An overview of the Kansas City Prophets.
We draw near the end of David Forbes’ assessment of the forerunners of the Toronto outpouring, turning this week to the Kansas City Prophets. This article is part of a series, re-publishing the 1995 book ‘Blessing the Church?’. Read previous instalments here.
The Kansas City Prophets
By the end of the 1980s, the charismatic renewal movement had become used to so much extra-biblical experience and had become focused on the fulfilment of so many eschatological promises, that it was possible for thousands of British charismatic Christians and their leaders to be affected and influenced by the 'prophetic movement' as epitomised by Paul Cain and the 'prophets' from the Kansas City Fellowship in the United States.
This movement came to prominence in America as the result of first a sermon and then a published report by Ernest Gruen, a Kansas City pastor, criticising the way in which the leadership of the Fellowship were seeking to take control of the spiritual life of the city.
The situation was further promoted by the fact that John Wimber and the Vineyard churches decided to take the Kansas City prophetic movement under their wing and assume responsibility for its future behaviour.
The basic complaints being made against the Kansas City Fellowship were the use of directive prophecy to control the lives of believers and take over other fellowships, the use of 'new prophetic revelation' to determine doctrine and practice, and the promotion of an elite group of apostles and prophets centred on themselves. Part of the accusation regarding their 'new' doctrines was that it was simply a return to the old Latter Rain/Manifest Sons of God tenets.1
By the end of the 1980s, the charismatic renewal movement was used to extra-biblical experience and had become focused on the fulfilment of many eschatological promises.
A feature of John Wimber's strategy, with regard to taking on responsibility for the Kansas City prophets and their senior pastor Mike Bickle, was to send in a team of his senior leaders including Dr Jack Deere, a former Professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and now the Vineyard's chief theologian. They examined all the complaints of biblical malpractice being made by Ernest Gruen and published a report acknowledging certain errors which in retrospect to a large degree simply papered over the cracks and allowed the Kansas City Fellowship to continue virtually undisturbed under the Vineyard aegis.
The errors which were acknowledged and by implication would not recur included “the attempt by some prophetic ministers to establish doctrine or practice by revelation alone, apart from biblical support”, “the use of prophetic gifting for controlling purposes”, “using types and allegories to establish doctrine”, and “using jargon that reflects the teaching of groups that we do not wish to be identified with”.
This last confession referred specifically to the accusation of promoting the Latter Rain and Manifest Sons of God doctrines. However, it must be said that irrespective of how sincerely these errors were acknowledged initially, subsequent events showed that little attempt was made to learn the necessary lessons, especially with regard to the use of establishing doctrine by revelation and the continued teaching of Latter Rain and Manifest Sons teachings.
Paul Cain
The decision by John Wimber and the Vineyard churches to support the ministry of the Kansas City prophets was undoubtedly the result of the link-up which they had made with Paul Cain.
Cain had an early history not unlike that of William Branham. Born in 1929, he had been aware of supernatural power guiding his life from its earliest days and had experienced what he believed to be direct communications with the Lord through audible messages whilst still a small boy. He became part of the Pentecostal healing movement which arose in North America in the 1940s and 1950s, led by William Branham, Oral Roberts and others, and began an itinerant ministry as a healing evangelist in his early teens.
The Vineyard movement took responsibility for the Kansas City prophets and initially acknowledged certain errors in their conduct, but in retrospect this simply papered over the cracks.
According to Paul Cain's own testimony he was much encouraged in his ministry by Branham who allegedly saw in him a similar kind of 'anointing' to his own. It is said that there was a particular bond between William Branham and the young Paul Cain, that they frequently ministered together and that Cain would often stand in for Branham at meetings which he was unable to take, although for some unknown reason Cain's association in ministry with Branham has been vehemently denied by the Branham family.
However, Cain's healing and evangelism ministry was undoubtedly marked by the same kind of ‘revelation knowledge' of people and their personal circumstances that had characterised Branham's, but by the early 1960s, disillusioned by the 'stardom' status accorded to him and his contemporaries and the general lack of integrity in the ministry, he withdrew from public life and lived as a virtual recluse until he went and met the Kansas City prophets in early 1987.
He believed that the Lord was re-commissioning him for ministry with the special purpose of restoring the prophetic ministry to the Church worldwide and that to that end he needed a public platform. His strategy was to be that of taking a prophetic message to every significant evangelical leader in the United States. The leader who responded by accepting him and his message would be the one whom God had chosen to give a platform for his ministry.
In 1988, Paul Cain felt he should contact John Wimber and following a visit from Cain, Wimber decided that the Lord was calling him to be the leader who should give Cain his platform.
Joel’s Army Teaching
Paul Cain consistently denied that he ever subscribed to the Manifest Sons of God movement. However, although there is no reason to believe that he was ever a card-carrying member of the movement, his 'prophetic' preaching clearly promoted the ideas of immortality for overcoming believers here on earth in these end times and he used the same spiritual jargon as the Manifest Sons of God exponents.
This came over in a very specific way in, for example, his teaching on 'Joel's Army'.2 This teaching, based on the destructive army mentioned in Joel chapter 2, was claimed to be the result of revelation which he had received at the age of 19 when he had a visitation from the “Angel of the Lord, and he was standing in his majesty like a warrior and he had a bright shining sword and he pointed up to a billboard like that, and on the sign it said, ‘Joel's Army in training’".
Cain had not understood and had asked, “Lord, what does this mean?”. He had from then on received divine revelation as to the meaning of the book of Joel for today and on this he based his prophetic message.
According to Paul Cain's own testimony he was much encouraged in his ministry by William Branham, who allegedly saw in him a similar kind of 'anointing' to his own.
The basic theme of the teaching was that God was about to raise up out of the Church a Joel's Army. The purpose of this army was to bring in the restoration of the Church and a great end-times revival accompanied by signs and wonders the like of which had never been seen before, not even in the life of the early Church. These signs and wonders would be accomplished by the 'new breed', the 'dread champions' whom the Lord would raise up to form this mighty army.
The purpose of this army was in fact twofold, for not only would it be the vanguard of the great signs and wonders revival, but it would be responsible for the purging of the Church and the destruction of all those who are unworthy to be part of the Bride. Cain taught, in true Manifest Sons style, that:
If you have intimacy with God, they can't kill you, they just can't. There is something about you; you're connected to that vine; you're just so close to Him. Oh, my friends, they can't kill you...If you're really in the vine and you're the branch, then the life sap from the Son of the living God keeps you from cancer, keeps you from dying, keeps you from death...Not only will they not have diseases, they will also not die. They will have the kind of imperishable bodies that are talked about in the 15th chapter of Corinthians...This army is invincible. If you have intimacy with God they can't kill you.3
Paul Cain was, of course, giving this teaching to the Vineyard churches before the Kansas City Fellowship report acknowledging errors, so it could be assumed that following the publishing of that report no further mention would be made of this kind of teaching.
It may be of interest to note that at a meeting between John Wimber, Paul Cain and Mike Bickle with Clifford Hill, I asked John Wimber and Mike Bickle if they could specify which teachings were being referred to in the errors acknowledged by the Kansas City Fellowship. Neither was prepared to answer my questions clearly on this subject. It was therefore perhaps not surprising to find that after the Kansas City report both Jack Deere, the Vineyard theologian who had been given the job of checking and verifying the biblical soundness of their teaching, and John Wimber, took up the Joel's Army teaching. Wimber propounded it at the London Docklands Conference in October 1990.
In Deere's version of the Joel's Army teaching he underwrote the divine revelation foundation of the teaching and extended Cain's tenets by an extravagant use of hyperbole. He made the point over and over again that this Joel's Army would be composed of believers who would outshine in their service anything that God ever accomplished through any of his servants in the past.
Deere taught that, “This army is unique...When this army comes, it's large and it's mighty. It's so mighty that there has never been anything like it before. Not even Moses, not even David, not even Paul. What's going to happen now will transcend what Paul did, what David did, what Moses did, even though Moses parted the Red Sea.”
Paul Cain clearly promoted the idea of immortality for overcoming believers here on earth and used the Manifest Sons of God jargon.
Deere went on to equate this army with the 144,000 in Revelation 7 who, he said, “follow the Lamb wherever he goes, and no one can harm that 144,000”. Most extraordinarily, he taught that 144,000 is a multiple of 12 and that since 12 stands for 'apostolic government' then 144,000 is the 'ultimate in apostolic government'.
In his version of the Joel's Army teaching, as given at the London Docklands Conference, John Wimber was much more cautious in his use of language, although he undoubtedly underwrote in principle most of both Cain’s and Deere's teaching. With regard to the great signs and wonders which this army would perform, Wimber simply said: “This army is large, powerful, unique, unlike any army that's ever existed before or will again. Even as the Lord started this thing with a bang, (Acts 2) he is going to end it with something so incredible that we'll talk about it throughout eternity. It will be the buzz for ever”.
However, on the subject of immortality Wimber did not fully support Cain and Deere, saying of the army: “anyone who wants to harm them must die”.
Bob Jones
The leading prophet in the Kansas City Fellowship in 1990 was Bob Jones and it was his prophetic utterances and revelation-based doctrine and practice that were behind most of the controversy that surrounded them and had occasioned Gruen's outbursts.
Jones came from Arkansas and in his young days had been a member of the Baptist Church. His spiritual life had, however, been fairly non-existent and he had engaged in petty crime. Nevertheless, his testimony, like Branham and Cain, was of boyhood and early teen 'angelic visitations' including an out-of-body experience at the age of 15 when he says he was taken before the throne of God.
With the advent of the Korean War, Jones joined the US Marine Corps where he became heavily involved in drunken brawls and gambling. With his life in an obviously downward moral and physical spiral he left the Marine Corps and moved to Oklahoma State where he opened an illegal liquor store - Oklahoma being 'dry' - with considerable financial success.
However, his life of debauchery brought him to the point of a complete breakdown which not even drugs appeared to alleviate, and he ended up in hospital in Topeka near Kansas City, where it appears that following a combination of good psychiatric treatment by a Christian doctor and a number of visitations, both divine and demonic, he was discharged.
Bob Jones then started to attend church and read the Bible again and after a number of further 'visitations' he was converted and baptised in the autumn of 1975. Because of the visions and prophecies which he brought to church leadership he found himself often becoming unpopular and ended up being rejected and unable to fit into normal church life. Eventually in the early 1980s Jones found himself accepted by the Kansas City Fellowship, even though Mike Bickle had originally believed him to be a false prophet, where he began to be valued for his prophetic utterances.
It was the utterances and practice of Kansas City prophet Bob Jones that lay behind most of the controversy which surrounded the group.
These were often bizarre and spiritually extravagant. Jones was very much 'into' seeing both demons and angels on a regular basis and having strange nightly visions and out-of-body experiences. According to both Jones himself and Mike Bickle, “Bob normally gets five to ten visions a night, maybe sees angels ten to fifteen times a week”.4 Apparently he had been doing this since 1974 and it does not take much mathematical skill to conclude that these supernatural experiences far outweigh all of those recorded as being given to people in the scriptures!
Jones was also very much the initiator of spiritual elitism for the Kansas City Fellowship based on 'prophetic revelation' and it seems that the more bizarre his 'prophetic utterances' the more they were promoted by the leadership. For example, he introduced the concept of an 'elected seed generation'. In this he taught that the children born since 1973 to members of the Kansas City Fellowship were the “elected seed” who had been especially chosen by Jesus and the angels from “billions of little round yellow things” floating around in heaven to be the “end time Omega generation”.5 These 'little yellow things' were the seed from actual blood lines and they were from the “best of every blood line there has ever been Paul, David, Peter, James and John the best of their seed unto this generation”.
This elite group were described as “the chosen generation of all history” who would “possess the Spirit without measure”. They were also described as 'the Bride of Christ'; the man child of Revelation 12; the ministry of perfection; the Melchizedek priesthood; the manifested sons of God; Joel's Army; and many other biblical epithets.
Jones taught and Bickle underwrote (as senior pastor of the Kansas City Fellowship) that this "end time, Omega generation super church” would do “10,000 times the miracles in the book of Acts”. They would also conduct meetings of “a million or more” where they would “move their hands and the power of God will go like flashes of lightning, and as they go like this over a million people, if a person is missing an arm…it will instantly be created”. Jones claimed that 300,000 of Mike Bickle's generation and their super-children would be last days' apostles, and that 35 apostles from the Kansas City Fellowship would be “like unto Paul”.
Again, we have never been able to find out whether all of these bizarre prophetic teachings of Bob Jones were included amongst the list of errors. When John Wimber brought the Kansas City prophets to Holy Trinity Church, Brompton in July 1990, there was an embargo put on Bob Jones regarding public teaching and prophecy but he was allowed to minister to leaders behind the scenes.
References
1 Gruen, EA, 1990. Documentation of the Aberrant Practices and Teachings of Kansas City Fellowship. Full Faith Church of Love, Kansas City.
2 Deere, J. Joel's Army. Audio tape message, 1990.
3 Gruen, EA, Documentation (see note 1), p218.
4 Ibid, p10.
5 Ibid, p12.
