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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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Years later, when Herrington tried to reread The Final Quest, he started shaking, ran to the bathroom and puked. He doesn't think it's possible to underestimate the influence of the book or of NAR's latter-day apostles on Deaton. "In some ways, Tyler was as much a victim as anyone else," Herrington says. "These apostles destroyed him. I think they drove him mad."

Shortly before deaton traveled to Kansas City, Bethany encouraged Micah Moore to join the worship group. The two had met in an English class during the fall of 2007. "They hit it off like gangbusters," a mutual friend says. Bethany had always "nourished her friends, and Micah had 'Lost Soul in Need of Nourishment' written all over him."

Earlier in the semester, Moore had dropped acid, and the trip had unbalanced him: He hallucinated legions of angels and demons fighting over his soul, according to a friend. Herrington says Moore was "questioning the nature of reality: 'Am I real? How do I know this isn't all an illusion?'" Moore told one friend that only radical personal change could save him.

Moore was a patient listener, eminently suggestible. A former friend remembers him as "a thoughtful and melancholic young man, going around tugging at his beard and thinking inwardly about things." Other acquaintances have described him as a "space cadet" and so pleasant it was "almost weird, but not in a creepy way." He was an avid guitarist and often played with other musicians on campus. One former classmate thought that he "was looking for magic in life."

The group became a sanctuary for Moore, who often came under "attack" from demons; some members defended him with prayers. "With a community of believers around me, I'm not vulnerable," he told a friend. Moore became as zealous as anyone in the group. He often spoke of the fallen world. "God is so pure and we are so sinful that the only way we can ever go near him is because of Jesus. Without Jesus, God can't even look at us."

Moore put his faith in Deaton completely. "He has a special gift," Moore would say. When Deaton laid hands on him, Moore felt "a special grace."

Many prospective members were drawn by this quality of Deaton's.

At IHOP, it is understood that God has endowed leaders like Bickle with prophetic gifts. But IHOP theology constrains those leaders from imposing limits on the power of their followers. Their insights are no more falsifiable than the leadership's own. "If you were to go up to Mike Bickle and say, 'I feel God's anointed me an End Times apostle,' he'd say, 'Praise God and bless you!'" says a former group member.

When Deaton announced that he had been chosen to train God's final army, thus elevating himself to the spiritual plane of IHOP's senior leadership, no one seriously challenged him. Nearly everyone in the group, according to former members, believed he was an End Times apostle. By the spring of 2008, when the group had grown to about 20, it was assumed that Deaton heard God with unsurpassed clarity and that he had been sent on a spiritual-martial mission that would refashion all existence.

But God spoke to Deaton so often, and about matters so minor, that it sometimes seemed as if the Lord were micromanaging the group. Once, when they were eating at a Panda Express, Deaton sensed a soul-endangering "spot of darkness" on their side of the restaurant, and said they should switch tables. He forbade Herrington from making a late-night fast-food run with two friends because they had "spirits of delusion resting on them."

By the fall of 2008, as Deaton was beginning his final semester, his followers were seeing End Times signs and omens everywhere: in a billboard's exhortation, a clutch of turkey vultures over campus, a stray phrase stuck in someone's head, a small bird in a hawk's talons. Visions came easily; people were "eating prophecies for breakfast," according to a former member. Angels informed the group that fire would rain down on Southwestern and rip the "masks" off unbelievers. Herrington had once dreamed that a flood razed the school and transformed the land into a dwelling place of bizarre marine mammals; the dream now seemed prescient. Forecasts of obliteration occasioned hope, not sadness. Deaton told friends over lunch that death was a sign of weakness and sin, an application of justice. No believer should fear it: A good Christian would not die before his work was done.

One July day in 1988, Mike Bickle was sitting in his office, reading a wedding card inscribed with a verse from the Song of Solomon. "Jesus, seal my heart with your seal of love," Bickle spontaneously prayed. Unaccountably, he began to weep. The phone rang. A prophet had heard the "audible voice of the Lord" for Bickle: The Song of Solomon, a dialogue between King Solomon and his beloved, should become a focus of Bickle's ministry. It eventually came to Bickle that true believers must see Jesus "through the eyes of a bride with loyal, devoted love" – they must "feel loved and in love" with Christ. Without this intimacy in worship, Christ would not return to Earth.

But the Song of Solomon is a paean to sexual desire. "Let the king bring me into his chambers" and "kiss me with the kisses­ of his mouth," the beloved says. "His fruit" is "sweet to my taste." IHOP's website states that one of its prayer guides, Bridal Intercession, "presents prayer as the joyful and romantic communion between the lover and his beloved....Readers will find themselves...eager to encounter this lovely Lord who is their bridegroom."