Questionable Uses of Prophecy in the Contemporary Charismatic Movement

The topic for this blog post was inspired by a recent Facebook post of mine. To set the context of this discussion, here is the original Facebook post:

“Possible future blog post topic, let me know what you think: One of the ways in which the health and wealth gospel has manifested itself within the charismatic movement is in our use of the gift of prophecy. It is regular practice for young people at charismatic churches/ministry schools to be told within prophetic words that God has a ‘big destiny’ for them, or that they have a ‘great calling’. Whilst I do believe in the gift of prophecy, and that every human person has a deeply meaningful and significant calling to serve God and to partner with him in his mission, is it true or healthy to suggest or hint that most of us will have a large, influential ministry one day? I personally have received these kinds of prophetic words and believed them for many years, but ultimately I have found them unhelpful and misleading. I once heard a well-known prophetic leader prophesy over someone that he was going to be the next Reinhard Bonnke. Leaving aside the question of whether having more ministries like Bonnke's would actually be a desirable thing, how likely is it that this person who received this prophesy was going to preach to millions upon millions of people in evangelistic meetings in Africa? Is it any wonder we have leadership scandals left and right, if we are training our young leaders to hunger after influence, power and a platform? The role of prophecy is to make us more like Christ. Christ did not hunger after power and influence, he willingly laid it down and avoided it for the sake of love.”

The purpose of this blog post is to expand this thought into a description of several ways in which I think the charismatic movement has drifted away from the biblical teaching on the purpose of the gift of prophecy. I think that, especially given that today is the day after Pentecost and also the recent scandal at IHOPKC, now is as good a time as ever to re-evaluate how we as charismatic Christians use the gift of prophecy.  

Firstly, let us briefly consider the nature of prophecy in biblical teaching. The first thing to note here is that the purpose and nature of prophecy amongst the people of God is quite different after Pentecost compared to before Pentecost. Prior to the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost described in Acts 2, prophecy was restricted to a few specially chosen individuals, usually prophets. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible were champions of covenant faithfulness. They were not primarily fore-tellers of future events, but specially chosen mouthpieces through whom God called his people back to faithfulness to him by obedience to the Mosaic covenant. When the Hebrew prophets do foretell future events, it is usually the judgment that God will bring on his people for their sins if they do not heed the prophet and return to faithfulness to the covenant. In the New Testament, post-Pentecost, what Moses longed for has become a reality: “I wish that all the LORD’S people were prophets and that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29 NIV). In the ekklesia of the New Testament, the expectation is that a greater number of God’s people will prophesy, with prophecy now described as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Note that foretelling future events is still a part of the use of prophecy amongst God’s people but remains of lesser importance. In the New Testament the main purpose of prophecy is not to predict future events but to edify or build up the church. This includes individual Christians, but prophecy in the New Testament is primarily a corporate thing, where the collective body of believers is built up and edified. Although we do have examples of foretelling in the New Testament, such as the prophet Agabus predicting a famine in Acts 11:28, the main purpose of the gift is edification/building up which, in the context of the New Testament, means verbal messages coming from God through a prophetic speaker empowered by the Spirit which help either an individual Christian or a collective body of Christians become more like Christ in their life together.

In light of this brief and basic exploration of the biblical teaching on prophecy, I want to highlight four common uses of prophecy in the contemporary charismatic movement that I argue are not faithful to the biblical teaching on the gift of prophecy. Before I do that, however, I want to mention two instances in my own life where I have received a prophetic word that was in line with the biblical teaching and which affected me in a profound way unto greater Christlikeness and faithfulness to God’s calling on my life. The first was at Catch The Fire Toronto’s School of Ministry in 2009. At this point I was only eighteen years old and only just emerging from a life of being really quite far from God. A well-known prophetic leader told me something to the effect of “You are someone who always says ‘I want the bigger things’, and God has made you that way so that you constantly hunger after him and seek new knowledge of him and greater closeness with him. Everything that you learn about God will one day be poured out of you into the lives of other people for their benefit.” This is a heavy paraphrase, not the exact wording. But the effect on my life was remarkable. This man had never met me before, and yet somehow knew the single most distinctive characteristic of my personality since I was a child – a hunger for that which was most important in life, the ultimate, the transcendent, and an insatiable desire to never stop learning more about God and sharing what I learn with others. This prophetic word was faithful to the biblical witness because it edified me unto greater faithfulness to Christ and a desire to be made more like him. It has sustained and encouraged me for almost fifteen years now. The second prophetic word was given to a collective body of believers in a Vineyard church in Edmonton in 2019. The gist of it was “Some of us are resisting God’s call to be willing to suffer for Christ. We want to remain comfortable, rather than obey God’s calling to walk in the footsteps of our suffering Messiah.” Again, a paraphrase. But, once again, the effect on my life was profound. This word gave me the strength I needed to face the overwhelming amount of psychological pain that I was in at that time in my life, and to eventually overcome it by trusting in Christ and being willing to participate in his sufferings. Again, this use of prophecy was faithful to the New Testament teaching because it encouraged a corporate group of Christians to follow Christ more faithfully and to become more like him.

Let’s transition now to my four common uses of the gift of prophecy in the charismatic movement today that I think are inconsistent with the teaching of the New Testament.  

1. The ‘you are going to be a big deal one day’ prophetic word.

This is the kind of prophetic word that I described in my above-quoted Facebook post. It is extremely common in charismatic churches and ministry schools today for young people to come away from prophetic ministry placing their hope in, for lack of a better phrase, ‘making it’ one day as a big-time preacher or ‘apostle’ or prophet, etc. The words tend to sound like “God has a huge calling on your life”… or “God has a big destiny for you, one day you will stand on platforms in front of thousands of people preaching this or that.” The problem with this is that, if the goal of prophecy is to edify us unto being more like Christ, we need to wrestle with the fact that Jesus deliberately told people not to make him famous. Scholars call this the “messianic secret”. Jesus went out of his way to avoid notoriety. He lived his life for the glory of his Father and the good of those he was called to serve, not to make a name for himself. The after-effect of this kind of prophetic word is that we have thousands of disillusioned young Christians who never did end up developing a big, influential ministry, who are now wondering if anything that God did in their lives back then was real. This is not good! We also end up having a few young Christian leaders who do end up with big ministries, and they often end up self-identifying, even if only in the secrecy of their own hearts, as big time ‘apostles’ or prophets or ‘apostolic leaders’ whose ministries are about them and their platform, not washing the feet of the least of these, or throwing parties for the poor who can never pay them back.

2. The ‘anointed man or woman of God reads your mail from the front’ prophetic word.

Those of us who have spent a significant amount of time in the charismatic movement have all been here and seen this. The visiting, usually ‘big name’ prophetic person stands at the front of the meeting and picks out one or two people and proceeds to publicly tell the group things about this person that they shouldn’t be able to know. Now I do think that this expression of the gift of prophecy often comes from a sincere heart that wants to bless people and build them up. The problem, however, is that it oftentimes devolves into a demonstration of ‘prophet’s’ anointedness as he or she ‘reads the mail’ of the person(s) in question and essentially makes a public spectacle of their own prophetic prowess. I think that Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6 where we are directed to not draw attention to our own piety makes it clear that this is not a helpful manner in which to practise prophetic ministry.

3. The ‘this person is going to be the next president’ prophetic word.

Since around 2015 we have seen in North America many recognized prophetic leaders ‘prophesy’ that Donald Trump was going to be the next president of the US, or was going to be re-elected, etc. For now I am not going to make any comment whatsoever on whether Trump is a good president or a bad one from a Christian perspective, I am simply going to point out that predicting who is going to be the next big political leader is a use of the gift of prophecy that is not consistent with the purpose and role of prophecy described in the New Testament and is therefore an invalid, misguided and harmful use of the gift. As described above, prophecy in both the Old and the New Testament is not primarily orientated towards the prediction of future events. Prophecy in the New Testament can at times predict the future, but only in ways that will edify the whole collective body of Christ, the church. The main problem with saying this or that person is going to be the next big political leader and calling this ‘prophecy’ is that the person giving this ‘prophetic word’ is almost certainly going to be heavily invested personally in the political outcome that they are ‘hearing from God’. It therefore becomes almost impossible for them to not ‘prophesy’ their own politics and self-interestedness into ‘the word from God’. These are not ‘words from God’, but the words and agendas of human beings, whether conservative or liberal, who are not centrally focused on edifying the collective, universal church unto more Christlikeness.

4. The ‘commentary on current affairs’ prophetic word.

It is not uncommon in the charismatic movement for prominent ‘prophetic voices’ to function essentially like a news anchor but with special insider ‘prophetic’ information from God. Again, this is a by-product of American evangelicalism’s obsession with gaining political power (which has in recent years essentially derailed the entire movement). The gift of prophecy in the New Testament is not intended to function in this way, because it generally reads the ‘prophet’s’ agenda and views into ‘a word from the Lord’, and is not centrally focused on edifying the collective, universal church unto being more like Christ – that is, servant-hearted, disinterested in self and gaining power, other-focused, lowly, etc. This is therefore, in my view, an invalid and harmful use of the gift of prophecy which has drifted away from the teaching of the New Testament.

I understand that these comments might be contentious for many people in the charismatic movement. My goal is not to bring guilt or shame to people or to pull the rug out from under their faith. My goal with this whole blog, not even just this one blog post, is to try to catalyze conversations within the charismatic movement that might help us be better readers and therefore practitioners of the Bible. This desire for careful attention to the biblical text unto fuller faithfulness in my own life and in the charismatic movement was inculcated in me through my studies and subsequent teaching at Alberta Bible College here in Calgary. ABC is a college that comes from a tradition that is usually opposed to charismatic teaching, and yet they welcomed a 24-year-old David fresh from the Toronto Blessing into their spiritual family with open arms and helped me attend to scripture much more closely.

Please feel free to share your comments on this post with me, I would love to hear from you.