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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

Page 6

Problematically for Deaton, the social world he had fashioned normalized his own desires while repressing everyone else's. In chapel, Jesus was a "ravishing" bridegroom, a perfect male form; under Deaton's supervision, heterosexual relationships had become unworkable, unmoored from romantic desire and skirted­ by Deaton himself with a justification of piety; and he had bound together godliness and homoeroticism.

Deaton always felt that his authority would be released to his followers after he left Southwestern, and as his final semester progressed, group members grew more confrontational with classmates, speaking openly of the Tribulation's proximity and their exclusive knowledge of the "Spirit of God." One day, Micah Moore biked around school, yelling, "'I am making war on this campus!' and roaring like a lion," in Herrington's words.

Deaton himself seemed to grow more intolerant. On the way home from a trip to Panda Express, at the end of November, Herrington vehemently contradicted Deaton, and he became so angry he asked to be let out of the car. The driver turned to Herrington. Deaton was the "apostle of Southwestern," she said, "and you need to do whatever he tells you!" After group members participated in an irreverent campus skit, Deaton told them that they had blasphemed God before nonbelievers and thereby given Satan a "greater foothold on campus." He ordered them to the chapel. Fifteen or 20 people arrayed themselves in a row near the altar to pray and repent; several were crying.

One day, Deaton played Bethany a song from High School Musical 3 called "I Want It All": "Imagine having everything we ever dreamed – don't you want it?" A few weeks later, according to Herrington, "she sat him down and very forcefully explained her feelings. He claimed he was overwhelmed by the radiant purity of her love and his prophetic discernment was unable to find anything worrying or unholy about it. His heart was opened by her tenderness." Bethany began to lean toward IHOP.

In November, Moore reported that God had talked to him while he was praying in the shower: A tragedy would soon befall Southwestern. Only true believers who stood on a "firm foundation" would remain at peace. A few days after Moore described this vision to the group, four other members shared confirming visions or insights. "It sounds like someone is going to die," one member said. Herrington predicted that the tragedy would occur on December 4th or 5th.

On December 3rd, a series of "spectacular omens" culminated in the appearance of an immense dark cloud over Highway 29, which borders the Southwestern campus. The group convened in Deaton's room. "There was a deep feeling shared by everyone present that God was about to descend on Southwestern in glory and judgment and...destroy these things that were against him," Herrington says.

The next day, a student named Rob Atkinson was crossing the stretch of Highway 29 earlier darkened by the premonitory cloud when he was hit by a car and killed. Atkinson had been a vocal supporter of interfaith dialogues, which Dea­ton considered harbingers of the Antichrist. "We were convinced that God had come down in wrath, and that our prayers had led to this student's death," Herrington later wrote to a friend. Several others concurred.

The worship-group members believed they had blood on their hands, and it exalted them. "We talked about Rob in a tone of gleeful triumphalism," Herrington says. Other ex-members ruefully agree. In Atkinson's death, according to Herrington, Deaton detected a "blueprint" for the future: After studying at IHOP, he would assemble an apostolic team, travel to Egypt and establish a ministry. God's wrath, unleashed by the prayers of his team, would destroy all unholy things, just as it had destroyed Atkinson. Members of the worship group began hearing from God: Their mission in life was to follow Deaton.

In early 2009, Deaton and Bethany moved to Grandview, Missouri, to begin IHOP's six-month

Over the next two years, most of the other group members would graduate and join Deaton and Bethany in Grandview. (Moore, a couple of years younger than Deaton and Bethany, would not arrive until the summer of 2011.) From 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Deaton and Bethany absorbed biblical analysis and theology, and from 6 p.m. until midnight, they worshipped in the prayer room.

It wasn't long before Deaton had a transformative revelation. Up until then, he had seen his homosexuality as simply the way he was wired, but in a moment of divine insight, it came to him that being gay was a choice he had made, whether consciously or not. He later described this moment, and the interior anguish preceding it, in an essay titled

"Good News in Why Homosexuality Is a Sin: An Answer That Makes It Conquerable and Non-Unique": "Oh, I can tell you [God's abhorrence] is so painful to the homosexual that struggles because this is what homosexuals feel – 'Why is my love condemned?...Just because God says no without giving any explanation, why? This is so cruel, so senseless, so unfair. I can't even imagine liking heterosexuality; it's disgusting, even though I want to be like that so badly, but how can I change? What's even wrong with this, God?'"

The "hopelessness" and "self-pity" in those lines was "sinful in and of itself," Deaton wrote. But the church offered little help beyond the blunt reminder that homosexuality is "not in line with God's established natural order." "When I heard someone callously say, 'Why don't they just not be gay?' rage would course through my being at the ignorance and insensitivity to the struggle that homosexuals try to endure, the intensity with which they always try to not be gay at least at first," he continued. Ten years of fruitlessly praying for intervention had made him bitter and hurt and had ultimately removed hope from "deep regions of my heart."