We got one!!!!

We’ve been praying for those with hearing problems for 6 months now with little result. I don’t know why it’s taken so long but we finally got one! A lady (Jane) was prayed for last Sunday to be healed from Tinnitus and she got healed. Thank you Jesus! Now we have one, we’ll have more!

Here’s an extract from her email

“Do you remember a few weeks ago I received prayer for my ear and shooting pains in my head. Well it got really bad and I ended up with an appointment at the hospital. The consultant told me it was Tinnitus and said the others shooting pains were from my neck!!! He told me there is no cure (I rebuked that) and it has just been getting worse over the past few weeks. I have been living on pain killers almost every day since and it has been difficult.

…After the service on Sunday morning we were chatting with Mike Green. He has also got Tinnitus and has lived with it for years. He and Phil prayed for me and it’s stopped!!!!!!!!!”

What a blast

What a Sunday! I’ve been buzzing ever since. I love it when God breaks in and sets people free and empowers them ‘en masse’!! It started with a couple coming up to me in the morning and saying that they had come last Sunday and during the prayer time he had been totally healed of back and neck pain that he had been suffering from for 10 years following an accident! Praise God! Now that’s how every Sunday should start! We then had a great morning service with a number encountering God powerfully but it really kicked off in the pre-match prayers before the evening service. Tabo had a word about God’s joy and I had also felt that God wanted to release joy. Pretty much everyone in the room got touched by God and then it just overflowed into the evening service. I particularly felt we should go after asthma and allergies so we’ll wait to see how many were healed – the presence of God was there powerfully. 

I’d had so many people ask me to pray for them to ‘impart what God did in me and PJ during our trip to Bethel’ that we decided to do it for everyone who wanted. I’m always reluctant to do this sort of thing because I never want to be the focus – my desire is to raise up the whole church to minister in power not be the ‘man of power for the hour!’ Nevertheless I felt it was right to do it on this occasion and it clearly was – I’m just praying that the fire that was started keeps burning – roll on the prayer meeting!

(By the way, if anyone reading this ever wants to pray before the evening service we always pray from 9:45am to 10:30 and 5:45pm to 6:30 and it’s open to anyone! Just turn up and start praying!)

Never the same again!

Just checking through my emails and found this one from Phil Dowling (leader of New Life Rushden) who came to our recent conference with Trevor and Sharon Baker. He encountered God in a massive way and he said to me the other day ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be the same again’

His story has encouraged me so much you guys had to see it! Phil by his own admission is not the usual suspect for this kind of stuff!

Here’s an extract

“Saturday night I had a dream about God’s glory ( I didn’t used to do dreams!) On Sunday morning getting ready for church I suddenly found myself looking at our school hall, and as Bob the caretaker was busy in the hall, it was as if there were angels around the mini balcony that there is also getting ready. When I arrived Bob was waiting for me, and he was dressed as I had seen him! Bob opened up about some things that worried him and let me pray for him. That has never happened before.

Sunday was a little different! It started in the prayer meeting before the meeting with people praying for us to encounter God’s glory. The worship was great, I shared my dream, and God began to move, a lady who is very quiet and has never spoken out before, shared a magnificent picture which tied many things together and led us to pray for all the men. God’s spirit came on them and a number ended up on the floor for some time.

After David Devenish spoke he prayed for healing (he got in before me!). One chap who came in with a walking stick, went out with it again, but tucked under his arm. A lady with arthritis said her hands and neck were now pain free, and the next day we got a text saying someone who had had chest pains for three weeks by late Sunday afternoon no longer did.

It was great.

In the afternoon I met with our core team, and tried to explain what was happening. I prayed for them and all bar one went straight to the floor or settee! This did not used to be normal for me, but I am praying that it is now.”

Prayer and Fasting

More on what I learned from Bethel later as I’m away again – at prayer and fasting this time – two days where we gather with Newfrontiers leaders from across the UK (and some from overseas). It’s always an encouraging time and it fantastic to hear stories of God’s power breaking out across the UK. A totally blind guy healed at one church (Camberley), someone healed of an eating disorder without even being prayed for in Jersey plus loads more. God who is everywhere is very much moving here!

It was also interesting to hear Terry Virgo speak about what’s happening in the Florida “revival” right now. I found some of his comments really helpful in assessing what’s going on there (if case you haven’t heard they are now holding nightly meetings with thousands gathering, hundreds being healed and many saved). Anyway, here’s some of the best bits from what Terry said

• Revival will not always look as it has looked before and it will often be shaped by the container through which God moves. When God moved in Toronto it had a very ‘Vineyard’ feel and in Pensacola it had a very ‘Assemblies of God’ feel. We must learn to look past the packaging and look to see what God is doing. We don’t need to accept everything to accept the genuine move of God. (my comment – we must learn to chew up the meat and spit out the bones!)

• Manifestations of the spirit – are really our response to the presence of the Holy Spirit. This is a useful distinction as it means we can learn to discern and ask God to increase whatever is of Him while recognising that there will always be things happening that are not (my comment – I’ve always found proverbs 14:4 helpful here ‘where there are no oxen the feeding trough is clean but many crops come from the strength of an ox’ – meaning there’s always a bit of a mess when real work is being done)

• Our attitude – we must respect God’s anointing. It’s His choice – I don’t want to dislike someone that he likes very much. I have to line up and get my heart correct towards it. I want to respect anointing. The giving of gifts is not the giving of rewards. We think they are rewards for good doctrine but they are not – gifts are free. Samson was not the most reliable – yet he gets into Hebrews 11 – the hall of faith. The way we think may not be the way God thinks. I don’t want to embrace all the stuff – but I do want to embrace what God is doing.

• Anointing is transferable – that’s happening with Florida and that’s happened before with other moves of God and is often one of the marks of a genuine move of God. Outbreaks are happening in parallel without any connection to Florida because this is of God. We’ve seen more healings in the last 2 years than we have ever seen before – why? Because God is up to something across the world. We must be strong in the word AND the Spirit and open up our hearts to the presence of God.

• Jonathan Edwards lived in revival full of phenomenon. He didn’t throw it out but nor did he embrace everything. He looked for the fruit and recognised that when God comes in power strange things happen.

Good stuff – an encouragement to press in for all that God is doing!

Home & reflections on Bethel (part 1)

It’s so good to be back and see my family – it’s only been 6 days but I’ve missed them all so much! While it’s still fresh, I thought it’d be worth writing down some of my reflections and lessons learned from our trip to Bethel….

1. God is ridiculously good. This is the ethos of Bethel and underpins everything they do and believe. “We’re on a journey to plum the depths of the goodness of God”. I’ve always known and believed that God was good but the atmosphere here has taken me to a new level and blown a few cobwebs away to help me see how this one truth must infect and affect everything we do and say. We must exist to display the goodness of God.

2. The pursuit of the presence of God above everything else. The culture at Bethel is that we must have more of Him and everything else falls a sorry second. Bill Johnson told the story of when the spirit first fell in power 12 years ago he would often be sitting in his office when he would sense the spirit come. He would stop whatever he was doing and stick his head out of his office and cry ‘surf’s up’ – to which all the other staff would come running. They’d then spend time receiving more from God. It seems wasteful, almost irresponsible. But I’ve seen that as Bill says ‘we get more done by accident now than we ever did on purpose before’. Kris Vallotten (the associate pastor) had someone from the media department apologise because she was so drunk in the Spirit that she could barely work. He replied ‘do I want my staff filing when God’s in the house – no you pray for me!’ There’s something of this heart that is throughout Bethel – we must have more of God. Everyone’s encounter with God will look different – but we must have and long for that encounter!

3. I’ve just got to love Jesus more. The desire for worship filled the place and you could see it everywhere. Worship was the most important thing – not to get anything from God but just to love Him. As Bill said in one session “if you get frustrated with the length of the worship time what does that tell you about your heart?” You cannot worship the Lord to get him to do something.

4. Boldness is a key to unlock faith and power. I saw a new level of boldness to pray for the sick and take the gospel into the market place in the people at the conference. From seeing the Bethel people literally run to pray for the sick on Sunday mornings to hearing story after story of people who prayed for impossible things and saw God break in. Bill Johnson used to ask his kids every night “what impossible thing is God asking you to do?”

5. We fear excess more than we fear lack. The conference challenged my fear of excess – another Bill quote “I refuse to take criticism of possible excess from someone who is satisfied with lack”. We’re so terrified of excess in the UK – but our greater enemy is being satisfied with lack. I asked Bill how he handles manifestations of the spirit in the church. He stated that he refused to make a list of ‘acceptable manifestations’ because if he did he knew that sooner or later God would do something off the list! Peter said to Jesus ‘you have the words of eternal life’: The point is this – I’ll know when it’s his voice because something happens inside of me – life. My safety cannot be in my intellectual capacity to avoid deception. It must come from my ability to hear his voice. This culture of faith and our ability to discern 100% rotates around his voice.

6. Kids get to play. We’ve started on this journey of bringing the kids into a supernatural but Bethel exposed me to more. From the personal prophecy time (where I had two kids and an adult prophecy over me non stop for 15 minutes) to the fact that their kids go on ‘outreach’ to old people’s homes challenged my understanding of how much we can bring our kids into.

7. Obedience to the Holy Spirit is key to hearing. I was challenged by the willingness of the leadership to do whatever God told them. Bill said “when you live by principle and not by presence it’s easy to manipulate him by mistake. You end up using kingdom principles for kingdom results but in your timing not His. This is why God doesn’t always honour the principles – so that we learn to depend on His presence and obey Him”

that’s just for starters….!

Day three – ok I got messed up.

Well I prayed that God would wreck me during this trip and it happened today – I’m a mess. It’s funny I was saying to PJ this morning I haven’t been drunk in the Spirit since 94 – I want to get drunk again. He heard my prayer!
Bill Johnson started the first session worship weeping – “I don’t care if we do nothing else – I’ve just got to love Jesus more”

So worship began and I just began to laugh – not giggle – belly laugh. Unlike anything I’ve known since 1994. The guy in front of me who is in his 70’s – looks a bit like my dad strangely – turned around and put his hand on my knee. I laughed harder and harder – my stomach hurt. Then he pulled my head forward and put his arm round my neck – man I was gone. I wept like a baby – laughing – crying – getting delivered – all mixed up together. I’ve never felt anything like it – it was as if God himself was holding me. I’m crying again as I write this!

After about 40 minutes I lifted my head and saw a guy behind holding his 13 year old grandson who has cerebal palsy in his arms and saying to him. “I love you. God loves you. You’re a special boy” over and over. His grand son can’t do anything but lie back and dribble. Oh my gosh – I was undone – another 40 minutes with charles (the guy in front) holding me saying God loves you Simon, he loves your heart and your passion for him. I haven’t cried so hard in years.

So that was the morning. There was no time for a preach – everyone was a mess. I found out after that PJ got hit so hard by the power of God he’s never felt anything like it. He then prayed for a woman with a back condition who got healed – but he can fill you in on that.

And it’s been like that after the afternoon session – I’ve rolled around on the floor laughing and crying – asking God for more boldness and courage to take his power onto the streets whilst receiving more of his love for me. And I’ve never seen PJ so messed up.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen next session….

Another encouraging story Bill told last night – in a recent conference a woman laughed for 3 hours under the power of the spirit. Her husband was so embarrassed – he took her home and closed all the doors and windows. After three hours she vomited up a tumor which had been in her stomach!!

We also had a woman testify that in their church in Nevada an 8 year old girl who had been born with one lung went for an xray and the doctor told the mother she had a minor infection on both lungs. The mother asked for another xray as there must have been some mistake – they took one and confirmed – the girl now had two lungs!!!

This will probably be my last blog entry till I get home – I’m going to write up some summary thoughts on the plane to try to digest everything that’s happened while we’ve been here. I can’t wait to see you all – and especially my wonderful wife and kids!!

Day three – wow!

Wow – what a day! There is just way too much to write – we’re both blown away with the amount that’s happened.

We started with q&a session with Bill and the senior leadership team of Bethel which was brilliant but the day really kicked off in the second session when Bill felt to prophecy over any church that was in temporary or rented accommodation that ‘now is the time’ for God to provide buildings. Lots of people prayed for PJ and I and the woman behind us had a picture of a warehouse – large and multi purpose! Then Todd Bentley prayed for everyone live over the phone (he’s in Florida). He prayed for an impartation for all of us and God’s power fell tangibly – it was amazing to see what a prayer over the phone can release. On the CD the session was called ‘Todd prayed and we all got drunk’ which is a fair description!

Everyone at the conference also had a prophecy time scheduled where 3 of their prophetic people would prophecy over you for 15 minutes. I had one adult and two kids and they had incredible words for me – God’s tuning you like a guitar, open heavens, healing, boldness. All the things God has been speaking to me about. I’d had a dream not 3 weeks ago about playing a guitar and it being out of tune and God tuning me! What was incredible was the confidence of the 9 year old girl who prophesied over me – it was mind blowing. We found out also today that their kids regularly go in small teams into old peoples homes and other places to bless and pray for the sick. We picked up some great resources for Nicky Stanyard!

The day was just packed with stories. We met one couple from Florida who encouraged us greatly with their journey in learning to move in signs and wonders and words of knowledge. Two of their many miracles were a woman healed of breast cancer and another of stomach cancer – praise you Jesus!!

There are so many other stories I can hardly recall them all – restaurants calling Bethel to ask “when are your conferences on – our waitresses all want to be on because they get such good tips”. Company’s asking for Bethel students to come and work as it changes the atmosphere of the workplace. There’s no question the church is transforming the town little by little.
Probably the best story of the day though was a pastor who was flying back from Europe to the US. He had a word of knowledge for the lady in the seat next to him (across the aisle) that she was in pain in her back. He asked if he could pray and she agreed – as he prays she slumps out of her seat into the aisle. The stewardess comes over and when he explains what’s going on she asks for prayer too – she has pain in her knee from an accident 4 years previously. He prays and she is healed. When he looks up 3 other people are standing in line asking him to pray for them. The stewardess then gets on the intercom and says if you need a miracle come to the galley-way between first class and coach.

A number of people gather and an English guy approaches the pastor and offers to ‘catch’! After a while of praying the English guy says ‘You’ll have to slow down I’m running out of places to put people” – at which point the pastor looks around and there are bodies everywhere. It turns into a 2 hour long healing meeting from Europe to the States. 5 people got born again, including an Arabic man coming of the US to get surgery. He gets healed and born again.
What a day. We finished with Bill doing one of the best preaches I’ve ever heard him give on creating a culture of faith – it really was outstanding – don’t worry I’ll bring home the CD!

Quote of the day “Peter said to Jesus ‘you have the words of eternal life’: The point is this – I’ll know when it’s his voice because something happens inside of me – life. My safety cannot be in my intellectual capacity to avoid deception. It must come from my ability to hear his voice. This culture of faith 100% rotates around his voice.”

More tomorrow!

Forgot to say

On Bethel’s website they have Paul’s sermon from Sunday night – Paul Manwaring is on Bethel’s leadership team and has just recovered from prostate cancer. It’s outstanding – I encourage you to listen to it if you have time.

click here

Day two – healed of HIV

This was the first proper day of the conference. It was actually fairly chilled out as the conference registration didn’t start until 4pm so we spent the morning shopping to toys for the kids (Caleb has been pining for Indiana Jones Lego) and I had to show PJ the size of the local Target and Walmart. If you’ve never seen a US Walmart it’s hard to describe the scale of the thing. Picture Bedford town centre inside a building – that’s about how big it is. You need serious hiking gear and kendel mint cake to get from one end to the other. There was a story a few years ago in the States of a homeless guy who lived in a Walmart for over a month before anyone found him – you get the picture!
After lunch we decided to drive out of town and visit a local lake ‘Whiskeytown’ which is beautiful – framed by snow capped mountains and forests it was well worth the visit.
Registration at 4pm was packed. There are literally people here from all over the world. We met a guy Phil from Alaska who pastors a church of 800 or so. He was such a sweet, unassuming guy and we took him out for dinner later where he told us his story of how he transitioned his church from cessationist (doesn’t believe in the gifts of the spirit) to moving in signs and wonders. Get this – last year they had a girl who was HIV+ (she’d had 3 tests to confirm this). A few people prayed for her and asked if she would be willing to be retested. She was reluctant (having had 3 already) but decided to give it a go. They retested her twice and she’s now been officially declared HIV-ve – and she has the documentation to prove it. It’s another example of how my world is being challenged by being here – nothing is impossible with God!
The evening meeting was powerful – it was wonderful just to be part of a crowd of 800 people who are all pushing in for more of God’s presence and power on the earth. It reminded me again that we’re not alone on this journey – that God is turning up the temperature across the world. Bill reiterated that he feels that these are 3 days of impartation – something he says he’s never said before. Just one quote from Bill’s talk tonight that just stood out to me ‘He didn’t put the resurrected Christ in us to do church – he put him in us because he expected us to conquer something. There is going to be a new way of doing things and it’s going to be completely connected with the glory – with being aware of his presence and brokering heaven onto earth’
more later…

Update from PJ

I’ve just read PJ’s email update to some friends and thought you’d love to see it as it made me laugh -

Hi Y’all (getting into the lingo)

Greetings from Stateside. Things are going really well here. I’m emailing from the church coffee shop whilst I sip a Frappucino. Having a good coffee shop has now gone to the top of my wish list for a church building.

Just in case you think we’re slacking I want you to know that I spent over 9 hours in church services yesterday. I’m feeling very holy today. The church is fantastic. In many ways similar to KA but more advanced in some respects.
People are flocking here from all over the world to meet with God and learn how they do things.

They prayed for people with cancer in the first service and the power in it was literally tangible. It was really impacting.The evening service last night was nearly 4 hours long (no more complaining about the length of my preaches). there were 40 baptisms, amongst them at least 2 people who were saved from encounters on the streets and around a dozen kids who’d made commitments (you’d love it Nicky). The preach that night would be one of the best I’ve ever heard. As it turns out the speaker is an old friend of my brother’s who’s moved out here from the UK. (actually its not that unusual if you know my brother.)

Along with the church services I’m also spending my time adapting to American culture. 3 important lessons.

1. We have rented a tiny lego car to get about in. This is a bad move, everyone else drives enormous pick up trucks which could easily drive over a lego car and not even notice. i have yet to see a pick up truck with anything in it.
2. Everything comes with cheese on it. I bought a cappucino. It had cheese on it. When you next see me at church look out for the pudgy bloke who looks a bit like PJ, that’ll be me.
3. If you put cheese on everything then you need a big pick up truck to carry you around.

Anyway I’m missing you all. Much love

Paul