Counterfeit revival

It had never occurred to me that I could be involved with anything spiritually destructive. Yet when I reached the lowest spiritual level in my pastoral ministry, that is exactly what had happened.

How could I have let things go so far? From my perspective, serving on the board of directors of the Association of Vineyard Churches (AVC) had been a privilege. My wife and I developed close friendships with the other leaders. Together we travelled to numerous countries, planted churches, and shared a vision for ministry.

One week, during a leadership conference in the mid-western part of the United States, several of us were invited to a private meeting. We were to be introduced to the 'prophets' who were slated to have a major impact on the future of our movement.

The prophets began to inform us that, in the last days, the Lord was restoring the five-fold ministry of apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists to the church. We were challenged to accept the arrival of apostles and prophets because today's church already had plenty of teaching, pastoring, and evangelising. The arrival of the prophets and apostles would lead to the world's last and greatest revival.

New phase

The prophets revealed that we, the AVC, had been chosen as the people and the movement that would lead Christians into this final display of power in the last days.

It all sounded downright intoxicating. After struggling with the daily duties of ministry and our fears of inadequacy, this was exactly what we wanted to hear.

We listened attentively to the flattery of our new friends, the prophets. Our scepticism barely peaked above the surface of our consciousness. It disappeared entirely later in the meeting when one of the prophets singled us out and proceeded to reveal, in detail, the secrets of our lives. Now they really had our attention. How could they not be from God?

We returned to our local churches with our minds wide open to this new phase in the growth of our movement. During the months that followed, many of us received a plethora of 'personal prophecies' predicting our future roles, positions and successes in God's new movement. There were words of prophecy for our ministries, for their locations and growth, prophecies about the great 'restoration' to come and our important part in it. 'Seers' would direct people regularly to their 'land of anointing'. The recipients of such advice would immediately pack up and go in faith, confident that the predictions of ministry success would come true.

Voicing concerns

Ministry musicians and lay people were promised star status if they would remain faithful to the prophetic blueprint unfolded before our movement.

Nevertheless, some of the leaders began to voice concerns and uneasiness. They had seen people uproot their families and travel great distances to the 'land of their anointing', fail, and then blame God. Associate pastors and other leaders were wrongly dismissed, indicted, and even convicted by nothing more than a dream or prophecy that accused them of some spiritual crime. 'Fortune cookie' faith soon became more popular than following God's clear voice in Scripture.

Some pastors began raising concerns in board meetings. But we thought we could solve the problem by applying one of the movement's most endearing philosophies: 'Don't trim the bush until it's had a chance to grow', which means, 'Let's wait and see what comes of this'. We put away our hedge trimmers, and the prophets continued to operate with impunity.

Prophetic notebooks

After only a couple of years, the prophets seemed to be speaking to just about everyone on just about everything. Hundreds of Vineyard members received the 'gift' of prophecy and began plying their trade among both leaders and parishioners. People began carrying around little notebooks filled with predictions that had been delivered to them by prophets and seers. They flocked to the prophecy conferences that had begun to spring up everywhere. The notebook crowd would rush forward in hopes of being selected to receive more prophecies to add to their prophetic diaries.

Those identified with healing ministries were holding seminars on formulas and methods for healing prayer, such as finding 'hot spots' on the body.

Dreams and their interpretation soon moved to centre stage as prophecy conferences taught devotees to keep a pencil and notebook on their nightstands to write down each dream as it occurred. Not long after 'prophecy du jour' became the primary source of direction, a trail of devastated believers began to line up outside our pastoral counselling offices. Young people promised teen success and stardom through prophecy were left picking up the pieces of their shattered hopes because God had apparently gone back on His promises. Leaders were deluged by angry church members who had received prophecies about the great ministries they would have but had been frustrated by local church leaders who failed to recognise and 'facilitate' their 'new anointing'.

Dial-a-prophet

After a steady diet of the prophetic, some people were rapidly becoming biblically illiterate, choosing a 'dial-a-prophet' style of Christian living rather than studying God's Word. Many were left to continually live from one prophetic 'fix' to the next, their hope always in danger of failing because God's voice was so specific in pronouncement, yet so elusive in fulfilment. Possessing a prophet's phone number was like having a storehouse of treasured guidance. Little clutched notebooks replaced Bibles as the preferred reading material during church services.

One conference speaker, addressing 8,000 people, discouraged the use of reference books, commentaries, and language tools for sermon preparation. Rather, the pastors were exhorted to determine their Sunday messages through listening for prophecies during long walks with the Lord. Something was dangerously wrong in the movement.

Back to the Bible

In my region of denominational jurisdiction, churches began to shrink because evangelism had been replaced by mysticism. Something bad was happening to the church we had planted 15 years earlier, and I was beginning to realise that it was my fault. I had reached the lowest point in my ministry, and I was staring at failure.

One of my earliest pastoral mentors had taught: 'When you're not sure what God is saying, go back to what God has already said'. The Bible! What a concept! I had grown weary of studying past revivals, movements, and histories of the church, vainly trying to find justification for what was happening in my own church. It seemed that, as a pastor, I had given up what I knew for sure in exchange for what I could never know for sure. It was time to search the Word and get back to basics.

After years of pastoral training, teaching, and preaching, I knew that the bizarre changes in the fabric of our church needed biblical evaluation and correction if our flock was to survive. I was supposed to be the shepherd, but I had become a follower. My pasture was in danger of turning into a dustbowl.

I remember well the first time I stepped aside and allowed false teaching in my church. I was told that we had 'quenched the Holy Spirit long enough' and that it was 'now time to give the church back to the Holy Spirit'. I was told that the penance for the ecclesiastical felony of 'quenching the Spirit' was to include an 'anything goes' time during every meeting. Order would be set aside, and chaos was to be invited.

Some of us were suckers for this kind of manipulation. My feelings of guilt were conjured up by suggestions that I had exerted too much human leadership and control in the church. All of my peers were confessing their sin of control and letting go, so I followed suit.

I had almost lost my commitment to presenting a clear gospel message to visiting non-believers and instead allowed subjectivity to reign over reasoning from the Scriptures. I needed to repent and become a true shepherd again.

As my wife and I prepared to attend what would be our last Vineyard board of directors meeting, we rehearsed what we would say: how we needed to eliminate the swirl of subjectivity that had entered our church; how we needed to get back to the basics of Christian evangelism and discipleship; how we needed to restore Bible study to our members' daily lives.

We didn't want to cause trouble. We had formed close friendships with these people, loved them, and considered them an important part of our lives. But we could no longer remain silent concerning the truth.

Finally, after a week's worth of sometimes heated discussion, prayer, and meetings, it was all summed up by the dream someone shared the last night. The dream, related as though it were from God himself, instructed us to do nothing, to make no decisions, but to 'wait and see'.

Tossed to and fro

Frustrated, I returned to my own church in Denver. I had just witnessed close friends, collaborators in Christ, legitimate Christian leaders being 'tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine'.

I knew without a shadow of doubt that it was time to begin the process of getting the church God had given me to pastor back to basics. At that moment, truth became more important than relationships.

My wife and I spoke with our remaining congregation. We knew that if they would commit to going back to the basics of Christian practice with us, the Word of God guaranteed that the Lord would work more powerfully and more legitimately in our lives than ever before. The congregation agreed.

I went back to teaching the Bible in the most basic fashion I could, verse by verse. What had been a church of 4,400 shrank as people left to join the 'holy laughter' movement. My hate mail grew to enormous proportions. Even the movement's leader publicly denounced me, predicting that God would kill me for my 'sin'.

Conversions again

God was true to his word in the midst of the storm that our congregation endured during what we later called 'the year of slander'. Within a few months, several hundred people came to a saving knowledge of Christ. Baptisms increased simply because there were new converts to baptise. People's lives were radically changing, and the church was becoming healthy again. Attendance increased almost overnight. Within a year, we added a third service to our Sunday schedule. Currently our congregation is moving past 6,000, and our struggles are with ordinary, normal issues of Christian life. All of this because of the basics.

This article is taken from the foreword to Hank Hanegraaff's book Counterfeit Revival, published by Nelson Word at £12.99, and is used with permission.

Tom Stipe's experience in the Vineyard churches (USA)