Playing With Fire

Last week we ran IC’s response to a reader concerned about curriculum that his local church had asked him to present to children. I was unable to link to the content he provided online, so I promised to do a deeper dive into the subject later on.* The four-page lesson (pages 39-42 of a KAIO publication) was entitled “Prophetic Practice”, and purported to help children unlock their spiritual gift of prophecy with the help of a local “known prophet” named Darby Slaton.

If the idea of Christians who need blow-by-blow instructions from a manual to teach a simple Bible lesson equipping your kids to lecture you and others with direct “messages from God” doesn’t curl your toes now, wait until you read some of the quotes that follow. Our reader politely and firmly declined to participate in the program … for very good reason.

Unsupported and Unsupportable

The teaching portion of the curriculum starts with the unsupported and unsupportable assertion that “God may be calling you [a child!] to the ministry of a prophet” and a five minute look at Jeremiah as an example. Jeremiah was possibly the most emotionally fragile man the Lord ever used to proclaim his words, and he suffered deep ongoing distress, rejection, imprisonment and eventual kidnapping. Is this the sort of life Christian parents aspire to for their children? Perhaps, but very few indeed would want it for them before age ten. So let’s not call this a problem with the curriculum so much as irony thick on the ground.

First real problem: IC made the argument that not all Christians believe the Holy Spirit is still giving the gift of prophecy to new believers today. In fact, large numbers do not. The reason is Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 13 that “prophecies will pass away”. Many of us believe they have done so, pointing to the absence of anything remotely resembling biblical prophecy in the churches today. More importantly, IC argued that even if the Holy Spirit were still giving the gift of prophecy today, the churches would be obligated to test purported prophets by the same biblical standards that applied to prophets throughout history. Many of these were false prophets. In one famous instance atop Mount Carmel, the false prophets outnumbered the true by 450 to one. Their ministry ended rather abruptly when Elijah killed them all.

A testing process of any sort is entirely absent from this curriculum. Yet all who claim to speak for God are obligated to to demonstrate the truth content of their messages. If the so-called prophet is lying or self-deceived, the churches of God need to know that.

Thoroughly Falsified

Shortly after this follows another biblically unsupportable assertion: that “every believer” has the gift of prophecy available to him/her.

This latter statement is not only unsupported by scripture but thoroughly falsified. Paul’s subject in 1 Corinthians 12 is diversity within the body of Christ. There are varieties of gifts, he says. One believer may be able to heal the sick, another may speak in tongues, yet another may receive the gift of prophecy. Not all believers in a local church have the same spiritual gift. The apostle uses body parts (foot, hand, ear, eye) as an analogy. “If the whole body were an eye,” he writes, “where would be the sense of hearing?” His point is that the different members of the body have gifts that differ and complement one another. He then lists a number of spiritual gifts and asks a series of rhetorical questions: “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers?”, and so on down the list. Given what has gone before, it’s impossible the apostle intends the answer to any of these questions to be anything but a hard “No.”

Even in the first century, not all believers were prophets. Not all believers are prophets today, and it’s distinctly possible none are. So then, the word of God does not support the statement that every believer has the gift of prophecy available to him/her.

They Were Stoned, They Were Sawn in Two

Further, we have exactly one example of a child prophet in scripture. That was Samuel, the exception who proves the rule. (I’m not counting Joseph, who was a young man of seventeen by the time he had his prophetic dreams.) All other Bible prophets were adults, for good reason. Those who genuinely spoke for God in times past generally preached difficult and painful truths to their nation, and the hard-hearted Israelites killed many of God’s messengers on that account in a variety of unpleasant ways.

Moreover, the Law of Moses made Israel responsible to test the prophets, putting to death those whose messages proved false. Thus, the believer who claimed to speak for God frequently risked death regardless of whether he was a fake or the real deal. Being a prophet was no job for children.

Encouraging children to seek to exercise a gift that may not even exist anymore is not only questionable but spiritually (and potentially physically) hazardous. To suggest all children may be candidates for this dangerous and comparatively rare office is reckless and unconscionable.

Trivializing the Word of God

We will get into the “known prophet” Darby Slaton in a second post, but the curriculum gives us some insight into what children might expect from Darby (or perhaps other “known prophets”) when one showed up to help them unlock their prophetic gifts:

“[Darby] had the children ask God how many coins were in his one pocket. At the start, many of them guessed. It was easy to tell when they were guessing. This was a non-threatening approach to hearing God’s voice. Next, he asked them what type of coins were in his other pocket. They were to give the number of each type of coin. He encouraged the children to practice at home with whatever was in their desk drawers.”

Of course they guessed. What else were they going to do?

Other activities included asking God which toy they should select for a friend and asking God which superhero is most like their friend. At the end of the session, the “known prophet” prayed over each child and anointed him/her with “the oil of gladness”. He then challenged them to keep practicing their “prophetic gifts” on their own. The homework assignment was for each child to ask God what he wanted to tell them that week, then to write it down, along with whom the message was for: themselves a friend, their parents or even the body of Christ.

As a parent, do you believe for a second that the Holy Spirit of God is in the business of doing parlor tricks?

The Old Testament prophets preached life-and-death messages. The New Testament prophets gave practical guidance to believers in a time when the word of God had yet to be completed. No genuine prophet is on record anywhere practicing the prophetic gift to get it right; all prophecy is an act of God from beginning to end, with human effort having no part whatsoever in it. Either God spoke or he did not. Often the prophets neither understood nor liked what they heard, but they repeated it to their nation verbatim because that is what real prophets do. No genuine prophet on record ever engaged in magic tricks or trivial demonstrations that he possessed special powers. In fact, looking for miraculous signs from God is a mark of wickedness and spiritual adultery. Who would want to willingly participate in that sort of exercise?

Why Bother with this Craziness?

The reader may be forgiven for thinking the aforementioned is some kind of fringe nuttiness too weird and obviously off kilter to waste time on. Well, it may be nuttiness, but it’s hardly fringe, and children are frequently the target.

Here, “prophetic theologian” Clayton Coombs shares “5 Ways to Disciple the Prophetic Gift in Children” as young as age four. Here, “My Friend Debbie” writes about “Parenting the Prophetic Child”, children who are hard to discipline and characterized by “roller-coaster emotions”. (How about that? My brother was a prophet. Who knew?) Here, Jane Berry writes about “keeping your prophetic gift ‘clean’ ”, because, as even Jane admits, sometimes the attempt to prophesy brings people perilously close to clairvoyance, witchcraft and trafficking with evil spirits. (I am not kidding! Can you imagine encouraging children to play with matches, let alone gasoline? That’s what this is.) Here, she discusses the importance of exposing children to faith healings and miracles, and getting them to participate. Here, Becky Fischer promotes her 13-week children’s curriculum on encouraging the prophetic gift in children.

I could go on. Encouraging children to attempt to channel spiritual energies about which they are untaught and cannot possibly understand or assess as to truth or error is incredibly common, even if it’s playing with fire. In certain sorts of churches, this is standard practice. Darby Slaton and his ilk are no rarity online.

We’ll get into Darby a little more on Tuesday. Let’s just say he’s found an interesting and novel use for his own “prophetic gift” besides appearances as a guest speaker for children.

___________________________
* I was subsequently able to save the pages as .jpgs and attach them here as graphics. They are probably all-but-unreadable on phones and the resolution is rubbish on the blog, but you can click on them one by one to get a hi-res version viewable on a PC or laptop.