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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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At IHOP's frequent, frenetic conferences, attendees learn that they are "in the early days of the generation in which Jesus returns," as IHOP founder Mike Bickle puts it.

In 1983, Bickle says, God instructed him to "establish 24-hour prayer in the spirit of the tabernacle of David." The tabernacle was the tent erected by King David to house the Ark of the Covenant after the conquest of Jerusalem; it became a dwelling place of God and a site of ecstatic worship. To resurrect this spirit of worship, Bickle would build IHOP's first prayer room, a storefront hall next to the Higher Grounds cafe and Forerunner Bookstore in an IHOP-owned strip mall in South Kansas City.

This is IHOP's most alluring tenet: God needs IHOPers to effect the Tribulation and bring Christ back to Earth. "The church causes the Great Tribulation," Bickle has preached. Before founding IHOP, he argued that

Bickle sometimes affects to know God as he would a peer. "I heard what I call the internal audible voice of the Lord," he has said. He claims that he visited heaven one night at 2:16 a.m., and the Lord charged him with preparing for an End Times ministry and seated him in a golden chariot that lifted off into the empyrean. At IHOP, where prophetic experiences are endemic, the mortal and divine commingle liberally.

The vanguard of God's End Times army, according to Bickle, will be made up of young people, or "forerunners," seers specially attuned to the will of the Lord, "the best of all the generations that have ever been seen on the face of the Earth." For seven years of Tribulation, they will battle the Antichrist. When Christ returns, he will slaughter by sword in a single day the unsaved, and his warriors will rule heaven and Earth forevermore.

Within a month of Deaton's return from Kansas City, everyone in the group had become a "hardcore IHOPer," Herrington says. They consumed IHOP books, music and teachings, and road-tripped to NAR conferences. They soaked themselves in IHOP theology until, in Herrington's words, "it became an integral part of who we were."

The work that most enduringly shaped Deaton's thinking might have been The Final Quest, an account of the End Times by NAR leader Rick Joyner, whose celestial travels and pretensions to divinity resemble those of Bickle. Joyner claims to have written The Final Quest in a "trance" state, akin to that of the Apostle John. Joyner describes his book as "a call to all who will go on to the most noble adventure of the age" – the final showdown between good and evil. The Final Quest is ludicrous self-hagiography that casts Joyner as a hero of Armageddon, "one of the saints fighting the last battle."

"Something in Tyler made him particularly volatile when exposed to those teachings," one group member says. Less than three weeks after he read The Final Quest, Deaton told his worship group that he had been divinely ordered to "train God's final army." Deaton had arrogated to himself, in Joyner's conception, prodigious supernatural power, highest-level divine revelation and the authority to call down God's judgment upon those who opposed him. The history of the group would play out against a backdrop of Final Quest imagery.