The Prophetic Edge
The Mind of God for Tomorrow Today
We have long believed that the primary purpose of the prophetic ministry is the declaration of the mind of God. The burden of the prophet is a concern to relay a message that is the mind of God to the people of God. The prophetic answers questions about what God sees and how He feels about our world and how He sees tomorrow in the light of today. The purpose of the Prophetic Edge page is to bring our understanding on selected topics and issues of this mind of God on the world of today.
Peter & Ann
My Prophetic Journey
The Beginnings
In 1981 I was in a time of prayer and fasting for the church where I was the Senior Minister. As a young minister with a young family it was my first pastorate as a Senior Minister and I was bursting with a desire to make an impact in my ministry. I had just read a book by Paul (now David) Yongi Cho and was inspired by what the Lord had done in the church he founded in Seoul Korea, which at that time had reached a membership of over 200,000. I began to dream about a church for my own city of Sydney that could reach even 10% of that size. I felt inspired that the Lord would build in my time a Pentecostal church of 20,000 in Sydney and of course imagined myself as being that person through whom He would build it. I launched myself into a season of prayer and fasting to see this come about.
At the conclusion of that time as I was praying the Lord spoke to my heart and said “Instead of one church of 200,000 what about 2,000 churches of 100.” I began to ponder what the Lord was trying to say to me about my own desire to see a church of 20,000 in Sydney, as the Lord’s reference seemed to be to the church I had read about in Seoul. Then the Lord showed me a vision of a lump of coal burning and said to me “A lump of coal burns but it burns slowly. If you grind that coal to coal-dust and lift it up into the atmosphere it becomes explosive.” I remembered having read about this problem in underground coal mining. I also remembered (from lectures on Physical chemistry when I was at university) that increased surface area made substances more re-active.
Suddenly I knew what the Lord was trying to say to me; to impact a large city or nation would take increased surface area rather than just concentrating everything in one place in large churches. I did not feel that the Lord was telling me He didn’t want large churches but simply that in and of themselves they were not the answer to revival and impact in a city or a nation. As I prayed about this concept the Lord gave me a vision of a fishing net being cast out into the sea and as it was drawn in many fish escaped capture when the net was cast out wide. Again the Lord spoke to my heart and said, “This is the principle of drag; as you begin to draw towards one central point the further out you are from that point the more ineffective the drag becomes and the majority are lost at the outer edges.” I understood the Lord wanted to place His people in a widespread distribution throughout a people group to maximize the people effectively reached. Further that this would be the most effective vehicle for revival and impact in an area as this is when the church would become explosive.
At first I thought the Lord was speaking to me to establish a church that focused on establishing a large number of daughter churches. However, I began to realize that in doing this all that would happen is I would simply move towards starting another denomination or ‘group within a group.’ I then began to wonder if the Lord was telling me to establish some form of ‘home grouped’ based churches as the answer. The concept was something similar to the House Church Movement that later started throughout the world. However, I began to come to the conclusion that no matter how I tried to interpret it all that what I would end up doing is building another form of what we already had. Over time I moved on to other pastorates and although I felt I had never really got hold of what the Lord was trying to say to me I also could never forget the experience. The visions and the Lords words to me stuck with me through the years.
A Vision Re-Visited
In 1994 after a successful yet stressful time in pastoral and teaching ministry I decided to withdraw from the ministry for a time to minister to my family. I did some teaching in Bible Colleges during that time as I had obtained Masters in Biblical Studies, but largely I moved out of the ministry. Moving out of the ‘insulated cloister’ of the ministry into what we had previously viewed as ‘secular employment’ opened my eyes to a world I was not seeing before. In the office I worked in I met people who had the same hopes and fears I had, who had the same desires and concerns for their families and who were basically ‘good people’ in the way the world understands the concept of ‘good people.’ Yet they were also people who would never think of going to church as an answer in life. If you had said to them that they needed to straighten out their life or get their life ‘right’ they would have assumed you meant that they needed to go to a gym, lose weight or ‘get a life,’ but they would never have associated a response of going to church and ‘getting right with God’ as an appropriate response. This was a world we were not reaching as the church and it was a far greater percentage of humanity than the one we did reach.
It was also interesting to see the way they viewed the church. I had been in the office for 3 months before people began to relax around me because they knew I had been a pastor. They began to open up and talk with me about life as they began to realize that I was not going to ‘bible bash’ them and not going to sit in judgment of their lives. The Psalmist declares that only the fool comes to the conclusion in their heart that there is no God, Ps 14:1, and so I found that by far the majority of the people I worked with or came into contact with in my employment believed in a divine being. However, by far the greatest majority of these did not associate church with that belief nor did they see any great need to make that association. As the divinely appointed vehicle of the gospel the church was failing to communicate with the community at large.
These things made a deep impression on both Ann and myself. As a result we committed to making sure that in any return to full-time ministry we would never forget the importance of the things we had learned. We also committed ourselves to making sure that whatever we did in ministry in the future would be designed and operated to overcome these problems so that we could effectively reach the world Jesus had died for.
At the beginning of 2001 the Lord began to speak to both Ann and I individually about re-launching into the ministry and we began to plan the planting of a church on the Gold Coast where we were living (this is a large tourist city in Queensland, Australia). As we began to pray and plan the Scripture the Lord placed on our hearts as the foundation on which to launch was from Isaiah 43:18-21; “Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth…this people I have formed for Myself; they shall declare My praise.” As I looked at the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) I noted the tense and force of the verbs of the beginning was ‘stop fixing your mindset on the former things, nor dwell upon the things of old.’ It was clear to us that the Lord was saying stop trying to re-visit the past and don’t try to build things the way they were; basically it was a matter of not yearning for ‘the good old days.’ We had successfully planted churches before and therefore committed as a family to launch the new work and that our focus would be a new thing that took note of what we had learned.
It was with a tremendous sense of anticipation and divine call that we launched the work in February 2002. We were certain as a family of our divine mandate to do a ‘new thing.’ However, we had been operating for over a year when after a mid-week bible study one evening my eldest daughter, who with her husband led the music ministry for the church, shook my world. After people had gone home and we were sitting around sharing she looked at me and said; “So Dad when are we going to do the new thing?” I stammered out some answers that seemed to satisfy for the moment but the statement had penetrated my thinking and my heart. What the Lord had said to me some years before in the ministry now came back to haunt me; a new idea in an old paradigm becomes an old idea. We had set out to do something new but the only paradigm we had to work on was an old one.
Lifesource International: A prophetic mandate announcing the Kingdom at Hand
The scripture the Lord had given us to launch the church was not just a vision for the future but an admonition to us about the past; and that admonition was that we should not let our previous years of experience blind us for the future. However, as I began a period of soul searching I also realized that after many years, at this time I was 55 years old, it was too hard to teach an old dog like myself new tricks. I also realized that no matter what I tried to do in church planting and building it would always end up looking like what I had done in the past and I had already seen that what we have done has a limited potential. We need something new but the vision we have for this new thing is in terms of what we have always done, our past.
Empowered Individuals: The Key to Revival Penetration
It was in this time of reflection that the Lord reminded me of the vision I had received in 1981. However, as I was praying suddenly I realized that the coal dust was individual Christians not groups or churches. This was the means of reaching those people I saw were not being reached. Instead of trying to draw them to a central point send Spirit empowered people among them. Then revival will not take place in meetings but in the everyday relationships in the lives of those who follow Christ. As I began to re-read Luke-Acts I found that this is the message of the charismatic theology of Luke. We realized that it was time to launch into the prophetic ministry the Lord had called us to undertake many years before and had confirmed through others. Out of this time the concept of Lifesource International was born being dedicated to empowering ordinary people with a mindset with which to view the world and their future potential (the coal dust ready for revival) and the Spirit mantle set out in Luke-Acts (the atmosphere into which the coal dust is lifted). The spark of the Spirit acting in and through people will ignite the coal dust in an explosion that will flow wherever the coal dust is. The end result is the mission statement of Lifesource; “Changing our world for good,” the idea being to play on two fold potential of the word ‘good’; ‘for good’ meaning for the better and ‘for good’ meaning for the long term.