My Strangest Prayer and My Personal Experience with Prophecy

My personal journey from a liberal church that had little belief in spiritual gifts, through local churches of various other flavors, to the point of praying for prophecy, as 1 Corinthians 14:1, 12 and 39 seemed to say was appropriate.

I earnestly request comments about this post, and the several that will follow, that I may think them through carefully, improve my own thinking, and respond to them. At the outset, I present five links to web pages that reflect my personal experience with prophecy: 1. “God Says: Trust Me with the Frightening Future” (late Summer, 2000); 2. “A Warning Concerning Idolatry” (October 8, 2000); 3. “A Call to Worship”; 4. “To remember, when the provision of God seems too slow;” and 5) “God Says: Keep it out of Court.” These are all messages I have struggled with in my own life ever since they were given. Links to more examples from the same period of my life, roughly 2000 to 2006, are given at the end of this post.

Before starting the discussion below, please also read my friend Jonathan Brickman’s short article “Nothing Justifies us to Divide the Church of the Lord.” I do not seek to divide, but to understand.

Now I will explain how these prophetic experiences came about. Prior to the year 2000, I had passed through churches in several very disparate Protestant denominations. As I said in an earlier post, my earliest memories come from a Congregational church that my parents attended–a relatively small church near the Wichita State University campus. I never heard anything about spiritual gifts in that church. However, while we were attending that church, my mother started working on a Theology degree at Friends University in Wichita, which was at the time a Quaker school (they now call themselves non-denominational Christian), and, from her conversations about her courses, I started to hear things I vaguely recall about the Quaker concept of the “Inward Light.” As I got a little older, I also read some of her textbooks. So, at the same time I was getting the usual American socialization that God’s voice isn’t real, I was hearing from my mother’s school work that it is real, and is his “light” within me.

An unusual developmental condition, Asperger Syndrome, probably also hindered me from completely discarding the voice of God to be “normal” during my early years. I didn’t realize at the time–not until I was in college–that I perceived things very differently than most people. It was some years after that, even, that I came to understand that I perceived spiritual “voices” around me, including the voice of God, much differently than most adults, because I couldn’t consistently shut those voices out of my consciousness, but, instead, have always had to “filter” them for their truthfulness based on my understanding of Scripture. And I didn’t have a formal diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome until I was 51 years old. But knowing that my perceptions have always been unusual contributes to my understanding of my personal history on this subject.

After the senior minister of that first church I can remember moved out of state, we started attending another, larger Congregational church, where my mother had been hired as the Christian Education Director. When the Senior Minister of that church died, and my mother was discharged, we started looking for a new church. This happened in late 1971, during my Senior year in High School. I stayed at a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) congregation we visited, at which I had a somewhat defective crisis experience of salvation. (I have never doubted that I came into a friendly relationship with Christ on that day; I will explain the details and defects in a later post). That church was an early “Charismatic” church in a mainline denomination–one that actually lay somewhere between “open but cautious” regarding spiritual gifts and fully Charismatic on Wikipedia’s classification scheme. That is, most of the “non-speaking” gifts were welcome on some occasions, but the “speaking” gifts, other than teaching (and the corresponding “offices” of pastor-teacher and evangelist), were discouraged. I stayed at that church until I moved away to graduate school four years later. My mother soon moved on to a Quaker church.

When I moved on to graduate school in Ames, Iowa, I started attending very conservative–fundamentalist in the strict, rather than the pejorative, sense–independent Baptist churches that were loosely associated with the church my future wife and her family attended in Wichita. Over the next 13 years, I continued attending similar churches as we moved from Ames, to Iowa City, to Lawrence, Kansas, and finally to Topeka. These churches all held quite strict Cessationist beliefs. That is, they believed that God stopped speaking to people directly when the Canon of Scripture was completed. For this reason, they also believed that all of the spiritual gifts discussed in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 were given to the early church for the sole purpose of either transmitting Scripture or authenticating the message of the Apostles, and, therefore, all of the spiritual gifts ceased when the Apostle John died. They taught that any apparent manifestation of these gifts in other groups was either faked, or given by the devil, and, if thought to be valid, would contradict the completeness and inerrancy of the Bible. I tried to fit in while I was in these churches, but I never lost my sense that God did still try to talk to me directly, not just by guiding my natural understanding of a scripture I was studying (“illumination” after “abstraction” through study) or through the words of a sermon, a commentator, or human advice (which were the only forms of communication from God these churches believed valid).

The death in 1989 of the last pastor of the church of that kind we attended in Topeka, followed very soon by the dissolution of that congregation, sent us visiting churches again. For about three years, we became members of a small Wesleyan church very near our house. The rather large contrast in many areas of theology between this church and the ones we had been attending for the previous 13 years is something about which I will comment in a later post. For purposes of the present discussion, two contrasts were particularly important–the Wesleyans’ “cautious openness” to the spiritual gifts (though exercise of them was pretty limited) and their emphasis on “entire sanctification” as a “second work of grace” (for more information, see also the Wikipedia articles on the Holiness Movement and Christian Perfection). Two things I could never find while I was in the Wesleyan Church were, unfortunately, a good definition of the entire sanctification experience I was seeking for myself and evidence that others had it. See also, “To be made more holy: Sanctification, Spirit baptism and many different churches,” which my friend Jonathan Brickman and I wrote many years later.

This left me, in the early 1990s, in a situation similar to that Charles Parham and his small congregation/Bible school had occupied a century earlier in Topeka–i.e., looking for clear evidence of the entire sanctification experience on which the Holiness Movement is centered. Although I knew nothing of Parham or the history of Pentecostalism until several years later, my search initially followed a similar trajectory–from entire sanctification to the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” (for a neutral discussion of this concept, go here). This led first into a Bible study group, which later resolved itself into a church congregation, on the radical edge of the Charismatic movement, which was clearly a part of the Signs and Wonders Movement but did not quite fully adopt prosperity theology. I was licensed, then ordained, in this church, as a part-time, unpaid associate pastor. After the founding pastor became too ill with a terminal illness to continue in 1997, I became–with no real preparation–its leader. On my first Sunday in the pulpit, it had shrunk from about 35 to 7 in attendance (and 6 of those were my family). It formally dissolved about a year later.

For about ten years after that, I was an ordinary member of a fairly conventional Pentecostal church. There was a problem, however. While I had seen and heard numerous charismatic manifestations of various kinds–some of them real beyond any doubt–and personally spoke in tongues and was familiar with words of knowledge, I saw no evidence that any of these manifestations, tongues included, were intended by God as “evidence” of anything about the person through whom they were manifested. In fact, I had privately spoken in tongues many years before anyone suggested to me that doing so was “evidence” of an “experience” separate from salvation, the “Baptism of the Holy Ghost,” as traditional Pentecostals insist that it is. I had not started experiencing it as such, so to follow the party line of what was then my church would have required reinterpreting my experience to fit their collective experience–which seemed an odd thing for a group that depends on a personal experience to be asking me to do. At least, to ask me to reinterpret my own experience to fit their doctrine, they should have been able to give me a good scriptural basis to do so. I was never able to find one.

But, while I witnessed manifestations of tongues (with interpretation) that I was quite certain were authentic, I also witnessed manifestations that seemed manufactured–multiple repetitions of the same syllables with no apparent linguistic structure at all. And I also observed that I and other tongues-speakers still seemed to have all of the normal human weaknesses. I started to question the role of tongues as evidence of spirituality. I posted the results of some of my analysis of these issues on the internet; they may still be found on this page and other pages that link from it.

Moreover, it was during this same era that not a few big-name Pentecostal and Charismatic “stars,” people whose “ministries” boasted healings and miracles, publicly and dramatically “fell into sin.” So there was an obvious disconnect between the doctrine that manifestation of gifts of the Holy Spirit, particularly tongues, are “evidence” of spiritual superiority, and what I could see in my own life, among leaders, and in Scripture. It was during this time period that I wrote the first version of “The Miraculous Clear and Present,” which has since been edited, modified and clarified by my good friend Jonathan Brickman.

This was the state of my knowledge and life experience, so far as the gifts and working of the Holy Spirit were concerned, in the summer of 2000. Many questions, few answers, but I was at least looking for answers in the right place–the Scriptures–and asking God to show me the truth. I had read, and re-read, the major passages on the subject–I Corinthians 12-14, Romans 12, Ephesians 4, and the Book of Acts–many times, and the early version of my web page on the subject was the result. At the same time, sometime in mid-2000, I took particular note of the following verses from I Corinthians 14:

Pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries. But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation. One who speaks in a tongue edifies himself; but one who prophesies edifies the church. Now I wish that you all spoke in tongues, but even more that you would prophesy… So also you, since you are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek to abound for the edification of the church… But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an ungifted man enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all; the secrets of his heart are disclosed; and so he will fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is certainly among you… Therefore, my brethren, desire earnestly to prophesy, and do not forbid to speak in tongues.

1 Corinthians 14:1-5, 12, 24-25, 39.

In what may have been my naivete, I read these references as saying that, while glossolalia is a legitimate manifestation of the Holy Spirit that has its proper place, I should really desire, and ask, to prophesy. See, “May Specific Gifts of God be Desired and Requested?”, written during this same time period. So, in the summer of 2000 I started praying that God would give me prophecy, even though my understanding of what that prayer meant was very incomplete.