The prophet's handbook

the Father’s mission. According to Philippians 2:7, He deliberately made Himself of no reputation, knowing that what He had been before the assignment became irrelevant to the task at hand. When a prophet comes into a local church because God has assigned him or her there, the object of his or her sojourn is to facilitate what the Lord wants the church to do. The challenge comes when prophets find it hard to do so without disrupting the church’s culture and operations, or when they must discredit its present headship to succeed. The Lord expects the prophet to meld with the church’s leadership and integrate his or her mantle into the customary life of the work as a support. Whatever authority the prophet on local church assignment wields is subject to that of the existing government of the church for the duration of the charge. Charge is a good word to use here because it includes the personal and professional costs of the duty, as well as the cost of its breadth of responsibility. Prophets are errant (and arrant) if they see their call as being sent to wrest the sheep from under the pastor’s covering. When one meets prophets who are extracting sheep from the church and presuming to draw them unto themselves, these are prophets who are going against divine order. I recently heard someone say that he was leaving his church because a beloved friend intruded into the office of the prophet. I say intruded because, if the prophet were genuine and not a novice, he would be of a mind to spare the flock and therefore would discourage stable sheep from leaving their pastoral covering to personally serve the new prophet’s calling. The reason the member gave for selecting his friend’s position over his pastor is that he viewed his friend as his personal prophet. What a dangerous mentality. No one is meant to have a personal prophet to the exclusion of the rest of the body of Christ, and no prophet is ordained to strictly serve any one individual or small, isolated clique’s will. Proverbs 18:1 says why, while Judges 17:1 gives us such an example in the Bible of this practice’s detriment. When you read the account, you learn that only an idolatrous heart devoid of leadership wisdom resorts to such a spiritual order. In an account in Judges, a man named Micah robbed his mother for his own objectives. He did not tell her he took her money, and she subsequently reacted by putting a curse on the thief. When he realized that his mother’s curse could affect him, he confessed his crime, and she negated her curse. In a bizarre turn of events, she gave him some of the money back to fulfill his heart’s desire to craft himself an idol. After he had done so, he invented an ancestral religion, and he installed his own priests. Of course, we know that during that era, the oldest