My Testimony as a 30-Year Observer of Mike Bickle and the House of Prayer
I am quite cautious in discussing the failures of prominent ministers. But given my perception of the Lord’s word for the overall body through this, and the long-term shaping of First Love Ministry relative to Mike’s ministry, I feel some responsibility to discuss it—if only to shine a more stabilizing light for anyone sincerely desiring a tempered more comprehensive spiritual perspective than will be found on YouTube or in any Christian press.
My first solid awareness of Mike Bickle and the “Kansas City Prophets” occurred about 1990. This was due to the controversy raging over Bickle, Paul Cain and Bob Jones brought about by Ernie Gruen, a local pastor, which made the pages of Charisma Magazine—the tabloid of record for any charismatic church.By the late ‘80s I had already been “baptized” into the new prophetic movement stream led by Bill Hamon, and was aware of Rick Joyner’s Morningstar Ministry, reading enthusiastically the MorningStar Journal. But I had only fringe awareness of Kansas City at that time.
Based on the reports in Charisma, I had no incentive to look into Kansas City. It appeared as “flaky” as the magazine itself. I just considered it to be a peripheral “phenom.” That same year, David Pytches released his more factual bio on the movement called Some Said It Thundered, which I did not see until 1994. But as the MorningStar group grew more interconnected with Kansas City through some there like Jack Deere, I figured sooner or later I would learn more about it first hand.
- First Encounter: Seeking a “Married” Prophetic
Finally in fall, 1993 on the second week of our honeymoon, we attended our first MorningStar conference in Charlotte, NC featuring among others Mike Bickle, Paul Cain and Jack Deere. “Good,” I thought, “Now I will get to hear these men first hand.” Well, I was extremely impressed with Paul Cain’s precisionally accurate prophetic prowess. And Deere was a good teacher.
But as for Mike Bickle, I was completely unimpressed. He struck me as a happy-go-lucky jokester of no real substance—especially for such a supposedly “deep” prophetic conference. And that settled it for me, “Well, I won’t have to investigate Kansas City any further. There’s nothing there but hype.”
Throughout these years, I had a low overall view of all the new mainstream prophetic movements, because they did not have the fire of Wilkerson, Ravenhill, and the early (1984) James Robison that cut people to the heart with conviction of sin, righteousness, judgment, repentance and the work of the cross. (As well, none focused on gaining a core-transforming experiential love for God as marked by “deeper life” writers as Tozer—a focus that gave rise to the name of this ministry.)
I also came to recognize though that God does not have only “one flavor” of prophetic. While He certainly exhibits the classic ax-swinging (“masculine”) “John-the Baptist-style” prophetic, God also has a softer, more body nurturing (“feminine”) prophetic. (For more, see The Mystery of Spiritual Gender series.)
Underneath the tension between these two “prophetics” lay a constant question for me: “Will there ever be a way, Lord, to bring about a fruitful reconciliatory ‘marriage’ between these two prophetic natures in the body of Christ as inferred from Isa. 62:5?” (You can look that up.)
- The Friends of the Bridegroom Message (FOTB)
Finally, in 1998, I got wind Mike Bickle was coming to my area, and that he was moving into some new teaching on John the Baptist and the Bride of Christ. “Hmmm,” I thought. “Mike Bickle? The hot air man? This sounds curious and potentially very interesting. I should go check it out.”
And so I did. But I was not prepared for what I was to hear. For Mike Bickle had changed. He now had a serious message, albeit under that “boyish” uber-positive persona. But his new message on the Friends of the Bridegroom had real solidity, direction and struck a chord with me. It centered on the John-the-Baptist side of the prophetic that actually dared to speak of judgment. It also focused on “first love” for the Lord, and to top it off, he taught from Isaiah 62 as a centerpiece passage! He touched all the wilderness elements I found lacking in the mainstream, and which prohibited me as a “masculine” ax-swinger from really “marrying” into the mainstream movements.
- Love Out of Order
But at the same time, though Mike did focus on my pet concept of “first love,” his was almost entirely based on the idea of “God’s feelings” and on developing our “feelings” for God, an outgrowth of his earlier “passion for Jesus” emphasis. For Mike, spiritual love was wholly romantic, seated in the Song of Solomon. (One day I quipped to a longtime prophetic friend, “This is not a John the Baptist movement; it is a Mrs. John the Baptist movement!”)
At its base, I knew this forefront romantic emphasis was wrong. At best, it was out of balance. Love for God is foundationally a committed giving up of one’s life for another, and only upon that, spiritual feelings and passions may flourish. Love is based in a determination and a choice (or as Gary Smalley wrote it, “Love Is a Decision”).
Likewise therefore, Mike’s three-fold progression of Bridegroom, King and Judge describing God’s order of relating to man was also backward to me. Though I knew where he was coming from on the back end, on the front end, to gain bridal relationship with Him, we must first meet God as Judge of our sins through the cross unto repentance, then He must become King over our entirety through obedient surrender, and only then may we find Him as our Bridegroom where we can experience His truest intimacy and fullness of passion for us. Mike never taught the front end. He also disparaged the concept of “the angry God” and sought to wholly redefine God’s anger in terms of His love (as has the entire passionist movement to this day).
- A Short-Lived “Courtship” and My Warning to the Bridal Movement
Nevertheless, I believed in Mike’s essentials, however mis-ordered, and needed to give this potential new ministry relationship room to grow and prove itself. So I set out to see if God might indeed bring these conflicting “prophetic gender” perspectives into proper alignment through FOTB unto a wholesome full-gendered prophetic that could eventually birth the Revelation 12 “sons of God.” I determined to “date” this movement. This led to my following Mike’s weekly internet teaching streams, three trips to Kansas City including the 1999 dedication of the House of Prayer, and to ongoing correspondence with Gary Wiens, one of Mike’s right hand men at the time.
Sadly however, while remaining quite supportive of the 24/7 House of Prayer and its worship (which I still am—and which I still consider as God’s most significant movement since the prophetic movement), I never saw the corrective genderal prophetic balance development I had hoped to see over time. I wrestled with untenable statements such as, “There are things God values more than obedience,” and untenable actions such as Mike’s short-lived approach to the Vatican Cult in Italy to seek common ground in our “passion for Jesus.” (I dialogued with him personally about this!)
I knew back then that such thinking was not merely lacking discernment, but a recipe for spiritual and natural moral hazard. By early 2001, the Lord launched me into writing extensively on the needful corrective balance in our view of our love relationship with God between the hardcore wilderness prophetic “sonship” paradigm and the now emerging “bridal” paradigm. (By 2003 I had coined the term “Passionism” to describe the error of “unbridled bridal” teaching.)
In particular, I wrote an article called Tested Under Glory: Relating Sonship and Brideship–An Exhortation to the Bridal Movement which I encourage every reader to review. But near the end of that writing, after describing how and why David morally fell relative to his worship, I stated the following:
David's attraction to the Lord based on spiritual passion alone led to deception concerning his own natural passion and in turn to his downfall. He was deceived because romantic passion—natural and spiritual, being representative of the feminine element of creation—is especially prone to deception.
For this reason, the feminine passion-centered bridal paradigm was never designed to sustain our relationship with the Lord by itself—any more than marriage was designed to be sustained by feelings. Unqualified by, ungrounded in and unintegrated with the sonship paradigm, the vibrant dominant bridal paradigm in our worship-intercessory movements is unknowingly contributing to a misty deception over the Body of Christ regarding the nature of relationship with the Lord and how it is developed….
[Of] all the walls the would-be bride would demolish, this wall with sonship she must overcome at all costs. For the Lord has shown me that if left uncorrected, the unqualified passion-centered bridal paradigm can and will lead to outbreaks of physical immorality in the very house of prayer.Little did I know at that time or could have discerned that sexual immorality was already in force in the life of the man charged to build that house!
- “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”
Finally, at the end of 2001, after one last visit to a small local bridal conference led by a Kansas City leader featuring but more dancing “snowflakes,” art, and syrupy love-talk and smiles, my decision was conclusive: “It’s over, Lord. I’m done courting the bridal movement.” I knew I had the Lord’s approval to move on.
Since that time, I have continued to follow IHOP only from afar, and only so as to keep a finger on its pulse, to know what God may yet be saying or doing, whether through it, or in spite of it.
In the next and final section to follow, I will sum up my perspective on the Bickle/IHOP situation based on the major testing points we have expounded. We will discuss the aspects of ministry persona and idolatry, sexual infidelity, and prophetic falsity relative to this global ministry-shaking event.
And we will address some of the ongoing questions flying about in the public such as: “What does Mike Bickle’s fall and the ongoing exposé of the IHOP-KC leadership mean about that work? Is it/was it a work of man, or of God? How much of Mike Bickle is/was real, and how much a mere front? Is Mike Bickle even a truly born again believer?”
[Continued in Part 5]
Chris Anderson
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org12/23
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