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Alternate known names: Brownsville Revivals, Elijah List, Florida Revivals, IHOP, Kansas City Prophets, New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)A movement within Protestant Christianity that embraces present-day apostles and prophets who claim they govern the church and give new divine revelation needed to set up God's EARTHLY kingdom., Toronto Blessing → see false prophet list.

Mike Bickle

Love and Death In the House of Prayer

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Deaton was determined to overcome those forces, though. His confidence, monolithic and exclusionary, tended to divide the world into allies and adversaries. He had been a champion debater in high school, and he brought a tirelessness to religious debate at Southwestern. He considered his positions plainly factual and listeners who rejected them ignorant. The caption accompanying his senior portrait from Calallen High School in Corpus Christi, Texas, read, "Be intolerant, because some things are just stupid."

During the summer of 2007, Deaton had traveled to Pakistan as a missionary, where he had a number of "supernatural" experiences. A boy with one leg, he told friends, had miraculously acquired another. During a visit to a children's home, he had heard the words "The leader of this place is committing sexual sin with young boys." Deaton informed the trip's leaders, and learned that two boys had been caught performing sexual acts with each other. They and the home's leader were removed.

Since his return, Deaton had been wondering how to access the supernatural in America. The answer came outside the Barnes and Noble. "What you just did in Pakistan," God told him, "you are going to do at Southwestern." The names of three friends "erupted" from Deaton's mouth: "June," "Justin" and "Bethany Leidlein." In Deaton's vision, their collective worship would "shift the spiritual atmosphere" on campus and catalyze a revival. Angels would descend and demons would flee, and Christians across the university would rush to join the group. Even non­believers would succumb. The "spirit of intellectualism" that held so many in bondage would be dispelled for good.

The magic at the heart of the books would always inform his understanding of his own divine power.

Bethany was small, fair, blue-eyed, reserved without being remote and from the outset wholly committed to Deaton's mission. In some ways, she made an unlikely follower. A natural intellectual who graduated magna cum laude, she'd read every Charles Dickens novel but one by the time she was 13, and was a talented writer herself, the pride of Southwestern's writing center. She started keeping a blog at the end of 2003, and produced some 200 pages of pointed, wry, sometimes lyric prose. In one post, she described a classmate as a "devastatingly sober playwright." "Oh, liberal arts," she wrote in the summer of 2006. "It's training me to be a splendid gentleman farmer." One evening, she stayed in the writing center after everyone else had left, "trying to cup the moment in my hands," she wrote. "I must often consciously uncrease my forehead, unfurrow my eyebrows and walk a bit more slowly, remembering that tomorrow will take care of itself."

Bethany took care of other people instinctively. "She had a quiet energy that flowed through the group," a classmate recalls. "Her life was one of the most luminous and promising I've known," Herrington says.

She could also be lavishly, almost immoderately romantic. She imagined herself as a novelist and professor at a small university, living in a cottage in the woods. "The dream of her heart was to be married," Herrington recalls. "We used to stay up late talking about it, night after night. She had been praying for her husband since she was a teenager. She had written him letters, before they even met." She found herself "fiercely attracted" to Deaton and was convinced that God had ordained their union. She was aware of his struggles with homosexuality but believed that God would use her to heal his heart.

In December 2007, at the urging of a cousin, Tyler Deaton attended an IHOP conference in Kansas City. He wrote his fellow group members right afterward: