a history of the charismatic movements ch510 …...from the latter rain movement came the...

A History of the Charismatic Movements

Transcript - CH510 A History of the Charismatic Movements © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 23 of 24CH510

Kansas City Fellowship/Prophecy Movement

A History of the Charismatic Movements

We begin our lecture today by continuing the study of the more current manifestations of the Pentecostal-charismatic movements in America. If you recall, in our last lecture we took up what is called the signs and wonders movement, sometimes formally called power encounter movement, or power evangelism movement—more popularly now designated and known as the Vineyard movement. We concentrated on the central figure in that movement, John Wimber. I tried to argue, as far as I can read and understand the movement in its literature, as well as in its people—friends of mine and ours—it seems to me, as I said at the end of the last lecture, that there are three basic assumptions, of which there are myriads of deductions from those assumptions.

Those three assumptions that manifest the current charismatic phenomena within the Vineyard movement are these. First, that Christians have, unwittingly perhaps in John Wimber’s view, adopted an Enlightenment rationalistic skepticism toward the supernatural. That the evangelical churches across our land tend to be benign, tend to be unexpectant, tend to be business-as-usual institutions—a criticism that I think is unfortunately and very often a valid criticism.

The second assumption in the movement is this: that the kingdom of God is present on earth today because Christ reigns through His church. This has a lot of implications of the relationship of the twentieth century to the first century, as we tried to briefly explain them last time.

The third assumption in the Vineyard movement, as I said of which there are many deductions, is that as Christ performed miracles to demonstrate and authenticate His message, so Christ’s ambassadors today. This is the essence of power evangelism or power encounters. Hence, according to Dr. Wimber and others, we are living today in the age of the apostles with the full and complete operation of all the grace gifts.

John D. Hannah, PhD Experience: Distinguished Professor of

Historical Theology, Dallas Theological Seminary



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Based upon those assumptions, I tried to describe the Vineyard movement. What I would like to do today is to talk about three other movements on this tape and the final tape that are very much connected to the Vineyard movement that emerged in the 1980s. Remember, as a review, I tried to argue that in the study of the Pentecostal-charismatic movements in America, there have been three major movements, as far as I can tell from the literature. It’s sometimes called the first wave, second wave, and third wave.

The first wave was classical Pentecostalism, sometimes most easily described within the traditions and rigidities of the Assemblies of God movement. The second wave, coming right after the healing revivals of the 1950s, was the renewalist or neo-Pentecostal movement, both in mainline Protestantism and in traditional Roman Catholicism. This movement, unlike the previous, was a movement in the mainline denominations and traditions, bringing the vitality of the second baptism.

The third wave is called the Vineyard movement. It began about 1982 with roots in the 1970s in and around the experiences and the developing biography of John Wimber. That flowered in the third wave, as it has been traditionally called, in the 1980s. From that point, the 1980s, there have come movements that are very much related to the Vineyard movement. These I would like to describe.

The first of them is called the Kansas City Fellowship, or sometimes called the Prophets movement or the Latter Day Prophets movement. The Kansas City Prophets, for a while, were separate from the Vineyard movement but in the late 1980s became identified with John Wimber and the Vineyard movement. So, in a sense, the Kansas City Prophets, with their particular unique teachings, while they may not be entirely embraced by Dr. Wimber, certainly are within the orbit of the Vineyard movement. So I would like to describe this particular manifestation, perhaps bizarre, perhaps more radical than mainline traditional Vineyard doctrine, but nonetheless fairly important, at least as we see it today.

This movement is called the Latter Rain movement. That phrase has been used since classical Pentecostalism since the healing revivals of the 1940s. It’s a phrase that keeps reoccurring in charismatic-Pentecostal literature, and it seems to me to be this: that many Pentecostal-charismatic people are truly, earnestly



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looking for the coming of the Lord. They believe that we’re living in the last days. They’re earnestly expecting a might moving of the Spirt of God to come upon the arid wasted Western world, bringing mercy and revival; and they are certainly vitally concerned that that occur. The Kansas City Prophets, or Latter Rain movement, is somewhat connected to this great impulse.

What I would like to do in the few moments that we have is to begin the discussion of the movements that are related to the Vineyard movement somehow, and there are obviously three, but we will come to them in time. The first is called the Kansas City Fellowship or Grace Ministries. The background to the Kansas City Fellowship or Grace Ministries is a movement born in the 1940s that we discussed very briefly, called the healing revivals, or called the Latter Rain movement. The Latter Rain that was supposed to have come in the 1920s disappointingly did not; and there was a hope that it would come in the late 1940s, 1950s, but it did not. There is now hope, currently, that it will come in the 1990s.

But by way of background, the history of the Latter Rain movement in the 1940s, I would say this: In the fall of 1946, a major teaching on fasting and prayer as a means to revival and restoration of the church spread throughout Pentecostal circles. Franklin Hall wrote the seminal book Atomic Power with God through Fasting and Prayer and established a major fasting and prayer revival center in San Diego, California. Hall welded biblical concepts with occult methodology and zodiac speculations. For instance, on page 19 of his book, he says: “Many if not all the American Indian tribes sought revelation of the Great Spirit through prayer and fasting. When they had famines, food shortages, lack of rain, etcetera, the Great Spirit was sought through prayer and fasting, and their prayers were answered.”

Hall also advocated an immortalization theory that appears as a precursor to the Manifest Sons of God theology. He says on page 31:

In the zodiactical sign of Scorpio, which is the eighth sign of the Zodiac, we have a picture of a scorpion with its stinger lifted, ready to strike. This is the sign of death and is supposed to govern the sex area. Just before this sign in the heavens there is the sign of a Judge, Jesus, who was the Giver of life.



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Jesus proceeds toward death and pulls the sting out of death. “Oh death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

Among those influenced by Franklin Hall were Oral Roberts, A. A. Allen, David Nunn, Tommy Hicks, and W. V. Grant. In 1948 William Branham, influenced by Hall’s book, became his most influential disciple, touching the lives of almost all the healing and revival preachers since. In Branham’s teachings, his followers view him as an apostle of the final church age. He stressed his emphasis on divine healing, accurate words of knowledge, serpent-seed teaching, the equating of zodiac and Egyptian pyramidic knowledge with Scripture, denial of the Trinity, advocating of the immortalization theory—that we are immortal from death—and the restoration of the fivefold ministry of Ephesians 4:11. Remember that in that verse the Lord said, “He gave us apostles and prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers”—fivefold ministry.

So it begins first in Franklin Hall; then William Branham; and third, a disciple of William Branham, John Robert Stevens, pastor of the Church of the Living Word in Redondo Beach, California, in the ministry called The Walk. He actively advocated classic church restorationism, immortalization, restoration of apostles and prophets, shepherding-discipleship authoritarianism. The essence of his teachings were 1) restoration of apostles and prophets in the latter days; and the assumption is we are living in the latter days, so there should be apostles and prophets laboring in the churches today. 2) Prophet-called holiness conceived through gradual attainment, through steps that are servant, friend, son, and godhood that we can obtain. 3) That apostles will rule the churches. 4) A worldwide revival through signs and wonders. 5) The defeat of demonic spirits. 6) The emergence of Joel’s army, immortal beings who will bring judgment on those who refuse the apostles’ authority.

From Franklin Hall, via William Branham, via John Robert Stevens comes the Latter Rain movement. From the Latter Rain movement came the shepherding-disciple movement, under the Lauderdale Five: Robert Mumford, Derek Prince, Ern Baxter, Don Basham, and Charles Simpson. That is the background for the rise of the Kansas City Fellowship, Kansas City Prophets, or Kansas City Ministries.



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In 1982 a man named Augustine claimed to hear an audible voice from God, a prophecy of the spiritual condition of Mike Bickle’s St. Louis church. We will come back to Mike Bickle. The accuracy of the prophecy in a vision while in Cairo, Egypt, convinced Bickle to start the Kansas City Fellowship Church in December of 1982—the same time that the Vineyard churches began. And now—at least as to my last reading—it had about three thousand members in six churches. The Kansas City Fellowship churches later will come into the orbit of the Vineyard churches and under that umbrella.

In 1986 the leaders of the Kansas City Fellowship formed Grace Ministries, apostolic teams sent out to teach latter-day testorationism. The movement solidified in 1990 when Bickle placed his ministry under the leadership of John Wimber and the Vineyard movement. There are seven major facets of Grace Ministries. 1) Apostolic teams equipped with signs and wonders; 2) a strategy of a single church in each city under one eldership. Later Mike Bickle apologized for that concept, thinking that John Wimber thought it was too strident and disruptive of the churches that were already there and independent. 3) The house of prayer, meaning intercessory prayer teams. 4) The Joseph company, ministry to the poor. 5) The Israel mandate, which is Jewish ministry. 6) A ministry training center. 7) The Shiloh ministries, or the prophetic outreach, where prophets live in a restricted area, share revelations. John Wimber is credited with establishing Shiloh’s basic principles and practices.

Within the Shiloh ministry of prophets there seems to be three major people: Paul Cain, who was a disciple of Charles Branham, joined the Kansas City Fellowship/Grace Ministries in 1987. Paul Cain teaches Joel’s army of conquerors through immortalization and heals through power surges in his hands, like Charles Branham did. In 1989 Cain prophesied to Jack Deere that God had a strategic purpose for the Vineyard movement and a strategic purpose, of course, for John Wimber as the head of that movement; so that the Kansas City Fellowship movement, John Wimber, and Vineyard become much more integrally connected.

The second key figure is Bob Jones, a Branhamite, who claims a special gift from God that demonstrates that the people’s prayers are heard by the Father, whom he calls Papa. In a book entitled Visions and Revelation, in 1989, Bob Jones says this:



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I was over there with Jim a while ago. My hands turned blue, and then they turned purple, and when that happens, that means you’ve got some incense that goes up. You’ve got some intercession that goes up that Papa’s saying yes to. [That is, God’s saying yes to.] There’s some prayers that’s gone on there that the answer is yes. When you’ve got this kind of anointing, some of you are already entering the secret place of the Most High. You’re already bowing down to the altar of incense. Your tears are falling on those coals, and they’re coming up before Papa. Papa’s saying “Come with more, believe for more, because when my hands turn purple, it means you’re getting through to the top. It’s yea and amen.” And that’s what He’s calling you into, that holy place of divine health, the Holy of Holies, which your children are called to enter in, can crash that threshold. It’s called the Place of Divine Health. That’s what the children are entering into. They’ll have the Spirit without measure, they’ll walk through walls, they’ll be translated everything that was even in the Scripture.

The third key figure in the Shiloh prophets is John Paul Jackson. After some radical behavior of prophetical excess, he was sent to Anaheim, California, the Vineyard center, to be tutored in theology by Jack Deere. This seems to have caused John Paul Jackson to be more careful in his prophetic utterances.

So the Kansas City Prophets movement began in the 1980s. It centered around the Shiloh prophets of Mike Bickle, John Paul Jackson, and Bob Jones. Criticism of the Kansas City Prophets’ teachings and Grace Ministries has been fairly widespread, so let me comment very briefly upon it.

Criticism from within the charismatic movement has been fairly broad. Wimber has stated that he, Paul Cain, and others have tried to adjust and relate to that criticism. But the criticism goes something like this: Some have argued that Mike Bickle has promoted Bob Jones as a true prophet of God when many within the charismatic circles suggest that he is not a prophet and have argued that it’s overstated. Others seem to have a problem when Mike Bickle stresses divine approval for his movement, with stories of supernatural confirmation that seem to be inaccurate.

Others have a problem with the Kansas City Prophets in their promotion of an elect-seed-generation theology for the movement. They teach, or have been thought to have taught, for



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example, that their children, their elect seed, born since 1973, are the elect seed, hand selected by Jesus and the angels from billions of little round yellow things up in heaven to be born into the families of the movement. The little yellow things are seeds from actual bloodlines, and they are the best of every bloodline that has ever been—Paul, David, Peter, James, John—the best of their seed in this generation, predestined and handpicked to be part of the end-time omega generation. They are described as the chosen generation of all history who will possess the Spirit without measure. This specific generation, it is said, is the Bride of Christ, the man child of Revelation 12, the ministry of perfection, the Melchizedek priesthood, the manifest sons of God.

This end-time omega generation superchurch will perform myriads of miracles that outstretch the book of Acts. They will conduct meetings of a million or more, where they will move their hands and the power of God will go like flashing lightning as they go like this over a million people. Three hundred thousand of that generation and their superchildren will be the last-day apostles.

Fourth, some have suggested that the Kansas City Prophets support charismatic pastors and leaders while privately teaching the congregations of those pastors and leaders that they ought to leave their churches and join the Kansas City Fellowship. Some have said that the Kansas City Prophets are stealing the charismatic sheep into their assembly.

Fifth, some have objected that the Kansas City Prophets teach that we should expect persecution and rejection from other born-again Christians.

Sixth, some have objected that the so-called prophets make irresponsible predictions and frighten Christian brethren with alarming prophecies, supposedly from God, warning of imminent danger. For example, in 1987, after the stock market plunged in October, John Paul Jackson warns that there was going to be a fall in the stock market, that 1988 will be a severe year for the stock market, and that “it will be severe between here and there, but nothing like 1980 will bring.” Not to be outdone, Bob Jones warned in February of 1988:

Another thing that will be this year is financial collapse. I don’t know how soon. I really expect it right away. It, the stock market, will eventually come down to 400 points. If you’ve got money in it, they call it common shares or



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something like that, what do they call them? Mutual funds. If you’ve got money in that, I encourage you to get it out of there real quick-like. The financial collapse is at hand. I always like to just warn you.

In actual fact, there was nothing that even remotely resembled a financial collapse in 1988. The stock market low was 1,879.14, rather than 400 points; and the year closed at 2,168.50, higher than it began.

The prophet, John Paul Jackson, gave the following public warnings and advice in September 1985: “We are going to see half the banks in the United States shutting down; 70 percent of the savings and loans shutting their doors. The dollar is going to collapse. It’s going to literally plummet. The stock market will fall like a ton of bricks. It will collapse.” Then he offers the following warning on how to escape financial ruin: “It’s going to. Now you’re saying to yourself: When will we know? The Lord will tell you. That’s why He put prophets in the church.”

So the Kansas City Prophets movement seems to be a movement that stresses current-day prophets, current-day apostles who speak authoritative, revelational truth for the people of God. That’s why it’s called the fivefold ministry, that Ephesians 4:11 seems to be a cornerstone concept, that finally we have the restored fullness of all of the gifts for the first time since the first century. While classical Pentecostals, for instance, talked about the restoration of all of the gifts, they did not restore apostles who could speak revelational truth that was infallible. In the fivefold ministry, according to the Kansas City Fellowship or Grace Ministries, that has all come about. So today in the church in Shiloh ministries we have apostles, we have prophets, we have evangelists, we have pastor-teachers. This is what these men are referring to.

He goes on in his prophecy:

The Lord will tell you. That’s why He put prophets in the church. And He’ll say, through Bob Jones, or someone here will say: “I have a dream. I had a vision. The Lord just told me that next week, next Friday, the banks are going to collapse, and you need to get your funds out right away.” Listen because the day is going to come when you’re going to have to act instant. That means obedient, be obedient.



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So some have argued that many of these prophecies are alarmist. Many of them have proven, unfortunately, to be both damaging and incorrect.

Seventh, others have argued that there is a real problem with arguing that there are prophets of this nature who allow for such generous allowance of error in giving personal and directive prophecies regarding people’s futures. Some have argued that this emphasis on prophecy with such an allowance for error, I think, the logic is gifts have to be learned. Gifts have to be perfected, and it takes time to get it right, and we should allow for error in that sense. Furthermore, I think the argument goes: As we are immature, we misunderstand people; and as the church matures, God gives more grace and higher knowledge and higher learning to His people.

Eighth, some have argued that the Kansas City Prophets had been aggressive in visiting churches and prophesying that they should join with the Kansas City Fellowship. I think that argument has somewhat been curtailed. I think John Wimber’s influence on the Kansas City Fellowship has been such that it has lessened that aggression for the original vision that in every city there should be one church, so that all the churches in a single city should join together with the Kansas City Fellowship in that church. This has decimated, to some degree, some of the charismatic and Pentecostal churches.

Some have argued, for instance, that the emphasis on supernatural, out-of-body experiences, angelic visits, conversations with demons, visits to heaven and hell, visitations from the dead, visions, prophecies, prophets, and supernatural signs are overemphasized within the movement.

Others have argued that the teaching on Joel’s army, the teaching of children who are the elect seed, who are children of this movement, is overstated. Some have said that they are indoctrinating children to believe that their specific generation is the elected seed of all the best bloodlines of all generations, foreknown, predestinated, hand-selected from billions of other seeds, to be part of the end-time omega generation.

They are seemingly told, for instance, from the literature available, that they will perform ten thousand times more miracles than in the book of Acts. They are taught that out-of-body experiences, it seems, are normal in the movement.



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Some have argued that the Kansas City Prophets movement is an extreme movement, even beyond some of the more bizarre events that we have seen in the history of charismatic Pentecostalism, that it is part of a new order that may be following cult-like tendencies. My own evaluation of it is that, as far as the literature is concerned, John Wimber’s Vineyard movement has had a conserving effect upon the Kansas City Fellowship movement or Grace Ministries and has brought an elimination of some of the most bizarre manifestations. But, to be fair, the information is not complete in my mind.

Those who war against it—many within Pentecostal-charismatic circles—cite things like this: the exultation of men in mystical experiences, the emphasis on sacrifice for the movement, commitment to the movement, covenants with one another for life, spiritual threats, use of bizarre mystical experiences, using personally subjective experiences to interpret Scripture, warning of followers to beware of other Christians, the notion of the creation of a super race mentality. And others have said hyper-spirituality, pride, exclusiveness, elitism, feeling that they are the “it” in the last days. My rehearsal of these things in the last few moments has been rather painful to me, but I truly hope that the Kansas City Prophets ministry and Grace Ministries will have certainly curtailed—and I think they have—the more bizarre descriptions that we found of it as it emerged in the 1980s.

My point in describing it, however, is this: that in the 1980s the Vineyard movement was born in the work of John Wimber, C. Peter Wagner, and others. It has emerged and grown rather prolifically. At the same time, in 1982, the Kansas City Fellowship ministries was born, which has grown well also. Those two movements amalgamated—the Kansas City Fellowship with the Vineyard movement—in the late 1980s. Some of the bizarre teachings, I think, have been ameliorated within the movement—at least as it was first expressed. So one manifestation of the Vineyard movement has been the Kansas City Fellowship emphasis, with its emphasis on Shiloh ministry, on dream interpretation, etcetera.

Also within the charismatic movements and the Vineyard third wave has come an emphasis, more recently, on the word prophet. It has been argued by some, and mostly by a very fine theologian and exegete by the name of Wayne Grudem, who is a member of a Vineyard Christian Fellowship Church in Evanston, Illinois. Two things, I think, he argues. One is that the word apostle—while he believes that all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit have continued,



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he does not believe that apostleship has continued, because he would believe that apostleship is an office. It is not a gift. Second, he believes that there are apostles today in the churches, but they are not to be related to apostles, but the prophets are less authoritative than apostles were.

As I introduce this second manifestation or relationship to Vineyard, in the teachings of Dr. Grudem, I in no way want to argue anything bizarre. Dr. Grudem is a fine, wonderful professor, teacher, and writer, very learned, a very godly man. What I am saying is this: that Dr. Grudem is asking traditionally minded evangelical people who have believed in a qualified cessationist theory—for we all believe that some of the gifts are continuing today. It’s how many and which ones and what do they mean, but Dr. Grudem has asked us to think through the issue of prophets today. Are there prophets in the church today? That becomes the question. And currently it has caused major discussion.

So let me reflect a few moments, as this tape ends and at the beginning of our final tape together, about the emphasis upon and definition of prophets today. Are there prophets today? Dr. Grudem, who is a non-cessationist, would argue very strongly that are not apostles today. So in that sense he doesn’t believe that there are people living today who have the authority, as the apostles did in the first century, that is, to speak in the churches or elsewhere infallible, irrefutable, must-be-obeyed, divine revelation. He is not saying that. He is saying apostleship is not a gift. It was an office, and that office concluded with the decease of the last of the original apostles.

His thesis is—and he’s asking evangelical, non-charismatically, open-minded people to think through the word prophet; and he’s asking us to believe that there are prophets today. They’re fallible, they’re to be tested—as 1 John 4:1 says—but, nonetheless, in the churches are prophets. First let me state something of his thesis as I understand it. Dr. Grudem has written several books on this issue. His doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, England, was entitled “The Gift of Prophecy in 1 Corinthians,” which was published in 1982; popularized in 1988 by the book that has caused a lot of recent discussion called The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today, which is the essence of his theory. And he has written other works, including a commentary on Peter, a work co-edited with John Piper called Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He was ordained in 1974 in the Baptist General Conference and is currently a member of the Vineyard Christian



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Fellowship in Evanston, Illinois.

So here we have another influence of the emerging Vineyard movement. And I think Dr. Grudem is asking us to use the word prophet in our non-charismatic churches, and he has redefined it in such a way that he thinks that’s possible. But here is his thesis. We’ll start it now and finish it in our final tape. It is somewhat difficult to place Dr. Grudem on the spectrum of charismatic emphases. He is a non-cessationist in terms of the spiritual gifts—the exception being the gift of apostleship. He believes in the closure of infallible revelation, so men are not giving revelation today. The issue for Dr. Grudem is the definition of the term “prophet” and the continuation of the function in a limited sense today.

The emphasis that was seen in the Kansas City Prophets, though well beyond the sphere of Grudem’s perspective on the use of the gift today—that is, in that Latter Rain movement—has overshadowed the previous emphasis on glossolalia, or tongues, and healing in the charismatic movement and as evidenced in the Vineyard movement. First, Dr. Grudem’s proposal consists of formulating two forms of New Testament prophecy—non-authoritative congregational prophecy, and authoritative apostolic prophecy. The apostles, not the New Testament prophets, are the true successors of the Old Testament prophets. The prophets, like their counterparts, spoke and wrote divine infallible truth. New Testament prophecy is not apostolic and therefore potentially fallible. Thus, Dr. Grudem is a non-cessationist cessationist. He is an example of the Pentecostalization of evangelicalism.

He wrote, for instance, in his dissertation:

In this book I am suggesting an understanding of the gift of prophecy that would require a bit of modification in the views of some of these three groups. I’m asking that Charismatics go on using the gift of prophecy, but they stop calling it “a word from the Lord,” simply because that label makes it sound exactly like the Bible in authority and leads to much misunderstanding. On the other side I am asking those in the cessationist camp to give serious thought to the possibility that prophecy in ordinary New Testament churches was not equal to Scripture in authority, but was simply a very human and sometimes partially mistaken report of something the Holy Spirit brought to someone’s mind. I am asking that they think again about these


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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arguments for the cessation of certain gifts. I should make it very clear at the beginning that I am not saying that the Charismatic and cessationist views are mostly wrong; rather, I think they are both mostly right in the things that they count essential. I think that an adjustment in how they understand the nature of prophecy—especially its authority—has the potential for bringing about a resolution of this issue that would safeguard items that both sides see as crucial.

So Dr. Grudem is saying that one should not equate New Testament prophets with either apostles or Old Testament prophets. New Testament prophets could be wrong. Apostles and Old Testament writing prophets could not be. He’s asking us to have a definition of prophecy, that is, congregational encouragement, that could operate in non-charismatic churches today. We will continue this lecture on our next tape.

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