch of their grade school kids – looked like they were in the 5th or 6th grade – went up and down the line giving words to people. A couple of them were surprisingly accurate and applicable.
Also, their vision of the heart of New Testament prophecy is outstanding. Of course we read in 1 Corinthians 14 that prophecy is given for edification, exhortation, and comfort. But the Bethel folk talk about looking into a person and seeing the treasure that is in there, as God sees them. Often the person is not aware of it themselves, or just an inkling that they can hardly dare themselves to believe. Not their sin, but God’s purpose and design for them, and declaring it. And by declaring it, you help bring it to pass.
Shawn Bolz is a modern day prophet, who although he is not directly connected with Bethel, has written a book Translating God: Hearing God’s Voice for Yourself and the World around you that does an excellent job of explaining God’s heart in New testament prophesy. He has an amazing ministry and is the most accurate person in the Word of Knowledge (supernatural revelation of specific details about a person) that I have ever seen. Look him up on YouTube, there are several examples of him in action.
Kris Vallotton is another senior leader at Bethel Church, and is himself a prophet and heads up Bethel’s prophetic ministry. His course Basic Training in the Prophetic Ministry is excellent, as well as The School of the Prophets. Actually, any of his books are great, I’ve read several.
Where We Are Now
So, Emily and my Christian worldview now is a hybrid of our roots from Word of Faith, and the more recent apostolic/prophetic movement as exemplified by Bethel. We’ve been able to draw from the strengths of both.
Word of Faith is at its core a revival in teaching, with a great emphasis on the Word, the Word, the Word! I find that lacking in some Christian circles nowadays. And being teachers ourselves, we have the same emphasis. I am very grateful for what I learned there.
Bethel was much more about empowering the “lay” people. For example, in most of the Word of Faith meetings, people would line up and “the man of God” would go down the line laying hands on them and praying for healing – which is actually a very scriptural thing to do. At Bethel, the leaders might call out some Words of Knowledge about health issues they were seeing and people would raise their hands, but then they would have the congregation lay hands on and pray for the people with their hands up.
One of Bethel’s main core values is changing culture. They teach that we should not have an “us vs. them” or believer vs. non-believer type of attitude and that as Christians we should actively seek benefiting our cities and the world we live in.
Next Time
Well, I feel that I have been rather long winded. Next time will be more of a teaching and cover what the Word has to say about prophecy in the New Testament.
