BEWARE THE NEW PROPHETS.
An Updated Caution of the Modern Prophetic
Movement
By Bill Randles
St Matthew Publishing (UK). 226 pages. £10.62
ISBN 978 0 692 533 208
Beware the New Prophets is a strange book in many ways. In essence it is a ‘hot’ warning about error, a repetitious cautioning about the power of falsehood, a jumbled historical story of things going awry, a wake-up call to naive believers, and a rambling mish-mash of personalities, movements and harmful teachings.
Aimed at US Christians and originally published in 1999, this is now a dated reaction to the excesses and errors of Toronto and Pensacola, penned by a Pentecostal pastor who is passionately concerned about believers being misled. It has been re-released and contains new material on Bill Johnson, Mike Bickle and Todd Bentley. Yet it feels mainly ‘old news’ and mainly for the US market.
My home town
I say mainly old and mainly for the US, but having been warned about the International House of Prayer (IHOP), I noticed a branch in my home town just today! Perhaps more significantly, the erroneous teaching emanating from Johnson, who is based at Bethel Assembly, Redding, California, is affecting churches here in the UK and is perhaps something we need to be aware of. ‘Super-natural warfare’, in that stream of teaching, has an emphasis which many evangelicals would be wary of. More seriously, there is an association with false understanding of the Person of the Son, his relationship with the Holy Spirit in the work of ‘the economic Trinity’, and our own ‘imitation of Christ’. Whether believers over here realise just how far from orthodoxy some of this may take them is a moot point. But this book may not help those who are sympathetic or confused by it.
For UK readers there is a sideswipe at the ministry at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) in the early 1990s, and also at the teaching of Gerald Coates back then.
In summary I think there are better things to read on the prophetic movement historically, better analyses of the doctrinal errors that have occurred, and better explanations of biblical teachings than those found in this volume.
