Click on following for earlier article: Part 1.
If you have read my two series, It’s Your Decision…Run or Fight! and Sifting Through The Ashes of A Spiritual Defeat, then you know that 1994 was not one of those years Frank Sinatra sang about in his hit song. It was not a very good year; it was an absolutely, miserable one for me.
And 1995 was not much better.
By early summer, I was just looking for a back pew in a church where I could hang out, keep quiet, and hopefully, put myself back together again. My life and calling were a mess.
A church, thirty miles away, seemed to be the answer to my prayers. The pastor was a man with a shepherd’s heart. Its congregation was around seventy or eighty members in size, and fun to be around. The worship music was awesome. And the meetings were informally held in a school gymnasium.
It seemed the perfect fit for me.
Though giving prophetic words was not what I hoped to be doing, I knew the Lord used me on good days and bad days as a prophetic voice. So, to be safe, I went up to the pastor after the first service. “Do you have any rules about giving prophetic words at your church?” I asked.
He smiled and shook his head. “No, we don’t,” he said. “We encourage people to give prophetic words.”
Over the following four weeks, I broke every rule he said that he did not have. Each Sunday, he was upset with me about something.
“You said there were no rules,” I whispered in exasperation one time.
“That was before I knew you,” he exclaimed. “And I’ve never met anyone like you in my thirty years of ministry.”
Finally, we met for lunch, hoping to settle our differences. It’s not that we didn’t like each other or anything like that. It’s just that he was comfortable with prophetic BB guns and I was an AK-47 assault rifle. We were miles apart in our prophetic thinking.
“Listen,” he said toward the end of our conversation, “why don’t you just submit yourself under my ministry. Then, when the Lord tells me to release you into full-time prophetic ministry, I will let you know. All of the doors of our denomination will then be open to you.”
“What if you don’t hear the Lord’s voice for my calling and life?” I asked.
He blinked. “I had not thought about that,” he replied. His eyes looking down.
The meeting ended with us giving each other hugs and going our separate ways.
The next day, I received a letter in the mail from a member of the church who was not even aware of my meeting with the pastor. She wrote that I was rebellious and needed to submit myself under pastoral authority. And if I failed to follow her so-called godly counsel, she felt my prophetic calling would never come forth. As in never, ever!
I was upset and did what Hezekiah did when he received a letter from an enemy of Israel (2 Kings 19:14). I walked around, reading the letter to the Lord.
“Lord, she says I’m rebellious and that I need to submit under pastoral authority. I don’t even understand pastoral authority, what is it?” I went on and on until finally I had finished.
Then I heard the Holy Spirit say, “Too much pastoring in the church.”
(Continued in Part 3)
Larry Who’s writings and teachings appear on this site on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It’s a little of this and a little of that, all written to encourage and exhort believers in their Christian journeys.
In the late 1980’s, I had a nighttime dream in which I was standing in the middle of a palatial ballroom. All of my precious Christian friends were there with me.
My biggest struggles over the last ten years have been the unlearning and relearning processes I have gone through since Honey and I left the traditional church system.
In today’s edition of 
“In the Kingdom of God, it doesn’t matter whether we are raising the dead or taking a nap because it all pays the same, if we are in the will of God,” said 
Once, I heard 
Larry Who 