Transcription
It wasn't. Jack came to our church. Jack came to our church a year ago, and I knew Jack a little bit at seminary and loved his book. I just—I read all his books and loved them, and I don't know why I didn't bring Jack in, you know, 20 years ago. I don't know even to this day. Jack was very gracious with me to confess that to him.
And um, but we—we are late in pursuing the gifts as we are told to in 1 Corinthians 12:31 and 1 Corinthians 14:1—to pursue the higher gifts, pursue this—the gifts, especially the gifts of prophecy and to really be normal biblical Christianity as you were describing at Matt this morning, just a biblical church. And so, you know, this has been so helpful for us.
You know, I feel like God, during a remnant radio show in May when Jack was here, put on my heart at that point, you know, there are a lot of pastors like me who believe in all the gifts aren't doing much. So, let's just host a gathering. I've been trying to get the convergence for a while, but because of co—they weren't hosting it, so we did. But, you know, this is more for me than anybody. I'm here as a learner, too. Uh, that we—Okay, what—what's next for us and, you know, I want to be wise and gentle, and my wife is—is a good help for me—to do this, don't do that, more of this, and some other people around me. So, I'm just—I'm—I'm completely convinced it's all biblical. So, we're going ahead this way and um, trusting God's going to guide us.
Jack, um, training prophecy because we're talking about like how do we—how do—how do we start training? But, before you do that, we have to address the—the elephant in the room of the—the kind of trope of like you actually can't train in prophecy. There's no Bible verse that says this is how you train prophecy. How that's in the back of someone's mind because before you do that, right, we got to dress those elephants. H—how can you put the minds of the pastors and teachers here that it's an okay thing to teach prophecy? It's an okay thing to teach healing and deliverance. I'm not sure there's a verse that says train in evangelism, is there? Nobody is against it. Well, I don't think he's like going through his—his scripture right now. He's like, "Nope, it's not there." Sam—Sam's like, "Wait, I did the ESV once." I'm pretty sure I fixed it. Okay. Yeah. What's a real site? It wasn't in the first edition, but it was in the second. I'm going to—I'm going to have to clarify that before—before this week is over.
Yeah. I think uh—I think Jesus is—is the model. Uh, the only one who ever needed any help chose 12 helpers. Why? To teach them or train them to love what he loves and—and actually to love them. And so that—that's what we're doing with all the spiritual gifts. Teaching of evangelism is somebody has to take you by the hand and show you how to do this, or you'll make a mess out of it. So, uh, Jesus is our model. I mean, he taught the disciples how to do everything. He did it in front of them and then released them to do it. He taught them how to heal by—by healing them in front of them. So, we did the same thing in—in church, but all began prophecy—all began with hearing the voice of God.
So, I was one of those guys that as a seminary professor that says God doesn't speak except in this book. And why would you trust dreams or impressions? You might have one-off dream from God. Okay, fine. But don't—don't think—don't expect that's going to be uh—normal. And—and so somebody has come along and say, "Look, 1 Corinthians 14:1 says earnestly pursue spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy. Prophecy is not inspired teaching. It's revealing the future." And uh, it all starts with teaching someone how to tell this impression is from God. Um, what this dream is from God. Uh, and then the—everybody can hear God. The prophetic people are going to be consistent at hearing God for other people. Uh, and then home groups are—I think—are the best place to learn to do that because every week you can—if you can have a practice of home group at hearing God after home group because yeah, that person's really good at healing. That person's got a gift of mercy. Uh, this person has got a prophetic gift. And then so we'll have—then we'll move a special training for the prophetically gifted people and show them etiquette and when they get really good enough then you figure out a way to use them on a Sunday morning uh service. And there's no one right way to do this. It's—it's totally up to you and your church and the leading of God. He'll show you how to do it for your church uh in a way that doesn't burn the church down.
Michael, how do you prophecy at your church? How do we do prophecy at our church? How do we practice it or train it? Train for—both—practice it. Well, we have a number of different spaces in which we do so, and he talked about spaces, but um, we have prophetic teams that pray for people at the end of every service. Uh, we also will prophesy from the stage. Now the people who prophesy from the stage are those who are most proficient in the gift of prophecy, and this is what Jack trained us in was uh—that Sunday morning is for—and I can't remember—I mentioned that just a few minutes ago—but Sunday morning is with mature expression of gifts and so—and so our most gifted prophetic people will prophesy from the stage, and we—we kind of step that up and pastor that moment. Uh, and then prophecy has been flowing for so long in our church, and we just—we encourage it, and all our small groups practice prophecy. If you come to a small group, good chance you might get prophesied over. If you just come to church you might get prophesied over uh—because it's—it's become a part of the culture and uh—and it's spread like that. So really in any setting where the people of God gather, there's a good chance you might get prophesied over, but there are specific spaces that we mobilize for it. We also send people out in evangelism and uh—and they do what someone called power evangelism. John wrote a book about power of evangelism, wrote a book about it, but where they move in prophetic and healing and deliverance just as Jack talked about that Jesus sending out the disciples to—to preach and demonstrate the gospel. And it is a lot easier to preach the gospel after you have demonstrated the gospel.
So in all those ways, Sam, how do you guys do at—what your model is super cool to me with the like 30 people you train? I want to just follow up on something Jack said as well. Um, have you ever noticed how we treat the so-called miraculous gifts of the spirit altogether different from how all other gifts are treated? Again, all gifts are miraculous because they're all manifestations of the spirit. So I don't really like that language, but people use it. Um, when I was in seminary—when Jack was in seminary—we took classes in homalytics. It's a fancy word for how to preach. So preaching and teaching is a spiritual gift. So why did they give us a class to train us? Um, I don't know that people are born administrators. You learn administrative skills. That's a spiritual gift—administration—leadership. Every spiritual gift can be taught and honed and trained and improved upon. Um, and if you know—so why do we think that oh only those can—but prophecy and praying for the sick can't. Um, you're all supposed to pray for the sick, but some people do it really badly. And yet others, you know, they learn—they—they know what to say, what not to say, how to treat people if nothing happens. Um, all these things you can grow, you can learn, you can improve. So I don't know why we differentiate u—among these gifts as some can be taught and trained and improved upon, but others cannot. I just think that's okay.
Now back to your question. Um, we—we started out—um, I created a prophetic leadership team and handpicked about—I think we had oh—eight or nine individuals—four or five men—four or five women—and they meet regularly once a month on Sunday mornings. Uh, they process perhaps prophetic words that people have in the church. Maybe somebody in the church has a dream. Somebody had a powerful encounter. We tell them—submit it to the prophetic leadership team. They process it. They pray about it. They interact with that person. Then they come to me and the elders and say—you—we think this is something for the whole body. Um, then we had about 30 individuals that we have actually authorized. Jack was talking about on a Sunday morning. You don't have an open microphone. You don't want people standing—popcorn prophecies all over the place—popping up and yelling out things—that's really dangerous. Um, I—I told these guys—we got a guy to come to our church. I don't know if he's watching this or eventually will—Sunday—two days ago—first time at Bridgeway—come up to me afterwards and I'm so glad we didn't have an open mic because he came up and said uh—by the way—have you read the four new books of the Bible? Said—help me? Said—yeah, we got their four—four books of the Bible—they're not 66 in the can. They're 70—and he began to describe these for me and I thought—can you imagine if he had come to the platform had an open microphone and spouted something—profiting over people. What? They start profiting over people. Yeah. Yeah. So—so we start out with about 30, and these individuals—they used to have to come to me to process their word, but I now have such confidence in them. I know who they are. I know their maturity. They know what is and is not permissible. Um, they don't have to vet their word through me before they share it. We now expanded that list to about 100 because we're constantly doing prophet. We have—two weeks ago—we had prophetic training on a Saturday morning for three hours. We had 15 people drive down from Wisconsin for it. It was great. Three from Iowa—um—just because they're so hungry to learn. Well, you all are welcome to come. Anybody come whenever we have these. So we have—and now I have a master email list of all the people that we have recognized—you've actually—whether or not you have—whether you're a prophet or whether you've actually done it well. And so every week or so I'll send out an email of instruction—correction. Hey, let's—let's consider this or how do we process what happened last week? Or I make issue—like I'm getting ready to send out an email that's going to really make some people mad at me because there's a particular lady who's all over the internet and she's truly deranged. Uh, you—even did an episode about her. So, but I got a lot of people following her, and they're just embibing all this utter absolute nonsense. Her name in that email. Oh yeah. What? What's your name now? Yeah, we can do it. Her name sounds—it's Ker. It sounds like—I hope and pray this woman knows Jesus. I really do. And I'm not saying she's not a born-again believer. But if you're following her stuff, stop it. It is seriously diluted beyond anything I have ever heard being spouted in the body of Christ. So it's not a new problem, right? You had false prophets in the first century running around. Absolutely. It's absolute absurdity. Like it's not—it's not like, hey, Trump is, you know, president, you know, six months, eight months later. It's like, you know, there's a box of—made of jelly. We can eat in heaven and cows—at dry kids—for protect our classes—wearing overalls. The cows wearing overalls talking to the kids. You can ride bucking broncos in heaven and the horses will talk to you, and then you can dive into the crystal sea with them and you don't have to worry about breathing because you can all breathe underwater. I mean, it's—it's like she claims to have been to heaven thousands of times—not once. Like Paul—thousands of times. I don't believe that. I just simply don't believe that. And we'll probably lose some people in my church because they—they're enamored with it. And it's—sometimes you have to bring strong correction for the sake of the souls of people. So it's not easy. Boy, I hope I don't regret that. I'll circle back. Okay. I want to give Matt another chance to talk here. So maybe you could talk us through because I know that in your context you have a lot of people who are concerned about that kind of thing. Hey, you know, Chandler, you open it up to spiritual gifts. You're going to get traveling to heaven three days later and—and look, Sam's open his church up to spiritual gifts and people, you know, and so he's having to correct this. And so—so talk into that. How are you shephering the fact that you—you want to keep going for it, but you have a real concern for error? And so how do you navigate that space?
So, what I've tried to do up until this point is I don't really name the person or um—the church, but I will certainly say we don't believe this. We believe this. And so, I'll try to draw a distinction between what we want to see God do, and what we believe the Bible lays before us and where this idea has kind of gone off the rails in—in—in this way. So, like if I—when I'm teaching on healing, uh—I want to point out there are people that believe that if everyone around you just has enough faith for you and if you just have enough faith yourself, you'll be healed. I think that's cruel. I think it's cruel to you as a sick person. I think it's cruel to put all of that on the people everywhere. It breaks relationships. It's evil. It's not true. This is what is true. And then I want to muddy the waters just a little bit by saying—and yet there is some aspect of faith at play here. So what we want to do is—and if I'm ever praying for the sick with a group of people, I'll always start with—um—let's just confess. We're going to pray. Let's just confess any doubt we might have right now that the spirit of God might—to the Lord. We don't want to do it out loud. Let's just say—Lord, I want to believe more than I do that in this moment—this person with stage four cancer—that the doctors have sent home to die—to be restored right before my very eyes. I want you to drive out of me right now. Holy Spirit, any doubt that that might be possible—and—and I don't know that I've ever like physically felt that doubt being driven out. But I do want to say to the Lord, I know you can do—I don't like this thing in me that's thinking that you can't. I want to bring that into submission to you. So, give a couple minutes and then we pray. So, so I want—go—this is where it's wrong. I say it's wrong. Where it's evil. I say it's evil. Uh, and then I go—here—here's the biblical sweet spot. This is what we're aiming at. And—and so that's how I try to do it at the village.
That was kind of the question I was going to follow up with with any of you guys honestly. Um, because I think that there is this desire in the charismatic community—like we want to go after the gifts. We want to see prophecy. We want to see healing. We really want to go after it. But if we police our own movement, if we step out of line and say, "Hey, that's too far," then we're going to quench the work of the spirit. And I find that there's this massive group of people that are—that have been hurt and abused in these really—I don't want to say hyper-charismatics because that's kind of—way—but these really out-of-control spaces. And I find that those people—like—that's a guy I can trust. When we get together and we say, "Hey, here—and no further. This is—this is why people—space"—that we actually—we actually create a sense of reliability and trust in the body of Christ. Um, Sam, you've written tons of articles on that. Have you found your church trust you more that you're willing to speak on those things? I hope so. Uh, that seems to be the case. Um, I still—I still make some people mad. You—I want to say this as well. Um, you know, Matt touched on 1 Thessalonians 5:19–21. Um, do not quench the spirit. And he specifically means by despising prophetic utterances. And of course, the remedy that isn't gullibility. Oh gosh, I got to embrace. I got to swallow up naively everything that is said in the name of prophecy. No. Test everything. Weigh it. Evaluate it. Hold what is good. Reject what isn't. And the amazing thing about this that we don't often think about—the church to whom Paul sent that instruction. It's one of the most mature churches that he found. If you read the first few verses of 1 Thessalonians 1, he's praising them for their maturity, their growth, their love. You receive the word of God not as a word from man, but it's from God himself. And yet there were people in Thessalonica who were despising prophecies. Why? For the same reason you and I did. There were goofy people trying to control lives, predicting things didn't come to pass, manipulating others, using supposed prophetic words to advance their cause, ambition in the church to get more power to look important. All the same reasons you and I. And Paul says, I realize that happens. If you despise prophecies, you're sinning. The violation of an apostolic command is a sin. What you—and so again, that doesn't mean you have to swallow everything that comes along under the name of the prophetic—test it—evaluate it—examine it in the light of scripture—pray over it with somebody who may have delivered a word and you question it—um—because otherwise you're—you're pouring water on the spirit's fire and you don't want to do that. I also say the—the thing that was—most surprising to me is I think in all of our churches there's that back—I'm almost ready to say in every church everywhere—maybe even out in California in a certain spot—there's a group of charismatic people that are just praying and hoping that it breaks loose in that congregation—um—and—and I have a couple of times now—I found them to be some of the most difficult as we've made this journey in regards to—um—what—one—the speed at which they want it and then two—that oftentimes—they—they want it to go a lot further than it's going to go at our place. And it's some of what you're talking about where maybe they got an old realized eschatology or they—they're the first to want your congregation—like—oh—they'll start handing out books that you don't want—you don't want your congregation reading those books. And so I spent just as much time on that side of things than I did on those that were nervous that we were going to become BEL. That's good. And—and Jeeoff, one of the things that—that a couple things you talked about is you talked about how you felt like at first you were too slow to move into the gifts. Why didn't I have Jack come earlier? Was one of the things that you said, but you also said, "Hey, I'm just learning here like everybody else."