An Amazing Healing Story

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182290_10100105939568080_2102746915_nThis is a guest post from Nicole Voelkel. We met in grad school at Wheaton College. She is a really great example of a prophet and evangelist and really moves powerfully in the gifts of the Spirit. She, herself, is a free spirit and is always moving around the globe. I think she is in Spain right now. Enjoy a fresh story of healing below. 

[How to Pray For Healing: 7 Crucial Steps]

“Hey, how many of you guys would like to see a miracle right now?” Jerry and I had just walked up to a group of about 10 students sitting in the student lounge at the local college. We were met with some bemused (and some confused) looks. “No, I’m serious. Who of you is sick? Right now, I’m going to tell you about God, and you’re going to see a miracle in front of your eyes. Who here needs a miracle?”

One of the girls pointed to her friend. “She needs a miracle. She lost her voice and can’t sing, and she’s a voice major.” The kids nodded.

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Prophecy – Apart from the Gospel or a Part of the Gospel?

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I am excited to announce that Alexia Salvatierra is going to be a regular monthly writer here on Release The APE. She is excited to partner with us to help fill out the role of the prophet Biblically and in today’s culture. We are so excited to have her join our team! You can read more about her in her bio below the post.

While the call to social transformation is increasingly common in the evangelical world, it often seems to be an extra-credit project.  Prophets are nice to have around but not an essential part of preaching the Gospel.  (Of course, real prophets are not always nice to have around – but that’s next month’s blog!)

I think that CEO of World Vision USA Rich Stearn’s  book title says it well – “The Hole in the Gospel.”  When the transformation of the whole world is not a core component of the preaching of the Gospel, then we are making our God too small and our witness suffers.  My 21 year old daughter’s generation is particularly sensitive to the presence of the “hole” (or the absence of the whole); one of her friends said to me recently that she is only interested in a Jesus that transforms the world.

Why is the prophetic dimension of the Gospel so critically important?  One of the church fathers said, “Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words.”  At Pentecost, the first disciples emerged from the upper room to preach the Gospel in all the languages spoken by all of the hearers.  Actions are a language.  What do our actions say about our God?  We read in James that “faith without works is dead.”  How does our message communicate consistently that our God is alive?  Of course, this can be heard as an argument for social action but not necessarily for prophecy (defined as the speaking of truths and the living out of truths that change whole communities and societies – not just individual lives.)  We only understand that the full communication of love requires the biggest possible transformation when we realize that it is not only the fact of God’s love that we need to communicate but also the full power of that love.  Satan is the king of this world, but the kingdom of God is breaking into the world and it is neither weak nor impotent.  As the old Irish hymn based on the Magnificat says, because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, “the world is about to turn.”

Bishop Medardo Gomez of the Lutheran Church of El Salvador presides over a church body that serves the poorest of the poor in his country.  They have churches spread through the most remote mountains and the most broken down urban slums.  During the civil war, Lutheran pastors were often killed for standing up for the basic human rights of their congregants and neighbors.  When the right wing death squads killed four Jesuit priests at the University, they went afterwards to search for Bishop Gomez.

The Bishop was out of the country at the time, so they took the cross which hung on the wall of the cathedral.  On Ash Wednesday, the members of the congregation had written all of their individual and collective sins on the wood of the cross, including the torture and persecution carried out by the death squads.  The captors of the cross called it a “subversive” cross.  When Bishop Gomez returned, instead of hiding out in fear, he recruited the ambassadors of various countries to accompany him to the military prison and demanded the return of the cross.  They returned it to him and it now hangs in the cathedral under a sign that reads “The Subversive Cross.”  Pastors of the Lutheran church of El Salvador are still being martyred – now no longer by death squads but by powerful gangs; their fearless resistance to evil and their protection of the victims of injustice in the name and spirit of Jesus Christ still costs them their lives.  I wish that every Lutheran seminarian in the U.S. had to spend a year with the Lutheran Church of El Salvador to learn whole Gospel discipleship. The prophetic gifts and role are not separate from evangelism; they are intrinsically and intimately intertwined – part and parcel of the Gospel.

[This was written in response to “Evangelism Must Be Tied To The Prophetic“]

Expelled: Evangelical Groups Being Removed by Universities This Fall.

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In a collision between religious freedom and anti discrimination policies Christian groups are being removed from campus. Any group holding to the policy that one must be a Christian to be in leadership is being systematically removed this Fall.

We who work on the campus have known this was coming for a while, but this recent NY Times article brings it to the forefront for many of you.

At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from their list of qualifications for leadership.

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Standing With A Prophet: Stand With The Victims

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By Beau Crosetto

Prophets always die.

They come against majority culture with correction and when you anger the majority culture, you will die…Biblically in a literal sense and today in America in reputation and standing.

Today Zach Hoag has been going off on twitter about the recent conviction of the youth pastor of Covenant Life Church in Maryland for the repeated sexual abuse of three minors (keep reading for details).

https://twitter.com/zhoag/status/466966597476032512

And his prophetic word is not being received and some people are starting to anger.

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Wind Opens Doors

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By Beau Crosetto

Yesterday after a full day of meetings I stopped by the beach to do a walk and prayer time. The wind was blowing incredibly hard for Southern California – it was hard to walk and ocean water was spraying up onto the walkway.

As I was walking, I heard God say to me, “Beau, I am so much more powerful than the strongest wind.”

It caught me off guard and I began to think about the Holy Spirit as wind.

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The Five-Fold Symphony: How the Gifts Work Together

By Jon Hietbrink

God gives us gifts to play a symphony, not a solo.

Every significant discussion of spiritual gifts[1] in the New Testament is situated in the context of a complex system—we are “one body with many parts” designed to operate in symbiotic harmony with one another. The problem is that the way we’re taught to understand and express our spiritual giftedness can often be a very individualized and siloed experience—we’re taught to understand our personal gifts, but we’re left to wonder how those gifts actually work together in the way God intended.

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How To Welcome A Prophet

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3pdD94DMThis is a guest post by Brian Sanders. He leads an incredible church network in Tampa Bay called Underground. He is one of the most inspiring leaders I know. I love listening to him teach and I love the way he thinks about leadership, church planting, and missional communities. He is an apostolic leader through and through and you see this no better than in the way he is the chief architect for his network of churches. But he also comes hard with timely prophetic words. One of which was his last post you can find here.

Prophetic types might be the hardest to welcome because their gift is often unwanted. Even the most refined prophets are hard to hear. The history of, well, history—is that religious people don’t just fail to welcome prophets, we kill them. Here, then are some tips on how to welcome (and not kill) your prophets.

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