Page updated 22 September 2018

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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 8

That summer, Deaton began preparing the group for the End Times. They stockpiled a month's supply of food in the women's house and met twice a week with a guy who was reputedly a former soldier to practice dodging imaginary bullets, wrestling weapons from enemy soldiers and executing combat rolls by leaping from playground slide platforms and monkey bars. The training would pay off when the Antichrist upended existence. Deaton also told them that if they made it to the Middle East first, they would be able to fend off Muslim extremists.

Toward the end of the summer, in anticipation of Moore's arrival, Deaton changed the room assignments in the men's house. According to Herrington, a group member named Evan, whom Deaton had promised to liberate from a homosexual lifestyle, would room with Moore. Justin would share Deaton's basement room, which Deaton had assigned himself because of its privacy and potential to double as a "ministry room." "Tyler was full of paradigms that summer," Herrington says. Healthy heterosexual intimacy, Deaton posited, depended on prior comfort with same-sex intimacy. Rooming with Justin would allow him to "experience what it's like to be intimate with a guy in preparation for being intimate with Bethany."

Another member later told detectives that after he'd arrived in Grandview, Deaton had slipped into his room while he was in bed, laid down beside him and held him. He said that he later realized Deaton was priming him for sexual intimacy. One morning that summer, as the group was getting ready to go on a hiking trip, Herrington says he asked Deaton why he looked so tired. Deaton confided that he'd only gotten 20 minutes of sleep the night before because he'd had an extended "therapy session" with Evan. They had engaged in a kind of spiritual "wrestling" – "lying together in Tyler's bed all night in a largely undressed state," in Herrington's words – that resulted in "massive healing" for Evan and a "massive breakthrough in his masculinity." Deaton's relationship with Bethany remained as it was: a weekly three-hour school-night date and bread baking on Fridays.

Micah Moore's route to Grandview was circuitous. At the end of 2008, after seeming to fortell, and then will, the death of Rob Atkinson, Moore was home for Christmas break when he had a "massive freakout," screaming that demons were attached to his head. Moore's mother apparently blamed her son's collapse on the worship group's demonology. Moore didn't return to school that spring, transferring to the University of Texas.

One afternoon at the end of Moore's junior year, Deaton called. "Are you really happy? Are you really satisfied?" he asked.

Moore decided to return to Southwestern for his senior year. Deaton and several other group members drove down from IHOP to welcome him back. He had appointed Moore one of the leaders of the worship group before his breakdown, and now reinstated him. Deaton insisted that the group receive Moore lovingly. "I think Micah really felt indebted to him for that," a friend says.

A year later, when Moore moved into the men's house in Grandview, "things got crazy," says Herrington. The Holy Spirit continually overpowered the worshippers, knocking them down and inspiriting tongues. Moore was on his knees, yelling and experiencing head convulsions, and he "shook all the time," says Herrington. One night during worship, the Spirit descended with unusual strength. Everyone was "screaming and rolling around and writhing like the demons in Pandemonium," he says. After the worship, Deaton informed Herrington that his "immunity to the movement of the Holy Spirit" evidenced a hardened heart. Deaton had readmitted Herrington to the group partly to pacify IHOP authorities, according to an ex-member; now that Deaton suspected regression, he could no longer afford to operate within IHOP strictures.

There followed, Herrington says, a series of "bizarre punishments and psychological mind games," what Deaton called "behavior modification." First, they renamed him "Bobby" and confiscated his glasses. They outlawed the sweaters and dress slacks he usually wore; his outfits were "un-relational," Deaton told him. He took Herrington to Old Navy and American Eagle Outfitters, where Deaton picked out his new wardrobe: khakis, polos, cargo shorts, short-sleeve button­down shirts.

Soon afterward, Deaton assembled the group and told Herrington to go sit on the front steps. According to another group member, Deaton shared what God had revealed to him: Herrington was an inveterate lech with a cross-dressing fetish; he had been stealing June's clothes. Someone came outside and told him to remove his unauthorized sweater, a symbol of unwholesome self-isolation.

Herrington was now made to eat his meals on the floor and was rarely allowed to speak. Deaton created the "Bobby discipline team," which consisted of Moore and three other men. "Bobby has abused me so much, I just can't deal with it anymore," Deaton said. "It's time y'all found out what this feels like."

Herrington's jailers escorted him nearly everywhere, preventing all interactions. Herrington often stayed in his room during worship night. On two occasions, he says, a woman stood up and testified that an attacking spirit was drawing near. After praying together, the group agreed that Herrington was sending demons against them. One night, a woman prophesied that God was going to punish "those who have hurt you." For the first time, Herrington later thought, the group must have been calling on God to destroy one of its own. Four months later, he was formally excommunicated.