A TPM Investigation: Inside the International House of Prayer

[Warren Stupidity]

On a Sunday evening in March 2013, after a late spring snowstorm, several hundred people braved the weather to reach an unassuming building nestled into a former strip mall in the small suburban community of Grandview, Missouri, 16 miles south of Kansas City. Their destination was the International House of Prayer. The prayer room—a nondescript auditorium ringed with small side rooms for prophesying and faith healing—receives daily visitors from all over the world who want to experience what IHOP’s founder, the controversial, and self-titled, “prophet” Mike Bickle, claims is a recreation of the biblical King David’s tabernacle. Bickle maintains he is helping Christians achieve a greater intimacy with Jesus through 24/7 music and prayer - a prerequisite, he says, for Jesus to return to earth, carry out God’s battle plan for the end-times, vanquish the Antichrist, and rule the world from his throne in Jerusalem.

On that snowy night, hundreds of followers in what is known as the charismatic Christian movement descended on Grandview for a “Transform World” prayer summit, a meeting that promised 70 consecutive hours of prayer to add new houses of prayer to the hundreds of IHOP imitators around the world. Growing the number of houses of prayer, the participants believed, will help “transform” communities, preparing them for a global revival.


Through IHOP and its associated church, Forerunner Christian Fellowship, Bickle claims to be cultivating an elite class of “forerunners,” or people who “represent God and his interests,” and who “prepare the people to respond rightly to Jesus by making known God's plans so the people can make sense of what will happen before it actually happens.” His vision of the end-times, which is central to his teaching, maintains that these “redeemed” people will be raptured just as Jesus begins his “royal procession” into Jerusalem. Bickle believes they will return to earth as “resurrected saints” who will “possess supernatural abilities.” When Jesus rules as “King over all dominions and spheres of society,” these resurrected saints will rule with him, “as kings and priests.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/longform/inside-the-international-house-of-prayer--2

[AtheistCrusader]

1. This article is making me hungry...

[rug]

3. You read my mind.

[mr blur]

2. "small side rooms for prophesying and faith healing"?

Every whackjob catered for, eh?

[Cartoonist]

4. Another group getting down on its knees

Instead of working to help humankind, like building houses for the poor, shelters for battered women, free clinics, schools, food distribution centers, and on and on, their priority is to build new churches. Yeah, that's gonna help.