If you are preparing prophets for the office in the various specializations of prophetic personality and production, you will lead them to a prophetic preparation plateau.
Prophets will remain at that point until you introduce them to a company. They will either embrace this challenge or rebel like calves at a new gate. They will challenge you if you challenge them, or they will step into a fuller flow they didn’t know was available.
Those that challenge think they have individualized access, don’t want to share their personal nipple like puppies pushing siblings to the side, and think they are ready to stand on their own platform. They are picking up their calling cards from the front porch where Amazon delivered them, the new ones with “Prophet” on the front.
Please stop sending out prophets who have never walked into a company. Just put an ad in the local prophets are us newsletter that reads, “Local untested wildman about to stir up a bunch of empty-headed rebels with cotton-candy words. Beware. Your friends for Jesus and integrity at _ (fill in your ministry identifier).”
While my apostolic tongue is touching the inside of my apostolic cheek here, making a point with a tiny smidgeon of exaggeration, the test results are in, and I’m ringing the bell.
After working on prophetic training initiatives for decades, and training hundreds of prophetic candidates and tens of thousands of prophetic people, the line that must be crossed to move from this contemporary “I can do all things” presumption to a more mature leadership representation of Jesus seems to be the line that leads to operating in a company with direct oversight.
Test the submission of people. Test it severely. Test it with the receiving, releasing, interpreting, testing, applying, and implementing of prophetic revelation.
Consider these three principles: 1) Prophets should be trained to function at an international level when the call anticipates function at a regional level; 2) The prophetic is a process, not a spout or faucet or microphone; 3) The prophet is a leader who must learn to follow as a means of experiencing how the prophetic revelation fits into a scope of authority broader than the prophet.
While I can do something successfully in training in any one of these without a company – even though it is still much less effective – I find limitation in producing all three of these goals outside the experience gained in the prophetic company.
The prophetic company must be lead by an apostle with a strong prophetic edge. The prophetic company cannot be led by an emerging prophet who is the leader of the class or the most impressive in prophetic revelation. The prophetic company is about the leadership, submission, character, and temperament of the prophet.
While each prophet benefits personally, the company expands, accelerates, and rising above the previous prophetic plateau together. From the new heights, like eagles riding super-heated updrafts, the prophets see from a perspective that makes the present revelation fit into a broadened schematic of kingdom purpose.
Warning: let me be clear that you will lose some people starting a prophetic company, insisting that this is part of the training, and inferring that people need to mature or rise higher through any group exercise. They will insist they got where they are now through some excruciatingly personal process (Not!), and “they answer only to God” and “they won’t be limited or controlled by man”.
You will suffer the pain of watching some of your pretty girls and burly men prophets running off with a backward curse. You will soon discover that the process weeded out the ones that should not be allowed to hold the microphone. You will realize this test reveals something well-hidden that you were about to push out of the nest and plague the kingdom with more prophetic confusion.
Do Jesus a big favor and endeavor to persevere! The quitters wandering about blaming you for their isolation and failure would have been the ones that gutted you as a Jezebel the first five years of their prophetic ministry. They are the ones that would split ministries and become the next opportunists.
Yep, a prophetic company reveals the reveals.
