Wouldn’t You Like to Know About Prophetic Companies? Part One

From time to time, I am impressed of the Lord to write to you about one of the two ministries that He is focusing much of His attention on right now. That, in this case, would be the apostle and the prophet. This two-part article concentrates on the prophet. In particular, it addresses the Lord’s impending restructure of prophetic ministry. Here I focus on the one organizational structure that scripture alludes to God’s model for organized prophetics; it is that of the Prophetic Company. Because of the importance of prophets gathering today, the time proven strength in numbers principle that secures any institution must come into play. That has to happen if the prophets’ struggle for acceptance and respectability is to begin and hold. In the first of this two-part discussion, I talk about the single hindrance to prophetic unity that must be removed if this work is to succeed in the present era. It is the routine typically perceived as boring that most people would give their souls to avoid.

For decades, I have been asked all sorts of questions on the prophetic. As many of you know, I devoted the main of my ministry years researching and answering these questions and publishing them in various texts. Over the years, the Lord has been reinstituting this office and settling it as a permanent fixture in His New Creation church. As He has done so, He has released increasingly profound revelation about the office and how it should function in the modern church, and its societies. These will continue to surface until the Lord finally gets the institution He is going after; which is a prophetic institution not consumed with rivaling Satan’s, but one that resurrects the mantles and ministries of the successful Bible prophets. Such an institution takes work, requires order and structure, and can only flourish in an atmosphere of uniformity. Uniformity rests on routine.

In a direct contradiction to the popular gift driven charismata we have all grown up on that implies the spectacular is the norm for the Almighty, in truth God is the opposite. He once told me, as that He is in the routine. He wanted me to know that without the routine the spectacular could never be. As I pressed Him to explain what He meant by what He said, He reminded me that the sun, moon, stars, seasons and times are all products of routine. Humans may vary their daily behaviors from time to time, but even they eventually settle into some sort of routine. Routines rely on several things, such as standards, uniformity, consistency, habitual practices and regularity. Without these, what stabilizes life, everything that prospers it, empowers and enriches it never has time to happen. For instance, harvests take time. Crops grow in their appointed seasons. We rely on night and day to plan our activities, to sleep and awake. Regular hours help our companies run productively and permit us to earn the wages that sustain our lives. Everything about us subsists on routines. Schools, government, businesses and even recreation and vacations all hold to routine schedules and seasons. You depend on your favorite establishment to open on time, but to close when it says it will, too. If it closes early when you counted on it to be open until a certain time, you are frustrated when you find it closed. Very disastrous things happen when life and society break their word and vary their routines. Routines tell us what to respect, how to plan and what to do to succeed. They make things predictable and whether we like to admit it or not, predictability makes us feel safe and confident. They let us know how to live life on purpose.

No matter how unencumbered a person may be with the duties and responsibilities of life or how disengaged he or she is from the world’s mundanity, everyone in some way or another falls into routine patterns of living. Routines are rooted in customs, they are how standards and norms are born, and they become the rule of thumb. Laws impose routines because they aid continuity and inspire the standards that give us the consistency we need to build trust. Routines characterize things that have been around a long time and they let us know who is taking care of us in this life. Qualities like credibility, perpetuity, and reliability all depend on routines; it is how they all get their start. We all take a wait and see attitude with newcomers and new things, demanding them to prove themselves to win our trust. The proof we look for comes from observing their consistency, stability, and responsibility. It is what we use to confirm these. Routine is what has been lacking in the prophetic.

People today are still wondering about its future. Will it survive, thrive, become safe and established, or will it finally fizzle out and if it does, what will cause its fizzle? The answer in a word is routine. Some synonyms for it include normal, habitual, efficient and professional. Additionally, things like schedules, customs, habits and practices, and regularity join them as the results of routine. All of these are words used by organizations to gain people’s trust and assure their successful continuance. They are how organizations earn and attract a following. By the way, organization is another lacking feature of today’s prophetic, and routines enable that as well. Both grow out of consistency. Consistency adds the dimensions of constancy, stability, and steadiness to routines’ uniformity and regularity. Put all of these together and you get the point.

Until the prophetic uniforms itself, it will remain fractured, unsteady, and suspect to those it hopes to serve. Distrust will be its ruin because it fails to surrender to the single mandate imposed on all creation, establishment of a regular routine. How can it avoid this fate? By uniting, and not just its mantles, ministries and exploits. Every member and leader called to this service must unite in thought, practice, habit, and criteria. While uniting for single or periodic events is a start, these are not what will standardize the institution enough to make it trustworthy or enduring. That is tantamount to networking and networking is only a baby step in the right direction. However, what the prophetic needs to thrive calls for fusing teachings, doctrine, motives and pursuits. With these, isolating the common mentality and consciousness typical of prophetic ministers is equally important.

All of these essential elements of prophetic service are the “leave behinds” that will secure it when this generation is gone. That is why I am writing you this article on the Prophetic Company. It is one organization that will see to the prophetic’s unity, uniformity, routine and regularity. Through it, the systems, methods, and premises that characterize the prophetic are born and executed. Quality, effectiveness, efficiency, efficacy and excellence are all impossible without organization, which in turn is impossible without unity, and it impossible without uniformity. Together, these all encourage and rely on the standards, criteria, and the host of other values that safeguard and elevate an organization. Every one of them is born out of a simple thing called routine. It is how long standing institutions got their start, and if we are going to preserve the prophetic, we must surrender to them to protect it. It is the responsibility of every prophetic minister to preserve this vital ministry of the Lord, and those to be served by it as well. The first step is isolating what is common—routine—about it instead of chasing its spectacularities. That is its miracles, wonders, sensationalism, melodramas and theatrics. These should all be replaced with a sobriety that should spark its eventual unification. It is essential to the standards that bring it honor and esteem. As you think on what I have said here, take some time to review the meanings of the word routine below and apply them to what you think would stabilize the prophetic.

1.       A routine is a course of normative, standardized actions or procedures that are regularly followed.

2.       A routine is a discipline that focuses on the methods used to create order.

3.       A routine is a prescribed, detailed course of action to be practiced habitually.

4.       A routine is a set of customary and often mechanically performed procedures.

5.       A routine is a customary procedure to be performed with regularity.

6.       A routine is a series or order producing tasks, chores, or duties that are commonplace to specified endeavors.

7.       A routine is a typical, everyday activity that either is proceeded by or adheres to the standard principles of routine.

8.       A routine is that which is habitual, ordinary, and typical. It is the regular, unvarying, habitual, or rote.

9.       A routine is a prescribed, detailed course of action observed as a standard procedure to be practiced in accord with established procedures or a particular rule of order.

Think about the above statements and envision how they would be helpful to settling the prophetic and organizing it to achieve credibility. Share some of your thoughts with your learners, friends, colleagues or mentees. Let me know how it turns out. I would love to hear your feedback.

God Bless!

Non-Ecclesia Prophet Engagements

The Business Prophet

What is a business and industry prophet? Also possibly called an organizational or marketplace prophet, this manifestation of the prophet’s mantle is peculiarly suited to working with entrepreneurs, politicians, and secular professionals of varying types and mantle-compatible industrialists. The range of non-church services it can provide easily spans all fields of endeavor. Preparing this sort of prophet requires solid rooting and grounding in God’s word of truth, exposure to business principles and practices in general and significant education in the particular secular arena the messenger is assigned by God to oversee and/or occupy.

Organizational Prophet Challenges

Organizational prophets’ serve the Lord quite differently from the ecclesial prophet because the customary insulations that allow the free expression, operations, and intrusions of the prophet’s mantle are greatly curtailed in non-church or non-Christian settings. Such prophets then, must behave shrewdly when delivering the Lord’s word, wisdom and counsel in secular spheres because of the diversity of hearers, backgrounds, belief systems, and of course legislation. Hence, such prophetic service is more scrutinized and exposed to more antagonistic criticisms than the church or Christian ministry prophets. What this means is that the prophet must be knowledgeable, diplomatic and tactful. This type of prophet must also be resilient and thick-skinned. That is, resistant to frontal attacks on his or her service, ministry, and demeanor.

Apostolic & Prophetic Unions

As we are learning today, New Testament prophets are quite stunted without their apostolic counterparts and coverings. That is because the New Testament church was founded by apostles, unlike the establishment of natural Israel that was built upon the prophets. It would seem from this model that in things pertaining to earth and its duty to the laws and covenant of God, the prophet is sufficient. However, under the new world order dispensation of Jesus Christ things shifted. The emphasis on the earth is now bound up in His church whose eternality bears heavily upon it. Therefore, the apostle sits as the capstone of all heaven to earth business and transactions. Nonetheless, the fact remains, neither officer is complete without the other and that is the importance of apostolic and prophetic teams. The inherent lone ranger mentality of the prophet has to give way to a team mentality where the weightiness of the apostle’s mantle protectively over arcs its customary latitudes. Prophets, according to the model given us in scripture are innately compatible with apostles and are therefore designed by God to accompany them as they discharge the duties of apostleship. Apostolic prophets are those who hear, comprehend, and articulate most effectively, what the apostle is sent to do and teach. Forming the team takes skill, wisdom, insight and intense compatibility testing and training. Both ministers must know each other’s works, mantle, and spheres of service extensively in order to complement the other as needed in God’s service.

Prophetic Leadership

Prophetic Leadership is rather peculiar and difficult to fathom if one is not a prophet or an apostle. To begin with, Paul the apostle tells us that the prototypical foundation of God’s kingdom is that of the apostle and prophet. Moses, for instance, an Old Testament prophet prefigured New Testament apostleship and his work is what brought us the synergistic governance of the two mantles. Other passages bear this out as well. Here is why apostles and prophets make the best ministry team. Together they produce just the write mix for the Lord to change the world and establish anything new He wants to do. In respect to prophetic leadership, prior to Moses there is Abraham, a prophet, Isaac and Jacob, both prophets, and Joseph also a prophet. What this says is that the mantle of the prophet, although not every individual prophet, is distinctly predisposed to lead as the Almighty’s representative in the earth. Hence, quality prophetic education must include leadership and its related topics to outfit those called to exercise the Lord’s authority in high capacity positions are well equipped.

Finding Your Prophetic Place

How Do I Find My Prophetic Place?

 

Frequently, prophets ask me about purpose and placement. The majority of my questions come from young prophets, and a good number from those coming through the ministry’s preparatory trials. The question I get most often of late is, “How do I Find My Prophetic Place?” It seems to be the almost universal heart cry of prophetic messengers realizing that the open doors, and open hearts, they expected are nowhere near as open to their brand of ministry as they are to the other types. Another group that wants to know the answer to these is the prophetic late bloomers. They are the people the Lord hid His prophetic calling from until later in their lives. Similar to your Amoses for example, they were occupied in their younger years with other endeavors. After working in other fields for decades, God is now awakening them to their prophetic destiny. Upon hearing the Lord’s prophetic voice, they are just finally connecting with the prophetic side of their makeup. For many of them it is a surprise, although in hindsight some say for years they sensed something like that working mysteriously in the backdrop of their lives. With precious little time to waste on long winding search paths, the late bloomers want to know immediately what their prophetic awakening means so they can get it right, and get right into it while they can. The younger ones on the other hand, want to get it right and get right into it too, only for other reasons. They want to answer destiny’s call and make their mark in the world and in God and Christ. Altogether, I get enough calls from others outside of these two groups to let me know that this is indeed a matter to be addressed. So here goes.

Other than the apostle, there is probably no other minister in the Lord’s service harder to place than prophets. This is especially true when one thinks of their being called to more than the local church. Many prophets are scarcely confirmed and trained enough for the Lord’s church, let alone groomed enough for a secular post. One of the major reasons for the difficulty prophets face in finding their most compatible place in ministry, is how the Lord brings them into His service. The situation goes something like this. The Holy Spirit starts by altering how He has interacted with the new prophet in the past to signal that something new is about to take place between them. Sometimes abruptly, their interactions change without the prophet knowing why at first. If the person is in relationship with Jesus Christ, this is God’s approach, if not, He simply breaks His silence in their life and tells them what He called them to do. This sometimes curt encounter is preceded or caused by extensive occult experiences. Either way, the difficulty in prophets finding their place in the ministry is rooted in one of the two approaches. In which case, the personal encounter between the Lord and His future prophet and their subsequent interactions leave most of the confirmation of the calling up to the prophet to prove, unless the Lord sends another to bear witness to the secret events that took place between them. With formal career screening, verification, and schooling not being viable possibilities for this office as yet, the Lord must summon prophets to His service by approaching them directly. They in turn must answer His call by blindly going about figuring out what it means to be a prophet and how their ministry is to work. This could take years and court a lifetime of pain and suffering or setbacks in the process. Because of this, and due to the lack of a formal way to manifest and verify their ministries, prophets start out largely unaffirmed, or only marginally affirmed at best.

After a season of winging it on their own, learning what they can as the Lord gives it to them (or as they are willing and able to receive it) newcomers to this office eventually become persuaded that they either do not need a human handprint on their prophetics, or that their one on one interactions with the Lord accelerated their readiness and advanced them faster than others think. These two events can ignite a naïve pride in novices that stumbles them later as far too many conclude that what put them in their ministry is too vague and improvable to be verified or defined by human methods or tools. Such messengers are convinced that affirming prophets can only be done by supranormal[1] means. They feel the standards and procedures used by other vocations or careers are too worldly to be trusted. Prophets, they believe, are to be verified only by the prophets themselves, and maybe an admired predecessor. Now, we can debate the source of this misconception and blame this or that theology or doctrine for years, but in the end it is just wiser to simply say ‘the Lord is doing a new thing’ and get on with it. Meaning by this, that the Lord is now structuring His prophetic callings so that those He calls can be concretely confirmed in their ministry and properly placed. Another reason is so that His established leaders can better help them by taking a more active role in verifying, confirming, and developing those claiming a call to this ministry. We can all respectfully say His actions are long overdue considering the havoc some prophets have wreaked on His body in the past.

For God to initiate His new processes and procedures, and their safeguards, He has to standardize, uniform, and solidify the full range office’s essential duties and responsibilities. In view of how His prophets were introduced to and engaged in His service up to now, the effects of His actions can be shocking to most prophets. I have seen many of them stunted in their growth and ministries just because they either cannot submit to the change or have no one to help them successfully make the transition. To find your prophetic place, you need more than a prophecy or a lofty spiritual encounter that alerts you to a call to the ministry. While both may serve as great catalysts for you, the truth is that they are only announcements. After that, what do you do when the service is over and the prophet or the presbytery are gone? I have found that what most people do is call around or roam from place to place to find someone to elaborate on the word they received so they can act on it. Or worse yet, many of them just launch their ministries as they see fit only to be disappointed when the masses marks them as a novice and refuse to acknowledge them in their midst. Here is where it gets frustrating. Look at it this way. A 5 to 30 second prophecy that alerts you to a prophetic call, or any calling for that matter, is not enough for you to grasp how to fulfill it. If you rely on this alone, you will end up equipping yourself only on what you feel inside—what you sense the Spirit leading you to do. How accurate that is can take weeks, months, or years for you to find out. With the prophet and the apostle being the only two offices that you cannot enroll in a traditional or established educational program to prepare for, you are pretty much on your own. You must investigate the church or private classes (notice I said classes and not courses) that are available on your subject independently, and they can vary extensively from class to class with some being gift driven and others a hodgepodge of spiritual doctrines. For you to decide which one you should take for what you are called to do is a matter of trial and error. So how do you do it?

To choose the best prophetic readiness program for you, you need a trustworthy list of subject matter, topics, and other related curriculum information to tell you what makes for a credible and useful prophetic education program. Without that you have nothing to compare your possibilities with before choosing one. If you are like most newcomers to this office, you probably do not have access to such a resource since prophetic education is still so privatistic, and very little of it mature enough to be considered specialized. Today’s prophetic readiness and placement choices can vary drastically from individual to individual, ministry to ministry, and prophet to prophet. Do you see your obstacle here? You in your heart want to do it right and yet you cannot seem to separate the right from the wrong without help. Left to your own devises, you are most likely forced to equip yourself prophetically. What an overwhelming task. Because the way prophets are inducted, trained and used is erratic, finding one’s place in this calling is nearly impossible as everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes. This scenario is what I hear regularly when I meet people on this path. I, on the other hand, have invented a way to help you streamline the process and hopefully perfect your search.

What I developed is a series of web-based standardized ministry assessments to help prophets and all five- folders, church ministers and workers, discover their calling and place in God’s service. My system locates your purpose and destiny as a minister of Jesus Christ. It customizes your readiness program automatically, and tells you how long it will take to get where the Lord is taking you in prophetic ministry. These assessments have been used for nearly five years with more than 90% success so far, and that is a very conservative estimate. I invite you to be more than mystical about your call to this office. I encourage you to be emphatic and not enigmatic. It is your calling, your purpose, and your obedience to God. So be proactive. You do not have to stay stuck in the old move’s way of discovering yourself prophetically. 

Leap into the 21^st century and know for sure through this objective tool that you are a prophet, what kind of prophet you are called to be, and the best place for you to answer God’s call to prophetic ministry. Your preappointed sphere and particular people group are just as important to your success as your actual donning of the prophet’s mantle. Don’t settle for just discovering your mantle, know your place, your authority, and your measure of rule.  Find out what makes you ready to stand before the Lord “a workman that needeth not be ashamed.”

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[1] Beyond the range or wisdom of the normal or explainable.

Q&A: Personal Prophecy

Q& A: Personal Prophecy

What is personal prophecy? When should it be used, and how? Dr. Price answers these questions and more. Excerpts from On the Subject of Personal Prophecy now  available through the PPM Global Resources online store.

Question #1: What is prophecy? The most succinct definition of prophecy, used in the Prophet’s Dictionary is “God’s communications media.”

Question #2: Why is prophecy needed? Prophecy allows our in invisible and inaudible God to publicize His thoughts in our world through people.

Question #3: Who is prophecy for? Prophecy is for its communicator; in our case the Lord. Communication between the Creator and His creation began with God, who remains unknown without tangibly contacting us. True prophecy reveals His future for us. His wants us to inquire of reputable prophets to gives us God’s eternal answers for our lives.  Daniel’s 2:28 frankly makes this point.

Question #4: Should something called “personal prophecy” be practiced? Yes, because people desire to know the future for many reasons, and the Lord needs them to know it. Prophecy helps us plan life better, arm ourselves for its upsets, and equip ourselves to take better advantage of coming opportunities that God arranged before time. With prayer it can be an amazing tool.

Question #5: Why should people receive personal prophecy? God desires people to know His future for them so that He can guide their life decisions. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says the Lord put eternity in our hearts, why? So that He can lead us throughout life.  Job 33:14-16 adds He sealed our work in our hands for us to seek His plans for our lives because as Acts 15:18 declares, God has known from eternity all of His works. Prophecy answers our unknowns.

Full article answers 11 frequently asked questions about personal prophecy.

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